Once there was a president in the Oval Office who understood the ramifications of killing innocent civilians abroad, even for an operation that might appear on its face to advance American interests. This commander-in-chief once shunned a sweeping military response to a terrorist killing of a U.S. Navy sailor because, as his highly respected biographer later noted, the president told his aides "that killing civilians in a strike against terrorists would be 'an act of terrorism itself.'"

That happened in 1985, and the president was Ronald Reagan, the man that Sarah Palin and John McCain have practically nominated for sainthood during their rallies and their TV debate shtick in 2008. But Palin and McCain have in fact dishonored Reagan, and all the leaders from both parties who have come before them, with their cavalier attitude toward how America treats other people around the globe, and how other people should perceive us. We see this in their vicious and petty high school pep rally approach to politics -- where chants of "drill baby drill" seem to be morphing dangerously closer to "kill baby kill" every passing day.

The once noble idea that U.S. military actions that kill innocents as collateral damage are a thing to be minimized and ideally avoided altogether is now a wussy concept for those arugula-eating tire-inflating wimps, now that we're in the glorious new era of American "shock and awe."

And so Palin has made a big deal -- in a soundbite the McCain campaign is recycling in a TV commercial -- about some comments that Barack Obama made last year against the way that we're fighting the war in Afghanistan. In Palin's recent words: 

"Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians." Palin insisted that "such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause."

First of all, you'll be shocked, shocked to learn that Obama's actual remark on Afghanistan was taken way out of context. Here's what he really said:

"We've got to get the job done there," Obama said. "And that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there."

In other words, Obama's concerns are all about how to "get the job done" over there -- which seems to contradict Palin and McCain's cartoonish portrayal of the Democratic candidate as someone who doesn't believe in U.S. "victory" abroad, although I guess you can see why it's hard for them to understand when a leader doesn't use their exact pep-rally lingo. And as this excellent analysis in the Guardian notes, Obama's words were anything but "untrue" -- at the time he said them, U.S. forces and our allies were killing civilians, albeit inadvertently, at a higher rate than the militants we are fighting in Afghanistan.

And that was last year. So far in 2008, the issue of collateral damage and innocent civilian deaths in Afghanistan has grown much worse -- much of that tracing back to a strategy that's hampered by a lack of manpower, which is tied up in John McCain and George W. Bush's surge in Iraq.

Indeed, the utter vapidity of Palin's comments that any comment about Americans killing civilians in warfare are automatically "untrue" was rendered even more ridiculous by this sad story today out of Afghanistan:

WASHINGTON — An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.

The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.

The investigator, Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan of the Air Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had asserted, one of the military officials said.

This is one incident, and the facts are still very much in dispute. The U.S. military says the target was a Taliban compound, and if that's so it shows how hard it is to avoid this kind of tragedy in modern warfare. That doesn't mean the problem of civilian deaths shouldn't be taken quite seriously, and thus brushed off with embarrassing pep-rally bravado.

Most importantly, killing innocent civilians is morally wrong, period, and what had happens it should be the subject of mourning, not baseless denial and an avenue for political ridicule; you'd think even a pit-bull hockey mom would have a little more human empathy, especially when the Afghan people are our allies that Palin and McCain so much say they want to deliver freedom to.

But beyond that, avoiding civilian deaths is also so critical to that victory over there that Palin and McCain talk so much about; every needless death creates more hatred toward America and our allies, and drives new converts to anti-U.S. terrorism. And that totally undermines our strategy abroad -- it ultimately puts more U.S. citizens and soldiers at greater risk, including Palin's own son, now fighting in Iraq along with the sons of John McCain and Joe Biden.

And Palin's political abuse of the civilian casualty issue is disrespectful to our own military leaders, who have asked for more ground troops in Afghanistan so that we don't have to use so much airpower, a situation that's more dangerous for our soldiers as well as for innocent Afghans. I thought a McCain-Palin (or is it Palin-McCain these days?) administration was going to be all about respect for our military leaders and listening to what they have to say. Very sad.

The  problem of civilian casualties is -- at least back here in the "reality-based world" -- just too sober and serious to get those war whoops and whistles at your Sunbelt cheerleading competitions, too easy to lump into an evil effort to demonize Barack Obama as "that one." Even Ronald Reagan -- despite his many flaws as president --understood the gravity of the issue. Have we really fallen this far, this fast in just one short political generation?