Nijik comments

Beautifully written, and lovely sentiments, Miss Whatley. I think your choice is a very good one, and that as the years pass you will be glad you made it.

teleprompter -- I agree with you, that the US military is doing good things to help and rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure, and as the web-site I linked shows almost every recent death has been from insurgent death squads not Allied weapons. The soldiers out there are brave, braver than me, and I recognise it and respect them for it.

The point I was making, however, is that most of the huge number of civilian deaths occurred in the fighting at the beginning, when US/British bombs were being dropped on places where civilians and combatants mixed. Innocent deaths were inevitable then and are inevitable in Afghanistan now. We can't have war without innocent casualties but these days we try to pretend we can and get outraged when it happens. We cannot blame the soldiers for fighting in an impossible dilemma; we should either blame ourselves for expecting a perfect war where no innocents get killed in the crossfire, or if we can't accept that then don't have a war.

What gets me is not the fact civilians die (although I do regret it and feel sorry for them) its the fact that we don't/can't own up to it -- we try to sanitise war and pretend only the bad guys get killed, and I think that is immoral because it denies the terrible cost of these decisions in friend, foe and innocent lives lost.

Who is any rational decent person going to believe? America of course, not agroup of terrorist thugs who live in medieval ways.

After 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) over 6 years, mostly, but not all, from American weapons how hard is it to believe 140 civilians were killed by US forces in Afghanistan. The US warplanes made 13 passes over the villages dropping bombs and strafing [with cannon]; It doesn't matter what nation's pilots were flying them, or how good they were, innocent people are going to die.

In battles people die, and in battles with airplanes dropping bombs and strafing villages of mud buildings, innocents villagers die. It just terribly sad and tragic, but regrettably unavoidable.

The choice was War or No War. As the decision is for War, then if we disagreed we should blame the politicians not the soldiers, and we agreed we must accept the horrific cost of our decision.

Bingo... a bit of common sense :)