More On Falluja

Spencer has some concerns. Even if you assume the military is operating with 100 percent accurate intelligence as to its targets, and 100 percent accuracy as to munitions delivery, the notion that you could launch a large series of "precision" air strikes into an urban area strikes me as something that only a group of people raised in West Texas and Wyoming could come up with. There's a dude who lives a couple doors down from me whom I strongly suspect of being a drug dealer of some sort. Say the government were to fly a helicopter over to the corner of 10th and U and launch a cruise missile into his abode. What are the chances, realistically, that I would just walk away from this with my life and property unscathed. What if it starts a fire? Or if my roommate couldn't find parking right in front of our house and left the car in front of his instead? Or what if he put the car in the alley behind the block on the rubble from the demolished house blocks it? The attack pulls down the power lines? His house collapses into the building next door (and there are buildings on either side, so it's hard to see how this could be avoided) fucking up everyone's walls?

Now try doing this over and over again. Factor in the fact that the intelligence is not, in fact, 100 percent accurate and neither is the targeting. Consider that though I might prefer not to have a drug dealer living down the block, it's a situation our household can cope with much more easily than the loss of our electricity or our car. And what about the Chinese guys who are supposed to be opening a restaurant next door on Tuesday and have probably invested some huge proportion of their savings in the endeavor. How are they going to feel if it turns out that the targeted house was full of ammo, which blows up, setting their kitchen on fire, wrecking the equipment and massively delaying their opening date? Meanwhile, who wants to go to the restaurant next to the pile of rubble in the neighborhood targeted by cruise missiles every so often? Some liberation....

UPDATE: Pink Flamingo Bar Grill comments with some disparaging remarks. He's right -- helicopters don't fire cruise missiles. His substantive point is that anyone hanging around in the Falluja area nowadays is probably a bad guy who hates America (possibly his hatred of America is sufficient reason to think he's a bad guy) so we don't need to worry. My friends on the right ought to think through the logic of this position better. If our attitude is "Fallujans are bad -- kill them all" then why bother with precision strikes? Let's just load up some heavy ordinance on the airplanes and level the whole city, Grozny-style. But if this is what things have come to, then what's the point of the mission in Iraq? It's hard to see how you're going to build a democracy that way.