I know that we can turn Baghdad - a town with 2 and a half million children - into telegenic Disney Hell with several thousand tons of high explosives and injure only Bad Guys. (Indeed, watching CNN, one might wonder if anyone gets injured at all in this marvelously surgical new form of war.)

I know that we have a lot of really cool toys in our arsenal. I know that A-10 Warthog can fire over a thousand rounds a minute. (Though no one in the media has mentioned that each of these bullets consists of depleted uranium that will be radiating birth defects into the Iraqi gene pool for many generations.)

I know that the only truly powerful country on the planet is continuing to manufacture the perilous, conscience-stunting myth that technology can make war relatively safe. Indeed, we are so delusional on this subject that we believe that bombing the shit out of the Iraqis is a humanitarian act. This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we began to construct during Gulf War I.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:43:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments