A "Just War" with Iraq?

This comes from Harry Papasotiriou in Greece :"John Heelan writes, that "'surgical strikes' are military hogwash". This seems to suggest that he is unaware of the massive changes in the technology of air bombardment in the past few decades, and even the past few years. In the Korean War up to 70% of all casualties were civilian, largely because the US Air Force resorted to WWII-style indiscriminate bombings of enemy cities (the Korean War was one of the bloodiest in all history, killing about three million Koreans of both sides, half a million Chinese and 50,000 UN troops). Civilian casualties were a much lower percentage of the Vietnam War, during which the US Air Force did not pursue indiscriminate bombing of cities and moreover developed, towards the end of the war, its earliest precision-guided bombs. The Kossovo air campaign resulted in about 600 civilian casualties, according to official Serbian sources, which would have been unimaginable even with the technology of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, let alone the Vietnam era technology. If the technologically less advanced European air forces had conducted the Kossovo air campaign on their own, and had attempted to strike at the same targets that were actually hit, the civilian casualties would have been many, many times higher".

Ronald Hilton - 1/3/03