So Sorry--Carry On

Have to do a couple of things over here, but I mean to write a quick post about this:

Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After U.S. Raid Kills 9 Children

Seven boys and two girls died here on Saturday morning in an American airstrike, and their bodies were still lying in the dust when American soldiers arrived by helicopter to assess the results of the attack three hours later, villagers and American soldiers at the scene said Sunday.

A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign aid workers, might have gotten away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Some villagers said the suspect and his family, whose house was unscathed in the attack, had not been seen for weeks.

The attack has raised questions about the quality of American military intelligence and the effectiveness of using air power to kill fugitive members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda who are hiding in villages.

It seems as if "targeted assassination" works just about as well in Afghanistan as it does in the Occupied Territories of The West Bank and Gaza, which is to say poorly or not at all.

I doubt a single pro-war individual will make note of the tragedy, except maybe with some sort of ridiculous musing about the "fog of war" or like nonesense. Fog of war my ass. War is all about killing people. Yeah, sometimes you make a mistake and blast kids or other noncombatants to smithereens--and sure, the people who did this are probably as sorry as old Bill Janklow is these days--which is apparently very sorry--in tears, in fact.

But crying won't bring back the kids who've been killed in Afghanistan--nor will it bring back the dead non-combatants in Iraq (Nightline had a good story last week on a Marine Company deployed in the war. I don't expect ABC to be anything but blindly supportive of the troops--which they were--but they did report the fact that this company killed a number of non-combatants at a checkpoint early on in the conflict).

Right Wingers gloss this stuff over--apparently because it doesn't fit their preconceived notion that everything the United States does is inherently blessed by the Almightly. But I don't think dead kids are part of God's plan.

You know, Resident Bush often simplistically proclaims that "it's obvious that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," which is ridiculous at least in part because Saddam is still around, even as I wonder whether he really is as elusive as it appears or if Bushco is merely waiting until next October to gun him down. But I really began to think about Bush's conviction--no not the DWI conviction from back in '76, or the time he did community service in Houston, apparently to keep a drug conviction from getting on his record, or the college theft thing--no, his apparent conviction that utter chaos in Iraq is somehow better than a known threat. Consider: we knew Hussein was a vicious thug. That's why he was isolated, cut off from doing business with the rest of the world (except for a rather pathetic amount of smuggled commodities coming in from Syria), and otherwise shunned.

Yeah, Hussein was a punk. But at least ordinary Iraqis had a degree of civil order in their lives.

Today, there is chaos, with a strong potential that the next "civil" authority in Iraq will be anything but civil--speaking of civil, if I was a betting person, I'd lay odds that civil war will erupt sometime soon, probably as soon as Bush makes a political move to withdraw some soldiers, with an outcome of either religious theocracy, a new Saddam-like thug--or an Afghanistan-style system of regional bigwigs. As far as whether or not this is "better" than Hussein, I'll let the Iraqi people decide. After all, they're the ones who live there.