The US Central Command combat surveillance video showed an Iraqi military vehicle hiding beneath a bridge. A smart bomb glided in from the right, destroying the vehicle but leaving the bridge intact.
Then came a surveillance picture of Iraqi military communications equipment atop a building within some 2,000-year-old ruins on the bank of the Tigris River, a historic site recognized by the UN.
In that case, American commanders decided not to strike.
These two targets, and the opposite decisions made as to whether to attack, illustrate the complicated task given to US war planners who are charged with destroying a government but not a country.
The military mission calls for coalition forces to topple President Saddam Hussein and rid his nation of any weapons of mass destruction that may be hidden there. At the same time, the war plan calls for leaving as much Iraqi infrastructure as possible standing to ease postwar reconstruction, and to minimize civilian deaths, as well as to quiet angry public opinion.
As the war enters its second week, however, military affairs experts ponder whether more indiscriminate bombing might, in the end, hasten victory and save the lives of US troops, and even spare more Iraqis the pain of a grinding ground war.
"We decided we would restrain the use of air power for reasons of humanity and world image," said Loren Thompson, an air power expert at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center here.
"We have imposed a burden on our campaign plan that may slow down victory and diminish the quality of the victory we achieve," he said.
US generals can ratchet up the violence delivered by air with just a command, Thompson noted, and they are expected to do so as US ground forces move to face Republican Guard troops encircling Baghdad.
The question is what measure of risks to civilian casualties and sensitive buildings like hospitals and schools will be considered acceptable in order to secure a speedier victory. This quandary has been placed upon US commanders by Saddam, who has ordered his forces arrayed in neighborhoods, even using hospitals as garrisons, according to Pentagon officials.
The mantra heard at almost every wartime press conference held by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or General Tommy Franks, the senior commander for the war, and his subordinates is that the US military will continue its efforts to exercise extreme prudence in targeting and attacks in order to minimize civilian deaths and damage to public works.
"We have a very, very deliberate process for targeting," said Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for the US Central Command, during a briefing in Qatar yesterday.
"It's unlike any other targeting process in the world. It takes into account all science. It takes into account all capability. And we do everything physically and scientifically possible to be precise in our targeting and also to minimize secondary effects, whether it's on people or on structures," he said.
But the second-guessing is well underway.
"Selective bombing is wrongheaded; perpetuating the regime causes more casualties, certainly among Iraqi troops, than `collateral damage' would," wrote Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a commentary published by the Los Angeles Times yesterday.
Even as some military experts in the academic world suggest more vicious bombing be considered, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was only the latest international leader to serve notice that the US will suffer far-reaching consequences if it starts hitting targets that kill civilians and destroys infrastructure.
Annan's comments came as US officials reacted cautiously to reports that a marketplace in Baghdad had been damaged by an explosion that left 14 people dead.
At the Pentagon, Major General Stanley McChrystal said American forces had not aimed any ordnance at that neighborhood in the Iraqi capital. While officials could not absolutely rule out an errant American bomb or missile, they also said the explosion might have been caused by Iraqi antiaircraft fire falling back to earth or a faulty Iraqi missile.
"We do know for a fact that something landed in the Shaab district," McChrystal said. "But we do not know if it was US or Iraqi. We do know that we did not target anything in the vicinity."
Proponents of air power have argued, almost since the invention of the modern warplane, that victory could be achieved through the air by attacking enemy leaders, communications and the "centers of gravity" that prop up their governments.
For this war with Iraq, the air campaign had been designed to open the offensive and set the stage for the ground attack. But that sequence had to be reversed after US President George W. Bush ordered the surprise missile strike last Wednesday in an effort to kill Saddam and top Iraqi leaders.
McChrystal said that since the war began, more than 600 cruise missiles and 4,300 other precision-guided munitions have been launched at Iraq. But a week into the war, air power experts acknowledge that the Pentagon's current bomb and missile campaign failed to deliver a quick knockout blow -- though that could still happen.
In recent days, the air campaign shifted from mostly pre-planned strikes against leadership targets and command or communications centers to attacks on Iraq's forces in the field, specifically the Republican Guard divisions.
Any analysis of the air campaign by anyone outside the most senior military commands and civilian leadership is, naturally, based on a hodgepodge of television images, scattered eyewitness reports from the front and a sense of history.
"Many of the effects of air operations are cumulative," said Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who directed the Air Force's definitive study of the first war against Iraq.
"At any given time, you may think you're not doing very much but, suddenly, when the right pressures come together, the other guy collapses," Cohen said.
But he cautioned that the public's view of the air war is "opaque, at best."
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