I had a strange job during Gulf Two. I had to keep the BBC website alive.

Or at least the BBC homepage, bbc.co.uk. It was – along with Friends eeceunited, Napster and AOL – one of the UK’s most popular websites in 2003.

Fortunately the task didn’t require much work.

If demand for the site got to a certain level I had to break into the HTML, turning the site into a simpler version of itself which would load more quickly. If the site got hacked somebody would call me up and tell me what to do. I was pretty scared of this eventuality, but it didn’t happen. Instead I watched events unfold on various TV screens.

As it was a night shift, I stayed in a hotel round the corner from Bush House – sleeping during the day. Just me and lots of screens all night. Frankly, not much to do but watch the screens.

I noticed the repetition of the same few successful ‘target strikes’, I got to know them like an iconic sporting highlight. They think it’s all over.

It was a bit like a computer game. It was exciting. The targets were always a military vehicle in a desert: nothing ever missed.

I was curious about this; at one time there were six released videos. But there had been several sorties. What happened to these?

There must have been missiles that missed, targets which were located in towns:  a missile hit a building but damage another building which isn’t the target. But it was always a cross hair direct hit.

And the same time, they were talking of the thousands of missions that were being carried out. And I realised that the ratio of ‘missions carried out’ to ‘released footage’ is usually several thousands to one.

It wasn’t deliberate bias on the behalf of the duty news editor in charge of a particular bulletin. Anybody in that position would have to show the best available images. But the cumulative effect was inevitably misleading. Wide shots of the strikes in built up areas, close ups of the successful hits of isolated targets.

There were no outright lies, as you get with Russian and Iranian state television.

But what people saw on television, and therefore how they perceived the conflict, but was based on a highly edited selection of footage. The editors were the military: they chose what we got to see. They didn’t bother with a bloopers reel.

The decision to bomb or not is not one to be taken lightly. It is grave. You are making a decision to kill at least some people who are innocent. You would think the best available information should be used. You would think that this decision could be one which transcends party politics.

(It’s more accurate to say ‘the decision whether to join more fully in US-led bombing campaign which has been going on for the last year.’ France, Qatar and even Canada have been involved in strikes, and the UK’s role has been to support strikes with things like reconnaissance and air to air refuelling. You could argue that an extensive bombing campaign should  have brought Isis to their knees, rather than seen a period of unprecedented growth in the organisation.

Since Russia got involved, several hundred non combatants have been killed directly in bombing, but several thousand more civilians have been killed by the Assad regime. Russia still backs Assad. It’s very hard to verify exact figures, but it is acknowledged that US strikes have killed many more civilians than Isis since strikes began: more than 100 children amongst them)

In this context, the name-calling by certain sections of the media and the leaders we pay to govern us is an embarrassment.

The ‘consensus’ on Corbyn, according to the Telegraph, is that he is an ‘unelectable embarrassment’, and the party is gripped by some sort of madness or delusion. His supporters? An ‘online subspecies’.

Wow. Whatever you think of the guy, and his solutions to solving the world’s problems, it seems pretty vitriolic. People who think differently to you are not even human any more, and mentally unstable. You are either on the team or so worthy of contempt as to be no longer a person.

This is the opposition to the strikes – belittled and idiotic, a loony fringe. The photographs of him are carefully selected too, just like the air strikes. They capture him looking rabid, or ridiculous. It’s a version of the truth. In cartoons he is even worse. He is not on the team. His ‘Nuclear armageddon? No thanks.’ stance marks him out as  dangerous

Instead we have the patriotism, the flags: in fact the colours the shapes on the flag. People will go to war for colours and shapes, or rather these days support other people to do so.

When the bombing starts, it gets worse. I remember people cheered on the bus, when they announced the start of Gulf One in 1990. All sixth form kids. Did they have combat experience? A sound knowledge of foreign affairs and the complicated geo political tensions affecting the region?

No. They had been whipped up to a fervour by the media, waving the flag on their behalf. Colours and shapes. The bad guy. Saddam Hussein is evil they said. But we provided them with the weapons, I explained to largely uninterested peers. [This continues to be a factor admittedly]. We trained his troops and literally sold him some of his weapons. Maybe a more long term solution would be to not do this? And why are you cheering when you know that innocents will die?

Albeit innocents who look different to you, and eat different food.

We learnt new words. Human shields. Collateral damage. Friendly fire. They launched sneak attacks, we launched surprise attacks. They cowered, we used stealth.

Now we hear about ‘targeted bombing’. This was used as the reason why this bombing would work this time around as opposed to the other bombings which didn’t work and which killed innocent people and bred more terrorists. Targeted bombing sounds so much better than plain old bombing, but every bomb ever dropped has been aimed at a target in some way.

I hear there are Jihadis in Brussels: if targeted bombing works, why not bomb Belgium? Because we know we would accidentally kill some innocent Belgians, I suspect.

Of course we are ‘better’ at bombing: technology has improved since Britain first bombed Iraq.

(Britain first bombed Iraq in 1920. 100,000 British and Indian troops had been involved in a costly ground war; they adopted a policy called ‘aerial policing’ for reasons of cost. It didn’t really work.)

We don’t drop bombs over the side of a biplane any more, but we do make mistakes.

It didn’t last long on the news bulletins last week, but the report on the US bombing of the MSF clinic where my friend Declan worked is very revealing. And depressing. Human error and bad systems, basically.

It’s a reminder that ‘targeted air strikes’ is an aspirational phrase.

We get to hear about the bombing of an MSF hospital because there were so many international staff involved; MSF has a media team and people lobby in its behalf. If they had been poor Afghanis, would there have even been an enquiry?

This is the kind of data which should be discussed, for the right choice to be made. But we have politicians talking instead.

You may still feel that bombing is the way forward, and I understand that view. It may be the best solution.

That I personally feel that it isn’t, is less important; politicians and those who influence them should come to make this decision based on facts and evidence, away from hysteria.

Away from language which George Orwell, in 1946, described as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

He went for the political left as well as much as the political right in this regard, as well as advertisers and politicians; but he reserved a special vitriol for those who mask the reality of war with language designed to confuse.

‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink…

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.’

Defenceless villages like Idlib. Never heard of it? Bombs hit a crowded marketplace there on Sunday. At least 40 dead.

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