A napalm attack, an orphan, and a message three decades later | Hacker News Reader

A napalm attack, an orphan, and a message three decades later

bbc.co.uk

74 pointsnew_guy7 comments

Two things... one personal and one technical. I was in that war. I was a silent conscientious objector (I thought the war was about oil and money.) I went because I had an obligation to go. I have many stories but the best one is this. When the war ended, we sold our portable hospital to the Kuwaitis. We went to Kuwait City to deliver it and saw the destruction; the six miles of death. When I jumped off the truck and the people, families rushed up to me(us) and kissed my cheek, bowed and kissed my feet—I could not make them stop. They would raise up and say in cryptic English "We thank The United States, President Bush and you." I was touched and changed—it changed my opinion of the cause. What if I was sent back home directly after the war? To this day I would have said what I thought before.

Technically, this website is well done. Just scroll down and down. It's a little long but I like some of it.

From what I understand, Iraq reached out to the U.S. for approval, through diplomatic channels, before going through with the mission. U.S. said they have no opinion, then doubled back to defend Kuwait from the "evil invaders."

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/23/world/confrontation-in-th...

>In the two weeks before Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, the Bush Administration on the advice of Arab leaders gave President Saddam Hussein little reason to fear a forceful American response if his troops invaded the country.

>The Administration's message to Baghdad, articulated in public statements in Washington by senior policy makers and delivered directly to Mr. Hussein by the United States Ambassador, April C. Glaspie, was this: The United States was concerned about Iraq's military buildup on its border with Kuwait, but did not intend to take sides in what it perceived as a no-win border dispute between Arab neighbors.

>In a meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on July 25, eight days before the invasion, Ms. Glaspie urged the Iraqi leader to settle his differences with Kuwait peacefully but added, ''We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,'' according to an Iraqi document described as a transcript of their conversation.

What a great read. I had to setup a VPN to read it since the country I'm in (Vietnam) blocks the BBC, but it was well worth it. The scrolling feature of the article was also interesting... at first I reloaded my page because I thought it timed out loading.

You are from Vietnam reading about Napalm used in Iraq. Looks like Napalm usage was even worse during the Vietnam war.

[1] 388,000 tons of napalm was dropped in Vietnam during 1963 -1973 period Source - https://thevietnamwar.info/napalm-vietnam-war/

[2]..... use against civilian populations was banned by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in 1980........ Approximately 25 years after the General Assembly adopted it, the United States signed it on January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama's first full day in office. Its ratification, however, is subject to a reservation that says that the treaty can be ignored if it would save civilian lives.

Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm#International_law

I am also in Vietnam. The block on BBC is quite weak, they just do it at the DNS level. Set up DNSSEC and it will work fine without a VPN. I also find that using bbc.com sometimes works as well.

What does DNSSEC have to do with bypassing a BBC block? The BBC's zones (like virtually everyone else's) aren't DNSSEC-signed. Do you you mean DNS-over-TLS?

I'm sorry, you are correct. It was late and my mind was thinking of DNSCrypt, not DNSSEC. DNS-over-TLS solved the issue for me.

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