I wrote this back in 2003, during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in search of imaginary “weapons of mass destruction.” Almost none of the details would need to be changed to apply it to the current (2026) attack on Iran, so I have not changed them The biggest difference is that the C130. gunships have not been used in Iran, and that back then only the US used war drones, whereas now the Iranians have based much of their tactics on suicide drones built in their own country as well as first-person view drones from a variety of sources. And that we have not, as of this writing (31 March 2026) sent troops into the country.
The repeated insistence that our “precision munitions” and “highly-trained soldiers” strike only insurgent targets in Iraq has gone largely unchallenged by a complacent press since the invasion in 2003. The War has become routine for us, and the assurance that we are the good guys a daily necessity. There’s certainly something soothing about the word “precision” in this usage–it makes one think of well-oiled shiny machinery, gears meshing with serene and silent efficiency, input and output, predetermined purposes and perfect outcomes–all implemented with a sort of polished anonymity that we watch from a distance, not allowed to touch the levers but eager to enjoy the product thereof. That product, we are told, is peace, justice, and the American way, delivered to the huddled masses of Iraq not by Superman but by übermenschen in clean leather boots wielding machine guns, cannons, rockets, drones, and bombs against the Agents of Evil.
These agents of evil are extremely easy to identify, at least in the stories fed to the morning papers and the evening news: their most telling characteristic is that they are dead.
Much as injury under torture proved one’s guilt in ancient Europe–the innocent would of course be sustained by God Himself–so the death of an Iraqi at the muzzle of an American gun proves his (or her) commitment to the Insurgency. The oft-repeated information that our soldiers are trained to tell the Black Hats from the White Hats, and most especially the reiterated asseverations that our “precision munitions” never miss their target, and that our intelligence-gathering never assigns them an innocent target by mistake, have become standard assumptions that implicitly support the contention of guilt by demise.
I can’t help but be dubious about this, and not just because of the absurd assumption of technical and moral perfection that is the necessary premise of such statements. It is the blatant irrationality of them that leads me to believe we denizens of the US are engaged in a willful self-deception in this matter. Among the munitions we are using in this war are 25mm repeating cannons fired from Bradley Fighting Vehicles; 105mm howitzers; 120mm tank guns; 20, 25, 30, and 40mm repeating cannons fired from a variety of helicopters and airplanes (including the AC-130s which fire from a very high altitude); a whole array of rockets of various sizes; and bombs ranging from cluster bombs–inherently and intentionally imprecise–to 500 and even 2,000 pound monsters. Now, even if you assume that the guy who tipped you off to a safe house is really a noble democrat risking his life for the cause, and not some bitter clan or business rival using the US forces to snuff out a competitor for him–even if insurgents have put a red and yellow “Death to the Great Satan America” sign on their safe house and you know beyond any doubt that it is a legitimate target–there is no way a single 2,000 pound bomb, even if perfectly guided, constitutes a “precision weapon.” Let alone four of them, as were recently used in a safehouse bombing.
A 2,000 pound bomb dropped in the middle of the block where I and close to a thousand others live would destroy most of the buildings and kill most of the residents. An AC-130 firing its 1800-round-per-minute Gatling gun across our block would wreak nearly similar destruction. Nervous 22-year-olds blasting cannons and firing rifles at anything that moves in a given area, while not quite so effective at wholesale destruction as air attacks, would deliver indiscriminate death in retail proportions quite readily. Reliable sources estimate that only about 1/5th of the folks we kill are actual insurgents–maybe fewer.
Clearly it is immoral and evasive to put our faith in “precision munitions.” In fact, the very use of that name constitutes a lie. Perhaps we would do better to refer to them as “redefinition munitions,” since the effect they have is to convert anyone they kill into an insurgent.
They also convert all the dead one’s relatives into actual, living, fighting, hating insurgents.
Quite a machine we’ve built there, isn’t it? War manufacturing more war in an escalating feedback cycle. That is the grim semantics that underlies the grammar of the gun in this latest New World Order.
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This is one of 24 essays, editorials, and articles from my collection, Our Own Day Here.
Rick Risemberg
Crow Tree Books 