CBS News reports:
Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter south of Baghdad, and the two pilots were rescued with minor injuries, the military said Tuesday.
The OH-58D Kiowa Attack helicopter was brought down by ground fire on Monday. After an Apache helicopter rescued the two pilots, a U.S. warplane dropped two 500-pound, laser-guided bombs on the downed craft to destroy it, the military said in a statement.
This incident reveals that our military is clearly not in control of the situation in Iraq. First, one of our attack helicopters is shot down by ground fire. Second, our military felt it was necessary to destroy the chopper from the air rather than put forces on the ground to secure it. Third, nothing is said about dropping 500-pound LGBs on the insurgents that shot it down. More than four years into a war against a backward country the size of California our military has to take desperate actions to rescue downed pilots and keep an aircraft from falling into enemy hands. And they’re not even certain who the enemy is.
Most likely, the reason they didn’t drop bombs on the insurgents is that by the time help arrived on the scene the insurgents had disappeared — into the civilian population. This underscores the problem with the situation in Iraq: We don’t have the conviction or courage to do what has to be done to control the country, and the principal reason we don’t is that we shouldn’t be there attempting to control the country in the first place.
Taking control of Iraq will require extreme measures like we used in World War II. In Germany we devastated entire cities with our bombing campaigns, killing most of the civilian men, women and children living there. In Japan we destroyed two cities with atomic bombs. Then it was generally believed that without those measures the loss of our freedom and independence as a nation, if not most of our lives, was both likely and imminent. This is not the case with Iraq at this point in time. If Iraq ever becomes a direct threat to our country we can attack them then with the conviction and courage to do what is necessary to neutralize that threat.