Needless Deaths of the Past...and Future?

HRW has dusted off a report from 1991 on "Needless Deaths in the Gulf War" and posted it on its Iraq background page. This excerpt from the report's introduction surely resonates with the current climate:

...U.S. and other allied spokespersons claimed at every turn that the effort to minimize damage to civilians had succeeded. Though occasionally acknowledging that some civilian casualties were inevitable, the impression was created by statement after statement and television image after image that, so far as the allied performance was concerned, it was a near-perfect war, with as little harm to civilian life and property as humanly possible.

This impression was reinforced by a deliberate policy on the part of the United States and its allies to manage the news of the war in a manner designed to suggest that all feasible precautions in fact had been taken to avoid harm to civilians. Restrictions placed on journalists attempting to cover the war and the selective presentation of information about the conduct of the war, in part through elaborately rehearsed military briefings, left the press unable to probe the extent of the precautions actually adopted. Parallel curbs on the foreign press imposed by Iraq exacerbated the difficulty of penetrating the veils that blocked the view of the actual conduct of the war.

Anyway, it might be worth the while to browse the report in order to brush up on what happened the last time we grappled with Saddam, and as a sort of conjecture of what might lie ahead. Or, as I noted yesterday, what may already be in progress. Who knows.