COLLATERAL DAMAGE.(Iraq)

One of the characteristic horrors of what Raymond Aron called the century of total war was the expansion of the battlefield to encompass whole societies. In many of the twentieth century's conflicts, from the Philippines to Algeria to Vietnam and beyond, the distinction between soldiers and civilians offered the latter scant protection. In the bloodiest of all, the Second World War, both sides adopted a strategy of deliberately killing civilians and destroying cities--usually by means of aerial bombing, and always with the aim of breaking an enemy nation's will, or, failing that, its physical ability, to continue. The "good war,"in this sense, was bad in the extreme. The damage inflicted upon London and Dresden, Rotterdam and Tokyo, Leningrad and Hiroshima was anything but collateral. It was the whole point.

Whatever else can be said about the war against the Iraqi dictatorship that began on March 19th, it cannot be said that the Anglo-American invaders have pursued anything remotely resembling a policy of killing civilians deliberately. And, so far, they have gone to great tactical and technological lengths to avoid doing it inadvertently, too. Collateral damage is one of those antiseptic-sounding euphemisms that are sometimes more chilling than plain language, so hard do they labor to conceal their human meaning. It would be indecent to belittle the agony that has already been inflicted; you have only to imagine yourself, for example, as the parent or child of one of the dozens of people who were blown apart or maimed last Wednesday, and again last Friday, when stray bombs plowed into Baghdad marketplaces. But this kind of "damage"is indeed "collateral,"not only in that there is a serious effort to avoid it but also in that the intended purpose of the bombing of Baghdad, which so far has apparently been aimed only at military and government installations, has been to break not the will of the Iraqi people but the connections between them and their tyrannical rulers. Indiscriminate bombing would actually strengthen those connections, as we know from the experience of the Second World War and Vietnam. What we do not yet know is whether a different intention, backed by technologies of precision, will produce a different political result. And we do not yet know whether even the intention can survive the transition--which suddenly seems more likely than not--from a quick war of shock and awe to a grinding, protracted struggle, hand to hand and house to house.

The war in Iraq is a new kind of total war. The immense anxiety it is provoking throughout the Western world, perhaps most keenly in the United States, is more than a matter of compassion for the sufferings of people far away. The dread is a kind that hits closer to home. It is bound up with a set of fears that, in the runup to the war, had been invoked in different ways by both supporters and opponents of the impending conflict. One such fear is that "weapons of mass destruction,"especially portable ones, will find their way into the hands of undeterrable terrorists. Another is that what began as a measured ...