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.

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.

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?