Word: civilian
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...often a matter of counting dots on a computer monitor. "With 6-in. resolution you get a pixel for each shoulder and one for the head," says John Pike, space intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "That's hardly enough even to differentiate between military and civilian...
...biggest civilian employer: 740,000 people. One out of every 160 employed Americans works at the Postal Service. People are 83% of our costs. Up to 14 different hands handle each piece of mail. We make a house call on every home and every business six days a week. We do it for 29 cents. Plumbers charge 58 bucks...
That line had some effect. For Saddam, the U.S. hit on the air-raid shelter that, Baghdad said, killed several hundred civilians was manna from propaganda heaven. For millions of people around the world, pictures of the broken bodies dug out of the rubble drove home the horror of a war that until then had seemed, at least on the TV screens, to be rather tame. One of the minor mysteries of the statement about potential withdrawal, in fact, was why Iraq diverted attention away from the civilian deaths before the reaction to them had quite built to a climax...
...quite sufficient to shake the governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria) that have made major troop commitments to the coalition. The U.S. and its European allies suffered little if any public backlash against the war. In retrospect, generals played down too much the inevitability of civilian deaths in any bombing campaign. But Westerners, while shocked, seemed to accept the explanations that the U.S. was not directly targeting civilians; that Saddam in contrast was deliberately putting them in harm's way by placing military installations in schools, homes and residential areas; and that much of the tragedy resulted because civilian...
...fact there is no conflict here between journalism and patriotism. Consider those dreadful pictures of civilian casualties. Civilian casualties are inevitable and arguably justified in fighting a just war. But in a democracy, people have the right to make that decision for themselves. And they can't decide if they don't know. Saddam's propaganda weapon of advertising civilian casualties could succeed only by persuading people that the war is a bad idea and ought to cease. But if that did happen -- if enough people were genuinely convinced -- then, indeed, the war ought to cease...