Incidentally, I do believe that Israel is, at the least, violating Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on collective punishment of civilians. Having said that...

*sigh* I wonder, sometimes, about the emphasis oh horrible images. If Juan Cole managed to get everyone to freeze in shock at seeing such, for his sake, I hope he's never in a bad auto accident, a house fire, a natural gas explosion, or a chemical laboratory accident -- and expect the first responders, or the emergency room staff, to be frozen by the horror as he dies. There was no picture worse than I've seen in a US emergency medicine context, where I also had the benefit of the smell and the sounds.

Even for domestic emergencies, there's benefit to recognizing there are such things. I have given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a victim that suddenly vomited into my mouth. I spit it out, checked for spontaneous respiration, and continued, feeling good about the vomiting, because it meant life signs were returning. If you are trying to stop bleeding and it spurts into your eyes, and blood stings in the eyes, you wipe them clear, try not to worry about infection, and keep applying pressure.

I'm not getting into the usual argument about weird physical effects of alleged chemical weapons, or whether white phosphorus is a chemical weapon. Go look at the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1972, which does not list WP in its extensive list of chemical weapons. I find that people intent on "proving" chemical weapons rarely have the laboratory data, or even the pathological knowledge, to describe the effects of chemical weapons. I could think of several agents that might damage hair rather than skin, and none are WP. I would also not that even in conventional fires, hair may look normal, but crumbles at the touch, or is visibly damaged when examined microscopically.

--

Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*