It was the same thing with Vietnam, every president saying that they'd withdraw the troops real soon. Posted by: Non Nato at July 19, 2008 06:01 PM There are more PR problems in being an imperialist these days. You have to be more subtle about it. Take carpet-bombing. It's a lot harder to do without even our pathetic media noticing something. So they use "precision weaponry" and the death toll is still high, but not like it was in Vietnam or Korea, at least not from that particular cause and they can pretend they're doing all they can to keep the civilian toll down, short of, you know, not bombing anyone. The US bombing campaign in Korea is one of the almost totally forgotten episodes in mass civilian killing. By some guesstimates Korea lost more civilians to aerial bombing than any other country in history. If they'd totally flattened Baghdad in 2003 as we totally flattened numerous towns in Korea, North and South, even our embedded press might have noticed it was a funny way to liberate people. I just had maybe my 500th argument about Israel's human rights record at another blog and the usual defense came up--in this case, that Israel could have killed a lot more than just "hundreds" of civilians in Lebanon in 2006. Yeah, they could, and they did, back in 1982, but apparently there's more pressure not to do that now, at least not with bombs. Posted by: Donald Johnson at July 19, 2008