Guardian: This aerial onslaught is war at its most stupid

[unhappycamper]

This aerial onslaught is war at its most stupid
Simon Jenkins
Wednesday February 7, 2007
The Guardian

Watching a person kill another is the purest horror. Watching it done from the air, from a sanitised distance, is less so. Distance launders the bloodletting and technology purifies it. War becomes another video game. The camera sees no broken bodies. If it sees a mistake it does not see the mistake that caused the mistake.

The video-recording of the attack by two American jets on a British column in Iraq in March 2003, which caused the death of Corporal Matty Hull, should be in any museum of war. We hear the pilots clearly hungry for targets and finding them. They question the identity of the column, which seems to have "friendly" markings, but ground control assures them it is not friendly. They attack, and crow as they score. Ground control calmly tells them they have made a mistake and to head for home. They curse, weep and cry: "We're in jail ... I'm going to be sick." They have killed their own.

Listening to the pilots converse during the attack is to enter a world of ghouls. Death is reduced to technical terms such as "terminal control". Everything is coordinates, visuals, beeps and shudders, as if the fog of Wellington's Waterloo were reincarnated in a static of overlapping call signs, coordinates, ground controllers and Awacs monitors. It appears so slapdash as to make mistake inevitable. The most costly military technology on earth seems to have advanced not an inch from the recording of the Soviet shooting down of a Korean airliner in 1983.

The same sequence of events must have occurred in countless sorties over the past decade in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. There are now dozens of recorded friendly-fire incidents, including the bombing of the BBC reporter John Simpson in Iraq and what appeared to be the deliberate killing of ITN's Terry Lloyd.

The killing of tens of thousands of civilians is not recorded, let alone analysed. Yet hardly a week passes without news from Iraq and Afghanistan of the destruction of villages and the massacring of wedding parties and car convoys supposedly composed of "guilty" people.

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[Possumpoint]

1. War is

an unhappy business. Once you unleash the dogs of war, wright or wrong, people will get killed, maimed and injured. There are attempts to minimize and avoid friendly fire incidents. However, they have happened in the past and will in the future. The only way this can be avoided is to convert to robotic warriors or not fight. The ideal would be not to fight. Human nature says otherwise.

[OneBlueSky]

2. humankind best outgrow war pretty quick . . . otherwise, we'll end up extincting ourselves . . .

and most other life on the planet . . .

[Briar]

3. But the world will go on

probably with relief. If there is another sentient species, perhaps it will be genuinely intelligent.