On becoming reradicalized

I hate it, but it appears that I am being rapidly re-radicalized. Returned to the emotional state of my adolescenthood. It probably started when I joined an anti-war march in January of last year. Marching along Market (I think) in San Francisco, I found myself marching under a banner that said Berkeley Students Against the War. Remarkable! I mentioned to one of the banner-bearers that I'd marched under that same banner back in 1970, and that the only difference seemed to be that this time there wasn't (yet) any tear gas in the air.
I'd like to insert parenthetically here that among letters to the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers in the following days, there appeared to be a number of writers who accused the marchers around the country of being 'naive' for thinking they could stop the war. I responded by pointing out that for me, at least, I was simply establishing my right to say I told you so later, when the venture degenerated into the fiasco it has now become. I wish I'd said then that the naive ones, in my opinion, were those who thought there could be a successful conclusion to this cynical, hegemonic war. I always think of the good retorts too late to use them.
Now about that phrase so much in the news today:

Precision Bombing.
Precision bombing, along with Body Counts, Captured Enemy Documents and Hearts and Minds was a phrase coined back during the Vietnam war by DOD publicists to describe how we were winning that war. It belongs in the lexicon of war right up there with Collateral Damage as a misleading and obfuscatory way of sanitizing the death of unknown numbers of people.
Let's look at the precision we have achieved. In March 2003, the grand enterprise began with huge numbers of cruise missiles being fired at Iraq. Most of the missiles did, in fact hit their target (Iraq), but numbers of them also hit: Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia! Hundreds of the missiles completely missed a country the size of (we are often reminded) California! The DOD estimate finally was that approximately 80% of the cruise missiles hit their targets. This news tidbit was not greatly noticed, as at the time we were "winning" the war. Eighty per. cent. is actually not too bad for an obsolete system that we had to use up anyway, as the missiles were approaching their bar-coded "best used before" date. Honestly, our military "consumables" as they are euphemistically called, have expiration dates.
Of course,now that we control the skies of Iraq, we can target our, mmm, targets much more reliably. Especially if we venture close enough to use laser targeting. We can achieve absolute to-within-a-third-of-a-meter accuracy in hitting the XY coordinates of our goal. That's how we came to pinpoint the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade so exactly. Oops. Some of our targets seem to be cases mistaken identity. Must have something to do with military intelligence.
It's remarkable to me that there are so many people who believe that the government is completely inept when it comes to domestic issues, like making them pay taxes, while that same government is infallible in its judgements about killing people (other than themselves). Then there is the problem that, while one can strike at the predetermined X and Y exactly, it's not possible to know who will be at that location when the bomb goes off.

This isn't a novel. There are real people, children, noncombatants, people who just want to be left alone, who stubbornly insist on wandering into the bomb zone. When the DOD figures this one out, I want to know about it. I can't even imagine the feelings of people who hear the planes, see the planes, feel the explosions, and are completely powerless to prevent the death and destruction from occurring. My imagination says anger, rage, vengefulness. But that may be too mild a description of the way the people we are bringing freedom-and-democracy feel about us.

I wouldn't count on any future government of Iraq being friendly to the United States. Not unless we own it. How the perpetrators of this disaster ever thought they could re-create Iraq, and the middle east, is beyond me. Hey! It was a play you idiots! George Bernard Shaw wrote it as a comedy!