Saturday, November 24, 2012

Precise Weapons Kill Civilians Too - Peter Hart

Calling airstrikes that kill civilians more often than fighters "precise"–well, perhaps there's a more precise word than that.

As a general rule, it'd be better if media accounts of war did not stress the surgical precision of the weapons being used. It's a fixture of U.S. reporting on U.S. wars, but the same rhetoric is used when U.S. allies, like Israel, are dropping bombs.

According to the Palestinians Centre for Human Rights (11/19/12), 87 Palestinians had been killed, 57 of them civilians in the last round of fighting. Another tally finds that 72 percent of the casualties are civilians.

It could be argued, as defenders of Israeli military attacks have done before, that this ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths is more humane than recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But calling airstrikes that kill civilians more often than fighters "precise"–well, perhaps there's a more precise word than that.

The full article is available here