Regrettable Precision

Having gone to all the trouble of securing a fig-leaf United Nations resolution to make decent their rampant peacekeeping, Daveybloke and his fellow knights-errant are doing everything else the same old way. A NATO missile has apparently killed Colonel Gaddafi's youngest son and three of his grandchildren, all three aged under twelve. The commander of the operation (named, with NATO's customary puckishness, Unified Protector) responded to accusations of attempted régime change by stating: "All Nato's targets are military in nature and have been clearly linked to the Gaddafi regime's systematic attacks on the Libyan population and populated areas. We do not target individuals." Therefore, the bombing of the Gaddafi grandchildren must have been a tragic accident, since after all "NATO is fulfilling its UN mandate to stop and prevent attacks against civilians with precision and care". NATO does not target individuals, but it refrains from doing so with such precision that the individuals it would be targeting (if it did target individuals, which manifestly it does not) are collaterally detrimented anyway, to the regret of all concerned. It appears that NATO has learned much the same lessons from the Iraq débâcle as Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives learned from their party's years in the wilderness: namely that there is no policy so brutal, incompetent or discredited that can't be sold again once the worst of the blood and excrement has been scraped off the public display.