PANAMA AND IRAQ solidified the new total war strategy in the hearts and minds of Americans. The best example of that solidification is the strange trajectory of the Fuel Air Explosive (FAE) documented by Michael E. Kinsley '72 in The New Republic.

FAEs are bombs that are filled with gasoline. Near the end of their flight, they let out a fine mist of gas behind them, for, say, a mile. Then, they blow and set all that mist on fire. The explosive effect is the equivalent of a small nuclear weapon, without the fallout, and the bombs suck all the nearby oxygen out of the air.

It seemed at first that the Iraqis had these things, and were perfectly willing to use them, the bastards. As The New York Times wrote last January 24, "Hussein might be planning to use an even more horrific weapon, never before employed in combat, known as the fuel air bomb, which spreads a circle of fire."

Well, it eventually came out that the U.S. had some, too, but that the bombs were so powerful, we would only use them if the Iraqis used chemical weapons or FAEs (thus not use them as "diabolically" as the Iraqis planned to).

And then finally, it was the U.S. who ended up using all of them. Part of strategy was to blow up massed Iraqi troops by setting FAEs off over their defensive oil-filled trenches. Kinsley writes: "On February 23, the day the ground war started, The Washington Post reported about this weapon that at first we didn't have, then would never use except against a chemical attack, then were using to clear mine fields and pack down sand: 'All of the front-line Iraqi troops have been subjected to extensive bombardment, including many detonations of BLU-82 bombs, containing fuel-air explosives.'" It was firestorms all over again. "But by then, who cared?"

TO BELIEVE, as many neo-liberals (and General Schwarzkopf) do, that the war in the Gulf was unfortunate, but that once we were in, we should have made sure we fought it to its end, is backwards. The problem in the Gulf was not that faced with the "highway of death," with the visible artifact of what we destroyed, we failed to finish the job.

"We" didn't want to face the destruction at all, true. But that can lead two ways. Either it means we stopped short (as Newsweek claims in a recent cover story), or it means that we have to absolutely destroy everything so there is no evidence to see. Vaporizing bodies, burying them alive, plowing them with steam shovels into mass graves, sweeping them under the carpet bombing--that is the problem.

That problem is what makes Desert Storm and Just Cause strategically similar, even if their (clear?) objectives are so different. It is not the case that we no longer fight just wars or that we fight just wars unjustly. It is that modern wars require us to act unjustly because there is no half way to kill someone. Our military fights the only way it knows how, and our society thinks like its strategists: If it offends thee, "cut it off--then kill it."

Once again, the U.S. kicks some serious Third World ass.

Those video bombs didn't really hurt anyone, did they?