This got me thinking of Afghanistan and drone bombings, which tend to break up a good party just when it’s getting started:

In vain, [Colonel John Paul] Vann urged Saigon’s leaders to engage the enemy selectively, rather than to bomb and shell whole communities from which a few shots had come. He urged that a policy of terrorizing the population into submission must fail, and that indiscriminate air and artillery bombardment was not only killing scores of innocents for every communist, but permanently alienating the population… Vann tried… to pass tidings of such happenings, and to warn of their consequences, to the American command in Saigon… The United States military was determined to use its greatest asset, firepower, to fight the war of its own choice in Vietnam… Here was the fundamental betrayal: America committed itself to deny Vietnam to communism, but displayed from the outset a cynical indifference to the cost of such a policy for those whom it professed to wish to save. If this has become a familiar weakness of American foreign policy in modern times, Vietnam was its first manifestation.

From a profile of Vann in Max Hastings’ Warriors. Of course, in Iraq and Vietnam we haven’t done more than pay lip service to the idea that we’re helping anybody over there. We’re there for our own purposes, right or wrong.

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