Precision to Chaos

I was thinking about the start of the Iraq War. Rumsfeld was proudly talking about the humanity of the smart bombs. The bombs that didn't kill people. Of course the smart bombs did kill people as they would go off target periodically and end up destroying neighborhoods. But that got played down, and besides there is a price to war.

So we all got convinced, and the media trumpeted the notion that we could get comfortable with the Iraq War. Lives would be spared and a new type of warfare was going to replace the old. We were going to have a smart, safe war. In the Project for a New American Century's PNAC document the neo-conservatives, like Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Cheney, et al, the people that brought you the Iraq War, wrote of a new generation of safe nuclear weapons. Somehow these nuclear bombs would be like their counterpart smart bombs and nobody would get hurt, it was safe, it was smart.

George Bush exlaimed - Mission Accomplished - and it looked like the smart bombs and the death toll would be low, or at least relatively low, compared to other wars.

A little problem developed. The insurgency arose, the civil war arose, the death tolls grew, the deaths got more gruesome, and the tragedy keeps gaining momentum. How can you compare a car or truck bomb to a smart bomb.

We forget about our recent past. We forgot about the safe smart bombs and how the unplanned, the unrecognized occur, and how the tragedy deepened and got really bloody.

In retrospect the smart bombing of Iraq, the shock and awe, was the only planned and calculated part of this unmitigated bloodbath. Think about it, nothing else has come close to being as precise and exact in this war turned occupation. Shock and awe was a display of military might that we have never seen. It was a remote control precision attack that eliminated the structures that held the power in Iraq.

One could even get the very eery sense that the speed and accuracy of the destruction of Baghdad was the only victory that was sought. It was an experiment in military tactic and the crumpling of a dark city led by the always reliably vicious Saddam Hussein was all that was sought. We hold our breath and imagine with all our sanity that this cannot possibly be.

What does this tell us? The most obvious thing is that Americans are really really good at destroying infrastructure with bombs. I'm not so sure that is something to be happy about, but its true.

Perhaps the planners of the next war might drop the notion of a smart safe war. They saw that chaos does not turn instantly into a pretty picture of humanity wrapped in a harmonious industrious glow.

Perhaps they will explain to us the problem is fixed, they now know how to follow up with a plan that creates instant democracy. They will create a shock and awe army of white shirt bureaucrats that arrive from distant shores and as fast as the infrastructure is destroyed, these bureaucrats seamlessly form a new democratic governing body.

Here's what will happen. Nothing. We will forget all about the failures. No lessons will get learned. Bush wants to attack Iran, a far more complex and vigorous country than Iraq, especially considering Iraq had spent years under sanctions and no fly zones AKA continuous bombing.

At some point we truly hope we get a leader that is on the page of humanity. Someone that can speak and we truly hear the truth. Its that simple.