Moral Courage

[Occhidiangela]

Hmmmm go back a bit further. In WW1 errant bombs killed thousands of soldiers.

The city where I live in now was bombed in WW2 (the allied forces thought it was a german city) etc.

I think the killing of innocent people by accident is getting less and less. The bombs they use now are often not much heavier than they used to be, most of the (smart) bomb is propulsion and electronics.

In that sense the allied troops (with modern armies) are contradicting themselves. First they say that with there modern weaponry there are less and less civilian victims, but we keep hearing about wrong bombings.

For outsiders it is very hard to find out the truth. Take the bombing of the chinese ambassy (kosovo wasn't it). What tells me it wasn't bombed on purpose?
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When you look through a soda straw, you see the world differently than another who does not. "Wrong bombs" in an urban environment are a significantly different problem than wrong bombs in a suburban or rural environment. So, some folks hihde behind the skirts of their women, and use their best weapon, the soda straw view of the news camera, in a war. War is waged by far more than weapons.

The Chinese Embassy: an interesting series of errors, or a deliberate attack? I'd suggest the former. Remember, anything humans can do, they can screw up. "Nothing is idiot proof." Check out some of the more nonsensical warning labels on products, and consider what series of events required a bottle of fuel injector cleaner to hold the warning "do not drink this!"

You raised an interesting problem: expectations. The 1991 Iraq War was presented to the American people, and the world via CNN et al, with a certain spin: precision guided munitions, "surgical strikes," Tomahawk missiles, etc. The Silver Bullet hounds were salivating all over the place. That led to a series of expectations, driven by a partially told story, of "zero defects attacks."

There is no such thing. And remember, no matter where you are in the world, when your country is in a civil war, it sucks to be you. I see what is going on in Iraq right now as a civil war, one in which the US led coalition has apparently taken sides, but most folks on the ground cannot understand which side. :P

Occhi