COLUMN LEFT : With Military Precision, We Kill Innocents : The awkwardness about killing civilians doesn’t last long.

There’s been a natural resentment on the part of the U.S. government and other supporters of the war at the publicity given to Iraqi civilian casualties, with discomfiting pictures of fathers crying over their charred wives and children in front of the Baghdad air-raid shelter.

But the government should not be unduly disturbed. In war, any sense of awkwardness about killing innocent people doesn’t last long. At the start of the Korean War, U.S. pilots used to throw up in their cockpits as they machine-gunned civilians behind the lines. But before long they settled to their task and, with full public support, mowed down the “gooks” without remit.

Similarly, in Vietnam, slaughtered civilians soon all came under the general rubric of “enemy,” as well as being Asian and hence by tradition a horde without the privilege of individual humanity. With his recent comparison of bombed Iraqis to scurrying “cockroaches” one pilot, Col. Richard White, helped in the urgent business of hardening sentiment toward the foe, who can be classed as victims or agents of Saddam Hussein as needs dictate.

Pending the arrival of all Iraqis at “gook” status, government propagandists had to deal with the shelter and its dead. They rose to the challenge. It was a great piece of bombing, it wasn’t a shelter, the bereaved fathers were faking it, the burns weren’t real, it was all Hussein’s fault.

It all worked out well in the end. Opinion-formers like Charles Krauthammer said that the best way for the folks on the home front to match the bravery of the troops was for them to look at those charred children without flinching, as part of the necessary business of war. So it became an act of moral courage to support the bombing of the shelter. With more pragmatic brio, the British, who killed some 120 civilians in a block of flats a couple of days later, denied it for a while and then said it was just jolly bad luck.

Part of the sense of initial awkwardness arose because the U.S. commanders and their political supervisors had been talking about “military precision.” People thought this meant sparing civilians. When he destroyed Baghdad in 1258, Ulagu the Mongol used military precision in “degrading” Iraq’s main strategic asset at the time, its hydraulic culture. The damage he did was still visible to the archeologist Gertrude Bell when she inspected the area around Tikrit 80 years ago. Ulagu had destroyed the civil infrastructure of Mesopotamia, as central Iraq was then called.

The United States is following and expanding the Ulagu strategy, smashing the water and sewage systems, which means that many, particularly children, will die from germ warfare of a very effective sort. Also on the target list are bridges, generating stations, industrial plants, sugar refineries, flour mills, local government buildings, bus terminals and--highly important as a military target--civilian morale. This means strafing from time to time buses, cars and even sheep, as the Bedouin shepherd standing by his wounded son in a hospital in Nasiriyeh told my brother Patrick, who is reporting for the London Independent newspaper (10 in the flock were killed).

A bombing campaign always kills innocent civilians, which is why the British government denounced the IRA as moral savages for setting off the device in Victoria Station. This was the same day the British government was lamenting the bad luck of those Iraqis in their flats.

Sen. Sam Nunn said before the war began that he did not feel that he could look into the eyes of bereaved parents and say that yes, the sacrifice of their child, fighting in the Gulf, had been worthwhile. What would President Bush tell the parents of 10-year-old Ahmed Kassim, head torn open by shrapnel as the family fled in their car from the bombing of Basra?

If he was honest, Bush would say that the child was killed, along with many other innocent Iraqis, because Iraq had to be punished by war. As long ago as Aug. 10, Iraq was communicating to the U.S. government its readiness to withdraw from Kuwait. At least twice subsequently, in overtures acknowledged by the U.S. government, it offered a negotiated withdrawal. The only thing new about the Feb. 15 statement was its public nature.

Ah, but the linkages! They were never serious impediments to someone not set on war and disproportionate punishment.

The moment Bush and his advisers conclude that the coalition is under too much stress, or that an Iran-Germany-Soviet Union axis is too threatening, or that a land war is offering too many American casualties, then proposals such as Gorbachev’s will receive a welcome and the famous “linkages” cease to be a problem. Until that moment, in the cause of punishment and the destruction of modern Iraq, innocents will continue to die.