ON TO IRAQ?(Brief Article)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-AUG-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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