Thursday, January 10, 2008
Boomchucka
We dropped a lot of eggs today:
U.S. warplanes unleashed one of the most intense airstrikes of the Iraq war Thursday, dropping 40,000 pounds of explosives in a thunderous 10-minute onslaught on suspected al-Qaida in Iraq safe havens in Sunni farmlands south of Baghdad.
The mighty barrage—recalling the Pentagon's "shock and awe" raids during the 2003 invasion—appeared to mark a significant escalation in a countrywide offensive launched this week to try to cripple remaining insurgent strongholds.
Twenty tons of bombs make a pretty deep hole. I hope our intelligence was good. It has been getting better and better as the locals have gotten more comfortable dropping a dinar on the bad guys, so I imagine we killed a lot of them this afternoon.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Jan 10, 07:13:00 PM:
The British magazine Lancet immediately announced its estimates of 200,000 civilian casualties as a result of this airstrike, and compared it to the fire-bombing of Dresden and the use of nuclear bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Zhombre
By 
SR, at
Thu Jan 10, 11:23:00 PM:
Just in case the Iranians thought they could harass our warships with impunity. I bet some Iranian special forces got it today.
By , at
Fri Jan 11, 12:50:00 AM:
Good point, SR. I hope you're right.
By Georg Felis, at
Fri Jan 11, 11:59:00 AM:
From what I glenned from the official reports and intelligent reporters, this 10 minutes of bombing was directed at clearing IED's and rigged-to-blow houses that AQ had spent months rigging. Hopefully they caught a few of the riggers inside their little booby traps. The Air Force uses Fuel-Air Explosives for clearing large minefields for their large overpressure footprint (translation: It blows up over a large area) which detonates mines and IEDs without busting up the pavement too much, this is probably much of the payload. I wonder if they should count the tonnage of exploding IED's too?
