As badly as I feel about Afghan (and pretty soon now, Iraqi) civilians who die when our bombs accidentally go off-course or when our intelligence sometimes is faulty, we didn't kill those people - the intolerant Taliban swine who ran Afghanistan, cheered Osama bin Laden on and gave him a place of safety as he spent two years planning to kill THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN CIVILIANS, those people killed their own countrymen by sheer incompetence, malice and stupidity. They have pulled ruin down upon their own heads.
Likewise, Saddam Hussein has consistently put his own ambitions to dominate the Middle East over the welfare of his people. All he had to do was - DISARM - and the UN sanctions against Iraq would have gone away. Instead, he has systematically starved and sickened his country in order to be able to hold on to and enlarge his arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear/radiological weapons. Now we have a president who has the backbone and courage to enforce the treaties and UN resolutions which called for Hussein to stop making weapons of mass destruction, and all we hear about are the civilian casualties which are going to result.
America spends a great deal of money on things like precision-aimed "smart bombs" making sure that accidents such as the deaths of innocent people DON'T HAPPEN when we bomb bad guys. If we want to take our intended targets out with no concern for the lives of near-by civilians, it would be a lot safer for our own people if we use our fuel-air munitions - really BIG bombs, nearly as powerful as a small nuclear weapon - to flatten whole target areas and assure that intended targets are destroyed, with less exposure of the pilots involved to enemy antiaircraft fire.
If we didn't care about the lives of the ordinary people of Afghanistan or Iraq, we could use adjustable-yield nuclear weapons on every suspect target site immediately and have little or no uncertainty about whether we had serviced the targets we were concerned about. This could happen totally by means of cruise missiles, or with our current arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with nary an American life at risk. But we don't.
When I see the lies being poured out by some of our so-called allies about our "real" intentions in going in to kick Saddam's house of cards down, I think if that it were up to me, I'd authorize a mass ICBM launch on that sorry country, just to sterilize the threat to the rest of humanity that Iraq poses under its current leadership. It's probably just as well that it's not up to me, but to cooler and wiser heads - such as President Bush and Secretary of State Powell.
Americans DO care about innocent lives. Not just OUR innocent lives, but everyone's, even in countries that host terrorists and give them the chance to commit mass murder of our people. I think that sometimes the news media neglects to show tragic events in an rational perspective, and we need to remember how we came to be doing what we are doing in the first place.
If our enemies had the same choice of bombs and delivery systems we do, does anyone reading this really think that they would be upset about accidentally killing ANY of OUR people? The World Trade Center and Pentagon crashes tell me that we are dealing with bloodthirsty mad dogs who should be put down as quickly as we can find them.
We should let our armed forces get on with the mission, take the bad guys out and get out of the area when the job is ALL done.