An Airstrike a Day Won't Keep Insurgents at Bay
It might mean fewer dead Americans, though.
The old adage about warfare—that it's easy to kill people, hard to kill a particular person—is doubly true of aerial warfare. And in counterinsurgency warfare, the consequences are counterproductive.
This leads to the critical question: How, in recent months, are the Iraqi people perceiving the U.S. military presence? How are they gauging the chance of success? Do they welcome the troops, or do they want them to leave?
More on this tomorrow.
Correction, Oct. 25, 2007: The column originally stated that aircraft flew overhead and bombed the building. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of the book, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com. Follow him on Twitter.
Photograph of Sadr City by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty. Photograph of F-16 in Iraq on Slate's home page by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.