ON TO IRAQ?(Brief Article)

On Monday, July 1st, in the province of Oruzgan, in south-central Afghanistan, an American AC-130 gunship unleashed its fearful firepower on the village of Kakrak and its surroundings. A big wedding party was taking place, and some of the guests were celebrating by emptying their rifles into the air. Apparently, the crew of the AC-130 mistook the shooting for hostile anti-aircraft fire. Afterward, local officials said that at least fifty-four people, most of them women and children, had been killed, and that at least a hundred and twenty had been wounded. That initial account has since been independently corroborated by the Times and by investigators from the United Nations Assistance Mission.

Three weeks later, on Monday, July 22nd, an Israeli F-16 fighter aimed a missile tipped with a one-ton bomb at an apartment house in the Gaza Strip. The mission accomplished its goal, which was to assassinate a forty-nine-year-old Palestinian terrorist named Salah Shehada, the commander of the "military wing" of Hamas. But the Israeli missile also took the lives of at least fourteen other people--including three women and nine children, seven of whom were under the age of six--and wounded ten times that many. Afterward, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, while conceding that the civilian deaths had been "regrettable," praised the operation as "one of our major successes." But President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, deplored it as "a heavy-handed action that is not consistent with dedication to peace in the Middle East." The reproaches from other quarters--not only from the foreign ministries of Europe and the Arab world but also from within Israel's increasingly demoralized and marginalized peace camp--were considerably harsher. Writing in Ha'aretz, the commentator Ari Shavit called it "a grave and unforgivable act" that "plunged us deep down the slippery slope of bestiality."

The wedding-party bombing in Oruzgan met with few such condemnations. Even so, the comparison between the two incidents is not entirely in America's favor. Israel's target (which it hit) was a specific individual--a remorseless killer, who had already organized suicide attacks that deliberately slaughtered scores, perhaps hundreds, of innocent Israeli civilians and who was in the process of organizing more of the same. America's target (which it missed) was the remnants of a ragtag army that had been routed months before. Israel's operation was based on intelligence that was half solid (Shehada was in the building the missile hit); it was ruined by the mistake, still unexplained, of using a bomb that, though accurate to within a metre, was so big it destroyed neighboring buildings full of families. In Oruzgan, the decision to open fire, and to keep firing, seems to have been based on little more than the sight of tracer bullets in the dark and the knowledge that the area is one where sympathy for the Taliban strongly lingers. In Gaza, Israel was callous and careless with innocent human life; but, in Oruzgan, America was no less so. And the greater callousness of a terrorist enemy excuses neither.

In the Times a couple of Sundays ago, the war correspondent Dexter Filkins put Oruzgan's terrible night in a larger context. He wrote, "The American air campaign in Afghanistan, based on a high-tech, out-of-harm's-way strategy, has produced a pattern of mistakes that have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians." It's a strategy that emerged back in December at Tora Bora, where, as Senator John Kerry pointed out last ...