More than 100,000 Iraqis have died since the war's end, very few at the hands of the Iraqi military. In Panama, too, we left behind a nation without a functioning economy, with thousands of people in poverty caused by the war.

It is a national blind spot. When the video bombs destroyed the video bunkers, we couldn't imagine that anyone actually got hurt. The military discovered the law of video gravity: Killing at a distance is possible, and is not as serious when it is backed by a more efficient chain of command.

When out troops left Iraq and Panama, so did our cameras. Our killings were thirdhand, and no Iraqi Nayirahs have yet appeared on CBS to recount the horror we left behind us.

THE LOGIC that reinforces the willingness to kill civilians while making war seem more clean and precise has seized hold of American military planning and made a hero of men like the "level-headed and astute chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Gen. Colin L. Powell.

The laudatory epithets of Army magazine aside, the administration's warriors are not the moral superiors of Sherman and Oppenheimer. They are the best that the warrior bureaucracy can produce and nothing more.

In practice, this means stupidities and double talk that would choke the honest among us. They are worth quoting from Army, the official mouthpiece of this crap. In Panama, they report, many PDF [Panamanian Defense Force] soldiers were "discarding their uniforms in an attempt to meld into the general population."

Imagine, trying to blend in to the general population of your own country. Well, the U.S. military wasn't going to let them get away, so it detained thousands of Panamanians, many for months, just to see if they were those wily PDF guys.

But at the same time this "mop-up" was going on, the U.S. Army was making sure that we knew just how dangerous the supposed general population is. In Panama City there was "sporadic sniping, widespread civil looting, and 'dignity battalions' that roamed the unoccupied portions of the city."

The sporadic sniping had been the ostensible reason for bombing El Chorillo. The "dignity battalions," like those tricky now-you-see-them-now-you-don't PDF members, "continued to pose a threat," although to whom or what except the occupiers is unclear.

And the "civil looting"? Surprise. Three days of riots gutted Panama City's small shops, destroying cockroach capitalism for the forseeable future and turning this stable if corrupt country into a nation quickly on its way to hard-core deprivation. The U.S. forces did not have orders to intervene to stop the riots, so they let them run their course.

The U.S. forces did apparently have orders to bring an end to the entire society that would have kept such riots from occurring: stop the police, round up all journalists (except those in USIA), leave enough of the city in ruin to make sure the only people on the commercial streets are looking to do some shopping without credit cards.

IN IRAQ, the situation was different, but guided by the same principles. As Army put it:

"With the relentless and continuous use of air power; the all-out armor, airborne and helicopter assault of the 101st Airborne division on 23 February; the clarity of the objective (drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait); the suddenness of the ground attack; the complete absence of compromise with Saddam's increasingly submissive peace proposals leading up to the decision to unleash the ground forces; and with the sweeping flanking movements and attacks through weak points; the President and the Joint Chiefs were clearly committed to the time-honored principles of war: mass, objective, surprise, maneuver, security, economy of force and simplicity."

Simplicity aside, this gargantuan sentence is about as clear as the objective in the Gulf War. See, they even repeat that objective in case it wasn't clear to you. How could it be unclear if it was so clear? Didn't they go to the trouble to print thousands of those little cards that listed, one through four, the reasons we were there?

And, before we forget, there are those "time-honored principles of war." The key one in the minds of the planners, even if it isn't included in the list, is "the complete absence of compromise." No retreat, baby, no surrender.