Gas attack or missile attack: who suffers?

I sent the following webmail to Pres. Obama:

To paraphrase your words: “At what point do we say we need to confront actions that are violating our Constitution?”  “I would argue that when I see 400 children subjected to missiles, over 1,400 innocent civilians dying senselessly … the moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing.”


What guarantee do you have that each cruise missile will hit a military target?  What guarantee do you have that each military target will be occupied by those responsible for the gas attack?  Do you know how many civilian workers might be in each target?


A Tomahawk missile has a supposed accuracy of 10 meters.  Many streets in Damascus are less than 10 meters wide.  Will every military target be more than 10 meters from an apartment building?  How far will the debris from a missile explosion go?  How many missile explosions will bring neighboring apartments down?


Assume one apartment building has six floors, each floor has four apartments, each apartment has five residents.  That's 120 residents in a single apartment building.  Do you have any count of how many apartment buildings will be brought down by any misses or near misses or "non-misses"?


If the lethal blast range is 28 meters, then eight neighboring buildings could be brought down. That could mean over 900 residents could be killed by one Tomahawk missile.


If you send ten Tomahawks that could mean over 5,000 Syrians will die for your "message" to Assad.  That is a rather high-price for a message for the deaths of 300 or 1400 people.


Oh, by the way, have you considered the repercussions if any missile damages a mosque?


And if the gas attack was perpetrated by Islamic radicals, you really will have been suckered!

Just who is "The Media"?

I was in a University for Senior class on Social Justice this morning.  In one discussion, several people complained about "the media" not reporting many aspects of the news, for example, the number of civilian deaths in Iraq.

From my iPad, I searched the New York Times for "iraq civilian death" and received a list of over 31,000 articles.  I told the class this number and read the five headlines that appeared on my screen:

"A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq", 2010-10-22
"W.H.O. Says Iraq Civilian Death Toll Higher Than Cited", 2008-01-10
"Civilian Death Toll Reaches New High in Iraq, U.N. Says", 2008-11-23
"Civilian toll in Iraq increased in November"
"Civilian deaths in Iraq decrease significantly in one month"

The text shown for the last gives the lower figure as 922!

I did the same search for the Duluth News Tribune; nothing was shown from its entire archive.  If I searched for "Iraq death" I received 17 items.  One of these from 2006-11-10 gave an Iraqi Health Ministry estimate of 150,000 civilian war deaths.

But we shouldn't fault the DNT too much for this lack; it is not a national paper like the NYT and focuses more of its news on local and state events.

Many of these critics probably watch TV news a lot.  TV news has the burden of limited time; the news given on a half-hour broadcast (oops!  22 minutes excluding commercials) is about as much as you can read in a newspaper in five minutes or less.  If your "the media" is TV; is it any wonder that you miss a lot of in-depth coverage?