Political Satire

Cliffnotes: Morality of War - via Tacitus.

'I lost a scout this morning to sniper fire and my first sergeant was hit by a mortar round yesterday. That means I am taking it a little bit personally. How am I meant to protect my men when the generals are denying me the ability to bomb enemy positions?".

On the outskirts of the central Iraqi town of Samawah, Capt David Waldron and his company of tanks are locked in a defensive formation. His men are under intermittent attack by snipers and mortar fire. They are also increasingly angry and frustrated.

From Basra to Karbala, south of Baghdad, coalition forces are under attack from soldiers in civilian clothes and Saddam Hussein's shadowy Fedayeen paramilitaries.

And yet 50 per cent of the coalition's desired targets are being vetoed by high command for fear of hitting a sensitive "no combat zone".

I'm glad we aren't targeting civilians, but it seems like there is a fundamental problem. If the goal is to minimize U.S. and civilian casualties, is that fundamentally incompatible with waging war? If you assume that the enemy will not fight, then it will work. Now that it has become clear the Iraqis will fight, what do we do?
Posted by: CA Pol Junkie on March 24, 2003 08:31 PM

Excellent commentary Tacitus, but what I fear is that this difficulty will lead many on the Right to begin arguing that we need to start fighting "dirty" in response and to drop our concern over civilian deaths. I understand this sentiment, but if we are going to be true to our stated intention that this war is being fought (at least partially) for the good of the Iraqi people, we need to resist these calls. Let's not let this turn into a replay of many Vietnam mistakes where our actions convinced many noncombatants that we were not really their "liberators", but just a substitute totalitarian regime.
Posted by: Doug-E-Fresh on March 24, 2003 08:34 PM

The problem here is that we are getting caught up in the contradictions Dubya used to sell this war. The most successful pro-war points were and are all about liberating the oppressed people of Iraq. Democrats point out that dropping bombs on people and leveling their cities is a strange way to go about liberating them. So Bush, Rumsfeld and the gang decide to pursue a more cautious plan of attack which minimizes civilian casualties as much as possible. Unfortunately, that makes the task at hand, conquering Iraq, much harder.

So we are now trapped, essentially, between the rock and the hard place. Unleash our full power, and the war goes quicker, but thousands of Iraqi civilians die, world opinion swings even more heavily against us, and the surviving people of Iraq (who we'll soon have to govern as an occupation force) hate us all the more. Proceed as we are now, and the war takes longer and more of our soldiers are killed. I think this is one of the reasons why those of us on the Left thought this was a bad idea.
Posted by: KevinA on March 24, 2003 08:41 PM

1. Chris Mooney (The American Prospect) The Framework. The importance of the message.
2. Kevin Drum (weblogger) The Value of Fear.
3. Digby (weblogger) Fear sells.