Was Killing Iraqi Children Worth It?

by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation blog, April 3, 2008

A snapshot of the opening scene in the U.S. invasion of Iraq provides an excellent insight into the immorality and horror of the entire operation, from start to whenever it finally finishes.

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, at the outset of the invasion the U.S. military dropped bombs on a palatial compound in which Saddam Hussein was hiding. The article states:

“But instead of killing the Iraqi dictator, they had killed Mr. Kharbit’s older brother, Malik al-Kharbit — the very man who had led the family’s negotiations with the C.I.A. to topple Mr. Hussein. The bombings also killed 21 other people, including children, and the fury it aroused has been widely believed to have helped kick-start the insurgency in western Iraq.”

Now, that episode has at least two important lessons.

First, prior to the invasion the popular mantra among U.S. officials and many private Americans was the need to “get Saddam.” But as we often pointed out here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, it was never going to be just a question of “getting Saddam.” Instead, it was going to be a question of how many Iraqi people, including children, U.S. forces would have to kill before they “got Saddam.”

The article doesn’t state whether the U.S. military had actual knowledge that there were innocent people, including children, in the compound that it bombed. But it is a virtual certainty that they did have such knowledge. After all, if their intelligence was sufficiently good to know that Saddam was hiding in the compound, it had to be sufficiently good to know that there were other people living in the compound, including children.

Thus, when the U.S. military dropped those bombs, it had to be with the full knowledge that they would be killing innocent people in the process, including the children. And even if they didn’t “know” that there were innocent people in the compound at the time they dropped the bombs, they knew that there were dropping the bombs in reckless disregard of whether there were innocent people there or not.

Continued . . .