DAVID WARREN WRITES:

In just five days all this has been achieved! And while the most grisly parts of the campaign still lie ahead, all the worst fears have gone unrealized, so far.

More, still, could have been achieved, in this very short time, had the Americans and their allies not been playing to the most exacting moral rules ever devised for warfare. They are restricted by, for instance, a general order not to engage any target at all — including snipers and saboteurs within towns — unless they have a clear sight of it. They allowed, for instance, a dozen Republican Guard to fire rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at Apache helicopters from the roof of a building in one location south of Baghdad, entirely unmolested, because the helicopter pilots, who could have taken them out in a few quick keystrokes, couldn’t be sure of avoiding “collateral damage” to civilians who might be lurking in the building below. Giving the benefit of the doubt to surrendering soldiers cost most of the U.S. Marine casualties so far, in a single incident near Nasiriyah, as a suicide ambush was mounted under cover of white flags.

Even media folks are starting to notice. As Sgt. Stryker reports in the post I link below:

Dan Abrams of MSNBC is pissed. It’s kind of wierd to see a television anchorman displaying frustration and disbelief at certain things going on. The whole thing about the Iraqis dressing in civilian clothes and shooting from protected sites has really stuck in his craw. First he hammered Gen. Trainer about it, and the General explained LOAC and all that good stuf, but Abrams just wasn’t buying it. I tlooked to me that he just wanted to blurt out, “Why can’t we blow up that mosque, if they’re killing Marines?”

Then he had a retired JAG on and hammered him about the same thing. And then I heard something I thought I’d never hear an “objective” journalist say, and I paraphrase, “So our guys have to check with lawyers before they fire back? So we have these self-imposed rules that lawyers impose on our troops and the government imposes on itself and now Marines are dead because of it.” That last line was a statement, not a question. The JAG guy’s trying to explain about PR and the rest of it, but Abrams was on a roll. “Those Arab TV networks are going to show us supposedly targeting and killing civilians no matter what we do while we follow the Rules of War.” It was nothing short of astonishing to hear that. I don’t know what prompted all this. Perhaps he saw the tape of the Americans executed and exploited on TV. Who knows? But man, it was something to see.

That last is the question, isn’t it? It’s one thing to be merciful and careful above-and-beyond-the-call. But if we’re going to get no credit for it, is it worth the cost in American lives? The powers-that-be think it is. May they prove to be right.