The Kinetics Of Metrics

On Neocon Propaganda Radiation's 'Morning Edition', Ga-Ga-Guy Raz-amataz gave a curious and semi-maddening/semi-interesting report today about the Baghdad base airport ('second busiest in the world'). On one side he was doing his typical gosh-golly-gee-whiz-drooling-
marveling over military hardware in action, and on the other, he was at least showing the extent of what is going on at this particular airport on a daily basis. It was actually informative! Also, in a few instances, Raz actually seemed to distance himself (for once) from the seduction of the military show-offs (i.e. stressing the quotes around the term 'surge'), and letting the one military man he interviews show his true colors. By that I mean: when the officer talks about bombing, he notes that innocent Iraqis are often killed or injured. When he says, 'and we're sorry about that', he does so with a smile and almost a chuckle, like a little kid who's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Life is cheap in Iraq, especially for the non-combatant cannon fodder caught in 'kinetic' activities. In a roundabout way, I'm grateful to Raz for playing that brief interview. Even a contemptible enterprise such as war can have touches of humanity, but when you run a high-tech, mechanized machine where the principal product is industrial-strength bombing, and for every 'insurgent' you take out, 2-3 non-combatants are either killed or injured, humanity sinks to a new low.