“The Post goes along with the WikiLeaks claim that the new documents show ‘…that U.S. soldiers killed at least 700 Iraqi civilians in situations where troops felt threatened.’”
Why is it that ground troops can’t get away with a fraction of what aerial bombardment does? I guess we still picture war as gentlemenly knights squaring off in an open field. Which is why some 500 murders at My Lai get all the press, whereas thousands of dead civilians from strategic bombing are ho-hum, who cares? Actually, Nixon was crucified for his bombing campaigns, but that’s neither here nor their. The stock argument was that somehow he went outside the normal rules of warfare, not that Death From Above was inherently barbaric.
Not to defend unwarranted ground casualties. Just to say that people have little clue that most civilian deaths are from the air (and before airplanes, still from artillery), which murders with much greater abandon and less shame than any soldier ever born. Even in the way I—a person who pretends to know better—put it, you can detect the great psychological difference between air and ground campaigns. The latter passes by unnoticed while the former grabs all the headlines.
Unless we happen to accidentally bomb a hospital or something. Which is bad, but makes you wonder, what about all those other things we bombed that weren’t hospitals but also weren’t military instillations? Merely some guy’s house.
their = there