AS IRAQUIS STRUGGLE to rebuild an economy bombed back to the 11th century, as tens of thousands of Panamanians remain homeless two years after American planes bombed them out, politicians and Pentagon planners have begun considering new ways to drive Saddam Hussein from power, and America has failed to recognize that short video wars kill thousands of people when the bombs are dropping, and thousands more after they stop.

We have yet to come to grips with the fact that these last two good wars, effective as they may have been in imposing American policies, were not clean. When they happened, these wars killed people in horrible ways. After they happened, the wreckage of war continued to kill people in horrible ways. Obsessed with Iraqi atrocities and Manuel Noriega's wickedness, we fired on and forgot the civil societies next to the bunkers.

WHEN THE GRAND ARMY of the Republic and General Sherman perfected total war on the way to the beach, they executed a fundamental shift in friend-foe relations. The realization that whole societies and not just armies go to war made societies legitimate targets. Supply lines, economic resources (crops, farms, mines), communications networks--all of them helped the enemy, and they all needed to be cut off if the war was ever going to end.

World War II consolidated total war theory in the minds of strategists everywhere in the form of strategists bombing. First used by the Spanish Fascists, by the end of the war it was standard Allied policy. "Secondary targets," i.e. city populations, were subject to hundreds of sorties a day, and the idea of dropping a megaton of explosives on a city became an achievable goal. The black skies over Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and Tokyo--choked with bombladen planes--were mirrored on the ground by raging firestorms that swept through the cities killing up to 100,000 people in a single day.

When the atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was with the firm knowledge that massive destruction--the extermination of society--was a legitimate mode of military action. With 200,000 dead Japanese in the first week, the bombs brought victory.

But strategic bombing did not stop its progress with World War II. In fact, it can't. The amazing thing is that even with a century of total war behind us, we continually have to re-legitimize the decision to kill 'em all and let God sort'em out.

IT USED TO BE that total war was a way of punishing the opposing society for trying to mess with the best or a way of scaring them into surrendering before we killed everyone (which we can do, you know, city by city, town by town, every last fucking one of 'em, if it comes to that). But in Panama and Iraq, those reasons made no sense.

In Panama, where we supposedly intervening on behalf of a duly elected government, a majority of the people hated the guy we were after, so killing them would be counterproductive.

In Iraq, where a lot of them did support the guy we were after, no amount of civilian death would convince Saddam to surrender--he'd just let 'em all die, and he didn't care about the Young Americans for Freedom pledge to nuke Iraq into the world's largest glass coffee table. His bunker, after all, had a heated swimming pool. (Odd that we know all about the swim-up bar in that bunker and we have no idea what Bush's looks like).

Fortunately, high technology came to the aid of those in the Pentagon who still believe that the only surrender comes from a society on its knees and begging for mercy. All the techno-babble that gushed out of USSOCOM and Riyadh and Washington like oil from a wrecked refinery convinced us that "support networks" had to be hit, and that we were hitting them precisely: power stations, highways, food storage locations, hospitals.

Of course "support networks" support civilians as well, and all this high-tech bombing guarantees that not only military leaders but everyone "collocated" with them gets blown up, starved out, cut off and killed. This is the lie of "collateral damage."

When Stealth fighters and B-52s levelled the slum area of El Chorillo in Panama--creating 30,000 instant homeless and uncounted dead--when F-15Es and Tomahawks tore up the suburbs of Baghdad, they got away with it. We believed that if the military could have, they would have avoided these folks, and that if those folks lived so close to support networks, they obviously supported them.

KILLING IS A QUESTION of proximity. Before the war started last year, a Kuwaiti girl, identified only by the name Nayirah, testified before the House Human Rights Committee that she had seen Iraqi soldiers rip Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and throw them on the cold floor to die. It was a horrifying story, and according to 60 Minutes, President Bush quoted it at least 10 times as a reason to go to war.

Recent investigation by a number of journalists has revealed that, as far as anyone can determine, the incident never happened. Nayirah is the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and was coached in her story by public relations executives hired by the Kuwaiti government.

Of course, Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait did take place. But the direct, compelling nature of Nayirah's emotional story has mitigated the atrocities our Army created in Iraq and Panama. There probably aren't enough incubators in Iraq, and the few they have were without power for weeks.