During the past year, the US has turned increasingly to air raids to wage war against Iraqi insurgents without incurring US casualties. Air raids are, unfortunately, blunt instruments, prone to error. In the latest fiasco, we seem to have killed 12 civilians while aiming for three insurgents.
People who give customer service training to places like restaurants and retail stores like to say that customers are much more likely to tell their friends about an instance of bad service than good. Same in war. We're probably rebuilding a school somewhere in Iraq right now, but that's not the headline. It's 12 civilians killed by a US air strike.
Let's be honest. If that house had contained 12 Americans, we wouldn't have bombed it in the hopes of getting 3 insurgents. We don't view Iraqi "collateral damage" as being as important as the lives of Americans.
I'm not saying we should, but we don't and it's no secret from the Iraqis. We're not going to win a war for "hearts and minds" while we regard our allies as less important than ourselves. On the other hand, you can't run an army any other way. Soldiers are trained to kill enemies. There's no practical way to deliver democracy to a hostile population on the point of a bayonet.
So let's get out now.
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