I think ric thought Basra was a base in the UK and expected such an attack would have made big new. I think when people talk about the war in Iraq, a lot of times they imagine our (US) armed forces marching around in heavy combat gear mowing down farmers and peasants armed with AK-47s and pitchforks, and from time to time unarmed women and children.

The fact is there are casualties on both sides. Because of the "soft tactics" we are forced to resort to (for example we used "hard tactics" on Japan, this was effective and statistically minimized casualties, while if you didn't look at the statistics you would think the bombs we dropped killed more than "soft tactics" would have, while this is in fact not the case), we are loosing people all the time. A lot more of our kids are dying out there than would have with a few effectively dropped bombs, because this is considered too harsh by the popular opinion of the world. It is the difference between picking up little bit of confetti on the floor by hand and carefully sorting though it to make sure you are only picking up certain colored confetti, rather than taking the vacuum cleaner and sucking it all up. In Japan we vacumed up a small amount of confetti in two small areas, and in the end saved countless bits of confetti of every color, while in Iraq we are cautious to only pick up the red bits of confetti while loosing much more red confetti in the long run along with small amounts of every other color (women, children, news reporters, US and other foriegn troops).

I am not sure why I took off writing about the use of exessive force to minimize long tern casualties, it just kind of struck me in the moment. It is a huge morality question actually. Is it okay to sacrifice the lives of women and children for the sake of saving lives of enemy militants and your own troops?

Back on the topic:

Things like this mortar attack are happening all the time over there. I am amazed at how little of this is covered. It seems that it is completely over looked by the media.