People dying for no strategic benefit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/16/jock-stirrup-iraq-evidence-failure

More great material from Jock. Seriously, everything this guy says is absolute gold. Remember when a few more civilians were blown up in Helmand some time ago? No? Me neither. But Jock comes out with this beauty:

"This operation … is not about battling the Taliban, it is about protecting the local population, and you don't protect them when you kill them"

Is Chris Morris secretly controlling his mouth from a tiny remote control lodged surreptitiously in the pituitary gland? He is called SIR JOCK STIRRUP. As the gasp of obsoletist irony falls way off the map of southern Iraq, what is left of this actual and blankly honest, utilitarian rhetoric that can be of any use? "You don't protect them when you kill them". It is the sufficiently self-admonishing and repulsively bureaucratically correct language of military PR, impacted to its absurdist zenith, that injects the notion of foreign death into the invading population to produce the desired level of middle-class frowning and sighing whilst simultaneously wiping out any question of the validity of the military presence in the first place, indeed, the validity of military presence itself .

Foreign death is our mediation of state-instructed murder that attempts to bear no resemblance to innocent death from terrorist attacks in the West, removing death even as a right of the invaded population and placing it squarely in the sights of the precision bombers which are the grisly chrome hallmarks of modern abstracted warfare.