Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Over at the Smart Glenn's place Chris Floyd is shrill.

However, he neglects two important points.

MNF-I reports of civilian deaths are divided into "execution style" and "car bombs" but don't IIRC a category for "our bombs". These deaths must have increased during the surge as

Monday, the Pentagon acknowledged a long-unspoken truth: that the bombardment of civilian neighborhoods in Iraq is an integral part of the vaunted "counterinsurgency" doctrine of Gen. David Petraeus. The number of airstrikes in the conquered land has risen fivefold since George W. Bush escalated the war in January, as USA Today reports:

"Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics


Now they do count civilian deaths (except for the "we know of no civilian deaths" in Baghdad when the reporter who got the quote and visited and Iraqi ER sure did) but they seem to assume that there are no adult male Iraqi civilians

""Iraqis voiced outrage Friday over a U.S. military airstrike that killed an estimated 15 civilians -- nine children and six women," Ah so nine children and six women and zero adult male civilians ? Oddly sexist and ageist those bombs no ?

Or maybe the US military defines all Iraqi men they kill as enemy combatants.

If they keep up this way, they may be right soon.

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