Winning Hearts and Minds: Deeper into the Quagmire

Kill a person's children and you have probably made an enemy for life. Kill a person's relatives and, in many parts of the world, that person is honor bound to take revenge.

We are sinking deeper into the Iraq quagmire. This is illustrated by two BBC News headlines today.

From BBC:

US attack 'kills Iraqi children'

An attack by a US helicopter against suspected insurgents in Iraq has killed a number of children at a primary school, Iraqi security sources say...

One police officer said the helicopter was shot at from the ground during the morning.

The school was said to have been hit when the aircraft returned fire.

And, from the other war:

An American commander [US army spokesman Col John Nicholson} in Afghanistan has said that he is "deeply ashamed" by the killings of 19 Afghan civilians by US Marines in early March.

He said that the military had paid condolence payments to the families in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Western forces have been accused of carelessness over civilian lives when attacking the Taleban and their allies.

It has become a major issue, with Nato recently saying that its biggest error last year was killing civilians.

Civilian casualties are unavoidable in war. And I do believe that by and large America DOES do what it can to limit civilian casualties, unlike some nations and rebel groups we can name where targeting civilians is part of the game. But when the enemy is pretty unclear as to why we are even there and what we want to accomplish, each and every civilian death just makes one or two or ten more enemies. When you start to be seen as an occupying force rather than as liberators, each and every civilian death creates a new blood feud. At least in Afghanistan the commander seems to understand the problem and he is offering the families both an admission of wrong and what amounts to blood money. That is within the social structure of many cultures. If you kill someone's relative you have to either fight the person's family or you have to humbly ask forgiveness and compensate the family. I give credit to Col John Nicholson for playing by the rules of the region. But we are still seen as an occupying force that has ceased to be liberators. In fact, in Afghanistan we have Republican Bill Frist wanting to bring the Taliban back and in Iraq the government wants the Baathists back to help restore stability.

We have dug ourselves so deep into the quagmire that we can no longer afford to inflict civilian casualties, no matter how "unavoidable" it is from a military viewpoint. Diplomatically it has become impossible for those we claim to be liberating to accept the death of their relatives at our hands.

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