Another "precision attack," more dead children?

From Reuters:

U.S. aircraft bombed a house near the Syrian border before dawn on Monday in what the military said was a precision strike on an al Qaeda leader.

A local hospital doctor in the Iraqi town of Qaim said 40 people were killed and 20 wounded, many of them women and children, and a tribal leader said there were no guerrillas in the area.

A U.S. military spokesman said the precision bombing in Karabila, close to Qaim, was meant to avoid civilian casualties.

I suppose it's possible, as the Pentagon says, that locals are inflating civilian death figures under pressure from the insurgents. It's just as likely that the Pentagon is being deceptive, especially given its track record with body counts in past conflicts.

And to me this might be a bit of a tip-off:

... "The Americans started to bomb around Betha from after midnight (2100 GMT) until dawn," said a police officer, reached by telephone, who asked not to be named for his own security.

Not a single, "precision" strike (the U.S. military claim), but repeated bombings, from midnight to dawn.

The Reuters article appends this dry qualifier: "Independent verification of the casualties was not possible; the conflict has made it all but impossible for journalists to operate in the area most of the time." In terms of accurate reporting of the human cost of war, might this be the worst conflict ever?

This article calls to mind an piece in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists a few years back that looked at the munitions that were actually used in the First Gulf War.

One little-known fact is that of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped, only 6,520 tons—7.4 percent—were precision-guided ordnance, according to official Pentagon figures. Most of the weapons used were conventional, and very destructive, bombs and artillery. The military has not provided a breakdown of the weapons used but an air force spokesman has acknowledged that the "full complement of tactical munitions was employed throughout Desert Storm" and that he "wouldn't disagree with" a long list of destructive air-launched ordnance [including cluster bombs and fuel-air weapons] presented to him for confirmation that they were used in the war.

... The full extent of war damage in Iraq and Kuwait will not be known for some time, if ever. But much of what we know now challenges the assumption that the war was an antiseptic Nintendo game, an impersonal conflict with little "collateral" damage, or a contest dominated by selective, precision-guided munitions which discriminated between human beings in and out of military uniform. Large amounts of explosive tonnage were dropped in the region, over 90 percent in the form of weapons that were not precision guided-and we do not have accurate information on the success and reliability of precision-guided ordnance.

Read the whole article...

Different war, I know. Or is it? Will it be months or years—as it was following Bush I's folly—before anyone will be able to report on what kinds of bombs the United States has been using in this war?