In this thread we post short things that don't require a separate thread.
Previous low content threads:
January 2013 https://mises.org/community/forums/t/32794.aspx
December 2012 https://mises.org/community/forums/t/32607.aspx
November 2012 http://mises.org/community/forums/t/32264.aspx
October 2012 http://mises.org/community/forums/t/31744.aspx
September 2012 http://mises.org/community/forums/t/31087.aspx
August 2012 http://mises.org/community/forums/t/30246.aspx
July 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/29812.aspx
June 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/29429.aspx
May 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/29022.aspx
April 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/28697.aspx
March 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/28350.aspx
February 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/27995.aspx
January 2012 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/27526.aspx
December 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/27178.aspx
November 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/26855.aspx
October 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/26422.aspx
September 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/26084.aspx
August 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/25783.aspx
July 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/25323.aspx
June 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/24987.aspx
May 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/24393.aspx
April 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/23834.aspx
March 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/23166.aspx
February 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/22523.aspx
January 2011 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/21877.aspx December 2010 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/21375.aspx November 2010 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/20722.aspx October 2010 http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/20457.aspx
The Roads
I heard this gem the other day:
I am thinking, therefore I am. I am thinking critically, therefore I am. We are thinking critically, therefore we are.
I am thinking critically, therefore I am.
We are thinking critically, therefore we are.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
What makes that a gem exactly?
I completely disagree that there has to be a consensus before we can reduce the size of government and have a reasonable society that does not require government. Everyone only has to agree that they have had enough of the current scenario. Once that occurs then we have to be weary of incorrect solutions, like more government spending. It is our job to create as much traction around reducing government as the best answer to our problems. But that will never happen not because people can not agree on a consensus. But due to there being so much interest in the government increasing in size, far too many people benefiting from the current scenario for the government to reduce in size voluntarily.
There really is a war on kids. (For more, see here.)
The family of a 7-year-old New York boy is suing police and the city for $250 million, saying cops handcuffed and interrogated the boy for ten hours after a scuffle over lunch money at school.
Wilson Reyes, a student at Public School 114 in the Bronx reportedly got into a fight with a fellow student in December after he was accused of taking $5 of lunch money that had fallen on the ground in front of him. Responding to a complaint of assault and robbery, the police were called and took the boy to the local police precinct where officers allegedly handcuffed and interrogated him for ten hours, according to the lawsuit.
@TheFinest: Nice... violence is not the way forward. He makes an excellent point that the moment for the use of defensive violence will be obvious. The thugs in government are preparing for popular unrest because they know they are creating the conditions for that unrest. So, they're ready and waiting. Just look at the Pittsburgh police during the G20 protests. Armored vehicles, LRAD devices, ranks of gas-masked riot police outnumbering protestors at least 3-to-1... they're prepared and itching for a fight.
I hope that they don't "cut our time short" - this would be a cataclysmic event somewhere in the Middle East trigging full-scale East-West military engagement... such a WWIII-scale event would cut short any possibility of peaceful resistance to the government and would quash the growing dissent and dissatisfaction. Extraordinary measures such as summary execution of "traitors" could easily be deployed, basically making the territorial US an open killing field for soulless Federal agents, armed to the teeth. Dissent would become as impossible as it was for Germans under Nazi rule.
If this scenario happens - which I have predicted will occur before the end of this year - my advice is burrow and hibernate (survive). If you are of fighting age where you can be drafted, you should consider taking active measures to avoid front-lines combat deployment - do not join the guard or the reserves (these are first to deployed to the front lines). You might pay someone to help you get into Canada or Mexico but you'll probably have to go further than that to avoid the long arm of the Feds. You can try to sign on to an MOS that is unlikely to see combat, such as a cook or some other kind of low-level logistical capacity. As an unusual measure, you might consider joining a religion which conscientiously objects to combat violence to help assure this - such as the Mennonites or Quakers. If all else fails, you might consider simply choosing prison over the draft but be warned they are going to deal out absurd punishments to dissuade other resisters from making this choice.
You'll probably have a time-window to prepare your strategy - look for an outbreak of overt war between US/Israel and either Syria or Iran - either one of these events will be a sign that we are on the path to a draft. Then, keep your eye on the mainstream news outlets as they will begin constantly asking the question "Will we need a draft?" to soften up public opinion and get people ready for it. That's the cue that the draft will be coming within a year or so.... so it will then be time to prepare a strategy to deal with that. Put out of your mind all thoughts of resistance or revolution... keep spreading the word but understand that revolution is an impossibility at this point. The sitting political apparatus attains supreme power during time of war. This is why governments love war.
So, let's hope I'm wrong and that war does not break out this year... let's hope we get some more time because as StormCloudsGathering says... time is on our side. They're the ones who are going bankrupt, not us. They're taxing us to death but we're producers, we work every day. They're parasites and they're living on trillions of dollars of borrowed money... borrowed time. Once collapse is inevitable, the rats are going to try to get on the life-raft of Global War... if for some reason that doesn't happen.... they will drown. And it will have been entirely their own doing.
All we have to do is wait and keep spreading the word. Once the first Social Security paycheck fails to go out in the mail... that is the death-knell of the reigning political establishment. Even war will not be able to save them at that point. All we have to do is sit back and watch as the whole miserable structure comes crashing down on them. And we're going to need to be ready to rebuild our social system from the ground up... without them. All those old folks foolishly depending on Federal checks are going to need our help. All the masses held in suspended animation by welfare subsidy will be atrophied and unaccustomed to doing daily diligence to feed themselves. We're going to need to work together to rebuild our communities on a sound footing of free trade, voluntary exchange and work-for-pay instead of the current paradigm of whine-for-pay. That will be what the revolution will really look like, if we do not have war first.
Clayton -
You can also fake bad eyesight and hearing. If they implement the draft, preemptively go to an eye doctor, do poorly on the eye exam, and get some glasses. Do the same for your hearing. So you buy some glasses you don't need, at least your not in prison or murdering anyone!
https://twitter.com/RonPaul/status/298477312876355585
Have you guys seen the tweet that "Ron Paul" is in trouble for? A little insensitive, but people are missing the deeper point and are interpreting it as some sort of backhanded personal attack on veterans.
Yeah, it's pretty insensitive.
RP has never been a master politician.
@ Willy Truth
Did you see the Facebook wall update that he put out about an hour ago? It's of an entirely different tune.
Yeah, it's pretty insensitive. RP has never been a master politician.
I don't think this was foot-in-mouth... I think Paul knew exactly what he was talking about and meant precisely what he said. Chris Kyle's memoirs document his horrifically xenophobic and narrow-minded attitudes. Of course, that in itself doesn't merit death but based on body-count alone there is not the slightest doubt that Kyle had quite a bit of innocent blood on his hands. And you don't get where Kyle was in the military without a tremendous amount of heavily competitive vying. Jeremy Scahill - speaking on a different topic - puts the SEALs in proper perspective:
Col. W. Patrick Lang, a retired Special Forces officer with extensive operational experience throughout the Muslim world, described JSOC’s forces as “sort of like Murder, Incorporated.” He told The Nation: “Their business is killing Al Qaeda personnel. That’s their business. They’re not in the business of converting anybody to our goals or anything like that.” Shortly after the operation was made public, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey called JSOC’s operators the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.”
So, the quote is actually quite appropriate... those who are in the ranks of the SEALs are perpetrating atrocities under cover of thinly veiled euphemisms like "mission" "target" "assets" and so on. No doubt, these men are duped, especially in the beginning. But as they progress through the organization and move into positions where they have greater discretionary power to exercise judgment and to assess the naked facts of their missions, the fact that they are operating as a kind of Murder Incorporated must eventually start to sink in, even if they smother the thought in the recesses of their unconscious with the use of euphemisms and phony rationalizations.
And it's crucial to keep this issue in proper perspective. There are dangerous people all around the world. There always have been and there always will be. And there is a genuine market demand to employ some dangerous people to keep you safe from other dangerous people. But how did these people get so dangerous? "Training" is the modern euphemism. But when you study the issue, you'll find out it's not the training that makes these men dangerous, it's the acquired willingness to kill. Killing is really very easy... it is much easier to kill most any human than to kill even a small wild animal. Wild animals are extremely effective at hiding, they will run away extremely fast when pursued and, when cornered, they will fight back and most animals have superior natural weapons to the human being. And the fact is that killing soldiers is not much more difficult as the vast majority of soldiers are ill-trained and thus do not even present a serious threat... of those that are well-trained, most are young, green and unsure of themselves - easy prey for a steady-handed, seasoned veteran. And even of those that have gone through battle and survived, most of them have not killed and, thus, are not psychologically proven... they are not necessarily psychologically committed to kill. Finally, those that have seen live-fire combat, have killed and have proven themselves psychologically simply won't have the weaponry - in terms of accuracy and range - and the highly cost-intensive training that the special ops guys have. The training is only the tie-breaker when they are going up against seasoned, veteran killers... the rest of the time, it's basically shooting fish in a barrel for these guys.
The black ops folks such as these guys are real bad news in this regard. They are prolific killers. Among regular combat troops, many may not even see combat. And of those who do, many of them may never actually exchange fire with an enemy, let alone kill. The black ops poeple, by contrast, go out on a constant stream of live-fire missions... they vector straight to where there is going to be shooting and killing. They all have non-trivial body-counts. This was just as true before 2001 but the hunting has been especially abundant since then.
How did they get so dangerous? By killing. Lots of people. Nowadays, almost by definition, these people are innocent. A Taliban riding in Afghanistan is not "guilty" of any crime. We are not even at war with Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Congress merely passed resolutions - a resolution is not legally binding, it's just a statement saying "Congress strongly feels that the President should send troops to..." So, even the so-called "bad guys" aren't proper targets of US forces! The whole thing is a sham from top to bottom but the MSM and the Power Elites have the American sheeple duped... we are well-trained lap-dogs.
The fact is that USG claims some kind of moral high-ground. Al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, Gaddafi loyalists, al-Assad's troops... we're supposed to believe these are "bad, dangerous men" and the killers working for USG are "good, dangerous men." This is nonsense. They're all dangerous men but those that work for USG are the most well-armed and, by far, the most dangerous. And it is this moral high-ground that is the cherry on top of the shit-pie... it's the grand insult to the intelligence of every rational being on the planet. If you're employing dangerous men to fight other dangerous men... what you are doing is amoral, it is imperial behavior, no different than the Alexander's Persian campaign or the many campaigns of Julius Caesar to solidify his grip on the empire. It is the pretense that something other than sheer imperial ambition behind USG policy, the pretense that the motives of modern spec ops fighters are something other than sheer mafioso will to dominance, to beat the shit out of the other guy and prove that you are the baddest motherfucker on the block. That pretense is what Ron Paul was confronting with his remark. There's nothing politically unsophisticated about it at all.
thats a pretty good text, right now all I have for you is a minor factual note. Kyle was in seal team 3 which would fall under naval special warfare command not jsoc, which commands "tier one" units like delta and st6. end of message.
@skepticalmetal
Yeah, he was definitely trying to cover his ass after the PR backlash. Which, as Clayton pointed out, was not merited. But he should have known that murdered soldiers have a sacred spot in our militaryist culture. I read dozens of comments on various sites shaming RP because "the only reason RP has the freedom to say such ignorant things is because of brave men like Kyle"... Apparently American freedom is somehow directly sustained by sacrifices of foreign blood to the poltergeists of Jefferson and Washington.
Of course, I really don't see anything controversial about the content: Live by the sword, die by the sword is Biblical and is very fitting for this particular guy. Professional killer gets killed violently. Nothing too crazy there. Oh wait, unless you're a blindly nationalistic neocon, and then there's no such thing as a military man committing murder.
Anyways, I do think that RP could have phrased the tweet a little more...skillfully, knowing that this would be a touchy subject. No need to bring flak onto himself when the public is once again whipped into an emotional and patriotic frenzy.
"Of course, I really don't see anything controversial about the content: Live by the sword, die by the sword is Biblical and is very fitting for this particular guy. Professional killer gets killed violently. Nothing too crazy there."
You know, this is actually a very good point... Especially when talking to neo-conservatives who are primarily religious. I think that verse by Jesus is rather more important than a passing line in Leviticus...
Ron Paul on Twitter
It looks to me Ron Paul doesn't even fully know what "Twitter" is.
This obsession with military individuals in the US is disgusting. Big deal he murdered 200 people at super long range. What a hero. Give me a break. I didn't shed one tear for his death or the death of any military personnel. Why should i even care that he is dead?
His Facebook offers an intriguingly different tone...
As a veteran, I certainly recognize that this weekend's violence and killing of Chris Kyle were a tragic and sad event. My condolences and prayers go out to Mr. Kyle’s family. Unconstitutional and unnecessary wars have endless unintended consequences. A policy of non-violence, as Christ preached, would have prevented this and similar tragedies. -REP
Could it be that Ron Paul doesn't write his own tweets???? SHOCKING
John James:What makes that a gem exactly?
I found the shoutout to the collective at the end to be comical.
Anonymous hacks the Fed?
http://www.examiner.com/article/anonymous-hacks-the-fed-leaks-bank-executives-personal-information
If only they could get access to this keyboard inside the Fed and start punching the zero keys:
Wow... There's quite a lot of people online at the moment...
Epic.
Even if you did see this on the mainstream news, they would spin it into something like "he never really loved his kid."
WASHINGTON—Following the release of a secret Department of Justice memo this week that outlines the administration’s legal justification for killing U.S. citizens, a new Pew Research Center poll has revealed that a majority of Americans are torn over whether they support the government’s right to kill them anywhere at any time without due process. “On the one hand, I get it—it’s important for the government to be able to murder me and any of my friends or family members whenever they please for reputed national security reasons. But on the other hand, it would kind of be nice to stay alive and have, maybe, a trial, actual evidence—stuff like that,” said visibly conflicted 39-year-old Nashua, NH resident Rebecca Sawyer, who, like millions of other Americans, is split over whether secret federal agents should be allowed to target and assassinate her anywhere on U.S. soil. “I wouldn’t mind if federal officials blew up other citizens and claimed it was in the name of my safety. But it’s just that when it comes to me, I guess I’d rather not be slaughtered by my own elected officials on charges that never have to be validated by any accountable authority. This is tough.” While most Americans expressed conflicted feelings regarding the memo, the poll also found that 28 percent of citizens were unequivocally in favor of being obliterated at any point, for any reason, in a massive airstrike.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W0xzsbSbVUE
lol how to embed?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/camover-targets-cctvs/
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-former-lapd-cop-on-a-k
embed with a left bracket
"["
a space
the word "view:"
then the link
then closed bracket "]"
1) Albert Stubblebine is not high-ranking
2) Stubblebine is the guy who ran the unit that the movie "The Men Who Stare At Goats" was made to spoof
3) Stubblebine offers no actual inside info on 9/11 and he starts his questioning of the official story where all disinfo agents do: at the most difficult places, such as the Pentagon strike and the Twin Tower strikes and collapses.
If you want to understand why you should question the official 9/11 narrative, start here:
and here:
1) you can say that when youre a lieutenant general ;-)
3) imo its significant when a retired imagery analyst analyzes imagery. his other arguments are standard fare, but if he says that hole wasnt made by an airplane its significant.
Be that as it may, the entire 9/11 thing is infected with so much disinfo that it is very difficult for someone who has never taken a serious look at the topic to even find a good starting-place.... that's why I posted the above two videos. Any lurkers who would like to dig into this topic for themselves should also check out David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor and 9/11 Ten Years Later.
The WTC7 collapse and the lack of any air defense response for an hour and a half in the heart of US airspace over the government's primary headquarters on the Eastern seaboard while four hijacked, commercial passenger jets roamed the skies willy-nilly... these are the two biggest lies, most riddled with gaping holes. If you are a skeptic regarding 9/11 "conspiracy theories", the best place to start is with the most obvious errors in the official account... if you can quickly and easily convince yourself that a person would have to be crazy to doubt the official narrative on these two points - WTC7 and the air-defense non-response from 8:46am when the first plane finally hit the WTC (after having been off-course and not responding to FAA and ATC since 8:14am) to 10:03am when Flight 93 eventually "crashed" in Pennsylvania - then you can safely dismiss everything else that 9/11 skeptics have to say. These are the two most obvious problems in the official story. There are many, many other problems in the official story but these two don't require a lot of complex explanations. The contradictions between the official story and the known facts are simple and direct.
If you do see that a person wouldn't have to be insane to doubt the official story on the basis of the WTC7 collapse and the air-defense non-response (really, a stand-down), then you have prima facie evidence on which to proceed with the concept of a "vast conspiracy within the government". The objection that "they could never keep it a secret" is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how or why the official story is false, all that matters is that it is false and the truth must be something else. Perhaps it was a foreign intelligence operation - maybe Mossad did it. After pulling it off, USG was so embarrassed at its own security failures that it participated in covering it all up. Or perhaps it was the work of a secret element within the US government - a "government within the government". Or perhaps it was something else that escapes our limited imagination on such matters of treachery, murder and intrigue. It doesn't really matter what the alternative hypothesis is... if we establish that the facts falsify the null hypothesis - that is, the official story - then we must discard that hypothesis and look for another which is at least consistent with the facts, even if it is not "provable".
And the fact is that killing soldiers is not much more difficult as the vast majority of soldiers are ill-trained and thus do not even present a serious threat... of those that are well-trained, most are young, green and unsure of themselves - easy prey for a steady-handed, seasoned veteran. And even of those that have gone through battle and survived, most of them have not killed and, thus, are not psychologically proven... they are not necessarily psychologically committed to kill. Finally, those that have seen live-fire combat, have killed and have proven themselves psychologically simply won't have the weaponry - in terms of accuracy and range - and the highly cost-intensive training that the special ops guys have. The training is only the tie-breaker when they are going up against seasoned, veteran killers... the rest of the time, it's basically shooting fish in a barrel for these guys.
Well a big part of the reason why what special forces do may be likened to "shooting fish in a barrel" has to with their choice of mission. Just by definition of what is they do, it is they who decide when, where and against whom it is they seek battle. Most of the time they are training and resting behind the battlelines, only crossing them at the time of their choosing to go on extremely well-rehearsed raids with the element of surprise on their side and therefore against ill-suspecting targets. It's not their fault, but from the perspective of the regulars it is convenient and a kind of cherry picking. They do not dig in and hold the frontline — and come what may (such as a Nazi armored division or two, or the proverbial two hundred thousand screaming Chinamen). They are in and out. And effectively most times they are hiding behind the backs of regulars who hold the fort and do not get to choose their engagements. But you put special forces in a trench on the Western Front and they are just as liable to get massacred as anybody else. Nor would they in such a scenario prove any more efficient than veteran regulars either. Addendum: Viktor Suvorov in his classic introduction of the spetsnaz: "These soldiers never dig trenches; in fact they never take up defensive positions. They either launch a sudden attack on an enemy or, if they meet with resistance or superior enemy forces, they disappear as quickly as they appeared and attack the enemy again where and when the enemy least expects them to appear."
To your larger point regarding why special forces types are so dangerous, I would contribute the following. It isn't so much their bodycounts, but really the manner in which they kill. I think it is different to kill from afar and to kill people whom you do not see — such as in launching a SCUD missile or a V2 rocket — which is relatively easy for people to do. (Because in effect there is no felt emotional compulsion against it, only a rational argument.) This as deeply troubling in a sense, but (perhaps unfortunately) it is a fact of the human condition. It is also different to kill in a conventional high-intensity engagement — such as in your typical WWII movie with high-calibre artillery rounds going off all around you and what not — which is such an abnormal situation beyond anything the human was designed for and where the danger to your life and the life or your comrades is so acutely present and overwhelming to the senses. I think killing in such a case is again not difficult for otherwise ordinary people. The manner in which special forces kill is much more often than for regulars distinct from both these cases. It involves killing that is close and personal like in the WWII battle example, but that is like in the SCUD example without the immediate kill-or-be-killed dynamic to it. For example it involves killing people who are asleep. In a normal human being the thought of extinguishing the life of a person who is asleep causes revulsion. A special forces type however is trained to approach this as a technical problem. The most he is allowed to ask himself is if he should strangle the sleeping enemy, or cut its throat. These are people who are capable of, for example, silently descending on a trench of sleeping soldiers and methodically cutting the throats of 10-15 people. You are right it isn't mainly a matter of skill or daring, most regulars just aren't capable of that psychologically. Ordinary human mind has a strong compulsion against that kind of crap. Of course when what you have on hand isn't a gigantic high-intensity conventional war, but instead an occupation things change. Things change in the respect that now it is also expected of regular troops, much more often so than in a conventional war, to kill people who aren't engaging in combat themselves and to do it up close. For example in Iraq the occupying troops were told to shoot and kill any Iraqis carrying a spade. Regulars, veterans of conventional wars were stil for the greatest part normal people. Even those who were technically killers, for having extinguished a life, did so in a scenario where I believe it is relatively easy for people to kill, and where either the distance from the victim, or the immediate danger to oneself, precludes compulsion against killing from kicking in even in ordinary people. Regulars, veterans of dirty wars are in a much greater proportion not so. Many of them had, just like special forces types, killed in a manner that requires what you aptly call the "acquired willingness to kill". Willingness to kill that is not normally present in people (including those who are killers from afar who do not have to face their victims, and veterans who have killed in heat of battle). I agree people with this acquired willingness to kill are potentialy dangerous even of themselves, but much more seriously they are potentially extremely useful to the authorities. I am reminded the worst regime in the history, the Nationalsocialists in Germany, were a veritable factory for the making of people with this extreme willingness to kill.
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@Marko: +1
Have you read On Killing? Great book.
One note is that I think the modern view that regulars are, well, normal is flawed. Until the time of Napoleon, the concept of regular troops - who were nothing more than conscripts - as real troops had never existed. It was unprecedented and was the omen that signified the arrival of the two centuries of total warfare we have seen since that time.
But this is an illusion, in my opinion. The pre-Napoleonic soldier was much more like a modern special forces soldier. He generally did not "hold the lines" unless he was in some kind of virtually impregnable fortification. He killed up close and personal, he always strove to have the element of surprise, he (or at least, his commander to which he often owed only volunteer allegiance) chose his targets on the basis of his calculated ability to surprise and overwhelm them.
Of course, the rules of seige warfare were entirely different and I would argue that the logic of modern warfare is, in large part, the logic of seige warfare applied to the battlefield itself. What is a trench but a "improvised castle wall"?? Of course, artillery, rifles and rapid-fire machine-guns really and permanently altered the logic of warfare, as well. The entire concept of "holding your ground" became an exercise in suicide. A well-armed and determined enemy making a blitz push through a pin-point along "the battle-lines" with benefit of armor will always prevail... this is simply the physical law of force applied to strategy... the pin always bursts the balloon... and to pierce a much thicker balloon you need only a slightly thicker pin.
The real logic underlying total warfare and mass conscription creating "citizen soldiers" was the relatively novel idea that the individual's "love of country" could be harnessed to make him willing to die for his country. And really, that's all there is to it. As you point out, the job of the regulars is to make the real soldiers safe, so they have a permanent base from which to plan their strikes and a safely-held area of the battlefied in which to maneuver into position.
Following the 90/10 rule that we see everywhere in commerce - which I believe applies equally to war - we can safely say that 10% of the armed forces easily do 90% of the real work (not necessarily 90% of the killing... but 90% of the killing that matters) that brings about the desired strategic goal. For example, you can think of the forward operators that were deployed to Baghdad to call in the JDAM coordinates for dynamic strikes on Iraqi tragets of opportunity during the 2nd Gulf War invasion. Doubtless, more than a few high-ranking Iraqi generals and politicians were killed during these strikes. These deaths were far more consequential than the deaths of the goatherds-coerced-into-driving-tank whose tanks were turned into flaming canisters by Apaches along the invasion routes into Baghdad.
In summary, my theory of the emergence of modern total warfare is that it is partly the result of growing pains in the strategic understanding of the war elites of the true consequences of the gunpowder projectile weapons - artillery, rifle, machine-gun - as well as explosive devices, mechanization and air power to the character of warfare. It was also partly the result of very shrewd innovations (originating in Prussia, I believe) in the social technology of militarizing an entire population. First, you inculcate love of country from youth. Then, you leverage this love of country to turn otherwise "ordinary" folks who never wielded anything more dangerous than a pitchfork or an ox-cart into soldiers by the application of a "pre-molded" soldier persona onto them. You give them a standard gun, standard boots, a standard uniform and standard provisions and you roll them off an assembly line of military training and then send them out into the field to "hold the line" or some other ill-defined strategic objective whose true purpose is merely to relieve the core combat soldiers - the real professionals who do it because they love it - of intermediate strategic objectives, freeing them up to be used for capital strategic objectives, like assaulting the enemy's field headquarters or assassinating his generals, and so on.
Government Explained 2: The Special Piece of Paper
Law without Government