When power fails, Op-Ed in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The deaths of Iraqi civilians in air strikes Friday carry a message for all of us. American power has limits. When we try to move beyond human capacity in conducting military operations, tragedy ensues.

All of the escalating losses -- American, allied and Iraqi -- are terrible. The opposition forces have chosen barbarous tactics, often targeting ordinary people. Despite some mistakes, American men and women continue to conduct themselves with great honor.

Both this country and its friends, should recoil at the TV images of women and children wheeled through hospital halls after U.S. air strikes. Iraqi authorities say dozens of civilians died.

For all our power, we don't have the means to secure Iraq. Maybe it is beyond any country's power to achieve the kind of liberation for another people that the Bush administration said it wanted.

Raids have been occurring in cities and towns where we have lost control. It is no consolation to realize that guerrilla forces likely chose to blend themselves into the population.

That is what happens in such a conflict. And the insurgents gain sympathy when the people become victims.

During the early stages of the Iraq campaign, American commanders could legitimately boast that precision bombing had limited civilian casualties. In this latest phase, the bombing results should provoke strong moral and practical concerns among Americans.

No one knows how many new terrorists have been created by civilian deaths. But the numbers will increase if such incidents continue.

The latest draft U.S. government report about the lack of Iraqi weapons of annihilation ought to deepen moral qualms about of tactics that cause civilian casualties. The war supplanted United Nations inspections and sanctions, which were working despite Saddam Hussein's desire to develop weapons of mass destruction.

We have never believed the Iraq invasion represented a just war. Even among Americans who view the war as proper, there is a strong sense of the need to use legitimate means of conducting the war.

A year and a half after the invasion of Iraq, the world's greatest power has turned its military force to bombing raids that bring civilian casualties. That's a failure, strategic, moral and human.