War Without End, Amen: The Sanguinary Vision of Robert Gates

Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
...The day after his speech brought yet another example of how the war of the future will be fought: an American airstrike on a town north of Baghdad that killed nine children and six women, according to the Pentagon's own admission. (This massacre must have been a most glaring one indeed, if Bush's brass were willing to own up to such a death toll so quickly; usually, they simply deny that any civilians have been killed in their "precision airstrikes," or obscure the reality behind bromides about the "fog of war," despite the testimony of survivors and officials of the American-backed Iraqi government, and the dead bodies pulled from smoldering ruins.) The Pentagon claimed that the insurgents they were targeting had chosen "to surround themselves with civilians and then fire upon U.S. forces." (Naturally it would have been more sporting of the miscreants to gather themselves out in the open desert and wait for the Americans who are occupying the civilian centers to come out and kill them; but we all know the Arab mind is low and devious.) Here again, we see the militarist mindset at work, the inability to process any reality that falls outside the presumption that America has the right to apply "all elements of national power" anytime and anywhere it so chooses. They cannot grasp this simple question; Why are there insurgents firing on U.S. soldiers in the civilian areas of Iraq? Because the U.S. military has invaded and occupied Iraq, filling its civilian areas with more than 160,000 troops (and tens of thousands of mercenaries). If the U.S. soldiers were not there, then there would be no insurgents, and they would not be firing on U.S. soldiers...
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