The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

One other point of clarification. Fleeing is NOT surrendering. You can't let your enemy flee unhindered only to regroup later.

https://archive.org/details/aberrationinhear0000pain/page/18...

https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D1EE3B68F6738516CB38837...

The last paragraph indicates that the Iraqis were surrendering. Killing surrendered opponents in a war engagement is a war crime, and also against US Army policy regarding surrendered opponents.

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"The incident, or series of incidents, occurred near the Saudi-Iraqi border as the First Mechanized Infantry Division, in their breaching effort, tore through over seventy miles of barbed wire, minefields, bunkers and trenches about three-feet wide and six-feet deep, defended by, according to division estimates, eight thousand Iraqi soldiers. After Howitzers and rocket launchers “rained hell” upon Iraqis in their trenches, the heavily armored Abrams and Bradley vehicles broke through, “and the real slaughter began.” During what came to be known as the Bulldozer Assault, Abrams tanks, outfitted with plows and scrapers, broached the trenches, shoveling mounds of sand into them, burying alive the Iraqis inside. Vulcan armored carriers and Bradley vehicles drove alongside the trenches, firing upon those attempting to surrender and others who continued to return fire with small arms. The Armored Combat Earthmovers (ACEs) cleaned up the horrifying scene afterwards by burying the scattered arms and legs still in view, so that none of the journalists arriving thirty-six hours later could report carnage.

The record shows that as early as June 5, 1995 (weeks after McVeigh’s arrest) the Jones Team was aware of the Bulldozer Assault and had noted their need to determine whether any member of his platoon “actually ran over Iraqi trenches (burying soldiers in them)” or if they had seen evidence of this as they approached the trenches. If any of his fellow soldiers spoke to the defense team about it, no such documentation was located in the Jones Collection. However, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that McVeigh’s company, his Bradley among them, spearheaded the breaching operation and led the Bulldozer Assault.

In the few reports about it, news outlets quoted at least two individuals whom McVeigh knew. In September 1991, one of them, Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the First Mechanized lead brigade against the most heavily defended trenches during the assault, described it, telling reporters “what you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands … as (Iraqi) soldiers saw what we were doing and how effective (ly) we were doing it, they began jumping out of their holes and surrendering. Our firepower kept the Iraqis down in their trenches. They were incapable of firing back.”

No existing biography of McVeigh explores the horror of the Bulldozer Assault in any depth, or even mentions it as such. In his book, Stickney simply wrote, “A lot of shooting by the Americans was directed at the enemy’s dug-in trenches.” Hamm acknowledged that McVeigh’s “platoon was assigned to ‘roll up’ the trenches and nearby artillery bunkers supporting them. This involved rolling over them in Bradleys, tanks, trucks, and giant earthmovers, suffocating to death hundreds of Iraqi troops in the trenches. This tactic not only effectively killed the enemy, but the huge pile of corpses provided a sturdy foundation for a smooth crossing point for the invading forces.” Herbeck and Michel did not directly address the Bulldozer Assault, the bodies buried alive or McVeigh’s role in it. Rather, they allude to it obliquely by observing that the motto of the VII Corp was “If it’s in front of us, it dies” and “because of the sounds made by the tanks rolling over Iraqis, U.S. soldiers began to refer to the dead they’d created as “crunchies.”

The handful of existing news reports about the incident provide further details. Participants later said that they had carefully planned and rehearsed the Bulldozer Assault weeks before it commenced, a claim confirmed by satellite photographs. One Captain described the psychological trauma he later suffered because of his role in the slaughter. The Iraqis, he said, had been throwing down their weapons and were begging the U.S. troops to take them prisoner. “I wish we could have,” he reflected, “[but] after [taking] so many thousands of prisoners, the order came down that it was endangering our men to capture anymore … so we called in the bulldozers.… I had to give the order, order men who drove the earthmovers to just cover up the trenches… I buried hundreds of men alive…if I’d disobeyed orders I should have been shot for insubordination on the battle field … that’s war.”"

Was the Six Day War really a war? What about the Kosovo War? The Spanish-American War?

I picked these as well-known examples of "curb stomp" events with the title "war" in them. (They are even listed at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CurbStompBattle/RealL... ).

What about Anglo-Zanzibar War? It's famously the shortest recorded war in history at less than an hour. If it isn't a war, why not?

Was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire a war? Fewer than 2,000 Spaniards died, compared to 200,000 or so Aztecs.

Thank you for sharing the libgen link!

I don't think it is a good series of essays. It's necessarily scattershot in its argumentation to address the pre-action, concurrent-action, and post-action angles. But almost none of the arguments come across as earnest. I feel like I'm reading a longform series of "gotcha" takedowns with the authorial intent simply to throw wrenches into any discussion without actually proposing anything or materially affecting how the discussion progresses.

'The Vietnam war wasn't a war because US Congress didn't declare war'. Oh man, I feel so dunked upon.

To emphasize my point that Baudrillard is doing nothing more than getting his name into op/ed columns, here's how he disdainfully reacts to a low-casualty high-consequence war.

> There is a profound scorn in the kind “clean" war which renders the other powerless without destroying its flesh, which makes it a point of honour to disarm and neutralize but not to kill. In a sense, it is worse than the other kind of war because it spares life. It is like humiliation: by taking less than life it is taking more than life.

Stop disrupting supply lines, destroying infrastructure, or planning feints. Real wars are all about body counts and nothing more. And don't dare you try military strategy, as that would _humiliate_ the enemy, which we all know is a fate worse than death.