In answer to sirs' last post and without any cutting and pasting - - I think most of his argument depends on the concept of "targeting." The Americans can kill a hundred thousand Iraqis, but if those 100,000 were "collateral damage" rather than deliberately targeted, this kinda lets them off the hook. If the Iraqi Resistance kills 40,000 targeted Iraqis, this makes them [the Resistance fighters] a lot worse than the killers of the 100,000 not-targeted people.
That argument, IMHO, might have some application if the Iraqis had launched a war of aggression against America. I know, regarding the Germans and Japs, I don't give a shit how many millions of them were killed. Considering the atrocities their armies committed, considering that they started the war in the first place, not only were their casualties well-deserved and fully justified, I actually feel it's a crying shame that there weren't a whole lot more. However, those considerations do not apply when the victims of the bombing did not start the war in the first place. They are doubly victimized, first as being warred on without provocation and secondly by the actual killing and maiming that they must suffer. For the U.S. to START a war on Iraq, and then say, of the mountains of Iraqi dead, Oh, it's a shame, but nobody targeted them, it was all an accident - - that is just BS.
The decision to start the war and the decision to conduct it as it was conducted, those were decisions that carried with them on Day One the certainty that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die. Somebody had to know how many million tons of explosives needed to be shipped out, how many aircraft, how many bombs. One way or another that translated into mega-deaths and everyone who had a hand in planning the attack knew that. That none of the deaths was an individually targeted death is a transparent cop-out.
