Shut the Hell Up Already

The BBC is happy to harp on US accidents in the Afghan campaign:

Four Canadian soldiers were killed in April when a US fighter bombed them by mistake during a training exercise.

In January, US bombs killed civilians in the village of Hazar Qadam, targeted as a Taleban compound.

In December, planes bombed a convoy from the eastern town of Khost, killing people Mr Karzai said were tribal elders travelling for his inauguration.

Last October, a targeting error led to a bomb hitting a residential area of Kabul, instead of a helicopter at the airport.

During the 1898-1902 Boer War, the English Army invented the modern concentration camp. Nearly 30,000 died in them, mostly old men, women, and children.

During the Great War, the Royal Navy maintained a blockade of German ports, resulting in 1-2 million Germans starving to death.

In 1945, with the war nearly won, British bombers helped drop 9,000 tons of incendiary bombs on the town of Dresden, killing 135,000 people, and making homeless thousands more.

I mention these things not because I’m trying to draw some kind of sick moral equivalence between “British war crimes” and “American war crimes.” In the case of the Boer War and both world wars, Britain did what she needed to do to survive and protect her interests — in fights she did not start.

But war, as the man said, is major suckiness.

Today’s tragedy was just that, a tragedy. We’re in a war we didn’t start, fighting as cleanly as we know how. So, please, BBC, don’t foist your (undeserved) guilty consciences off on us.