The US has bombed a village on the Somali / Kenyan border where, allegedly, a lot of al Qaida folk were. They used an AC130 gunship, so there's probably not much left of the village. Some civilians are dead, too, of course.

The Guardian (destroying morale and undermining the nation's will to win the war on towelheads, as always) reports the words of one father:

My four-year-old boy was killed in the strike. The plane was firing at other areas in Ras Kamboni. We could see smoke from the area. We also heard 14 massive explosions.

Aw, bleeding heart me. Can't make an omelette without, etc.

But what if that boy was a US citizen? Or from any European country? The bombing wouldn't have happened. Why not? Two possible explanations.

1. We value lives differently. An african boy's life (and many others) is worth sacrificing to our larger goals; an American life is not.

2. Those ordering the strikes are scared of their voters. Kill our own, and risk losing an election. (It's not Iraqi deaths that lost Bush Congress in November.)

These two are obviously connected: the majority of voters won't bat an eyelid if foreigners die under our bombs, as long as its not a ridiculous number.

The Haditha trial will prosecute eight US marines for murdering 24 people in total, including a mother and her three children. A picture of the four of them huddled together in death made its way around the troops' mobiles and laptops.

It seems terribly teenage of me to ask: it's bad to shoot civilians, but it's OK to drop bombs, knowing that x% of all bombs you drop DO kill x% of civilians (someone probably has a number on this somewhere). That's engaging under the rules of warfare, and so OK?

But again: if those x%, that statistically knowable quantity, were American or British, those bombs would not drop. This may be a partly a democratic failing, but that's where a democracy is supposed to work at its best: making collectively binding decisions when we know that the systemic, organic result would be a moral crime.

Having said that, I wonder what answer we'd get if the UK population was asked directly: do you think all lives have the same value? That's the problem with democracy: you can't trust people with it. They might make the wrong decisions.