Matthew Yglesias asks why we keep on acting like a kinder, gentler form of warfare is even possible:
Early this week, downtown Washington, D.C., played host to a nuclear-security summit that occasioned a lot of frustrating road closures for those of us who live here. On the stretch of New York Avenue right by my office, National Guard vehicles would sporadically move in to block traffic from entering the street, the better to facilitate the passage of motorcades. And Monday evening, one such multi-ton truck hit and killed Constance Holden, a 68-year-old Science magazine correspondent, as she was riding her bicycle. In a bizarre response, the National Guard assured a local TV station reporter that “we will look at the video to make sure the pedestrian didn’t run into the truck as it was moving.”
Separately on Monday came the news that American soldiers in Afghanistan shot at a civilian bus in an incident “which killed as many as five civilians and wounded 18.” Disparate events, to be sure, but the former casts the latter in a different light, and both challenge the notion that the counterinsurgency-era American military is really engaged in a kinder, gentler form of warfare or, indeed, that such an approach is even plausible.
