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April 16, 2002 12:25 p.m. The B-52 Smear Supporters of Israel are creating collateral damage — the good name of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

n their zeal to defend Israeli actions in Jenin, some supporters of Israel are creating collateral damage — the good name of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The frequently repeated argument, on TV and in print, is that if the U.S. had been confronted with the same situation as the Israelis in Jenin — entrenched fighters in a heavily urbanized environment — the U.S. would have trotted out the bombers, just as we did in Afghanistan.

The implication is that the U.S., with its taste for air power, doesn't care as much about avoiding collateral damage and indiscriminate killing as the Israelis, who are willing to slog it out slowly house-by-house.

But the U.S. used B-52's only on Taliban front lines, where the huge strikes would be sure to hit soldiers. Ditto for the "daisy cutters," which we never dropped in the middle of Mazar-e Sharif.

We went to agonizing lengths to try to verify the accuracy of our targets in situations where we might be mistaking civilians for combatants. Here is a Washington Post account of the interplay between special-forces spotters on the ground (Team 555) and the pilots above:

Team 555's Air Force representative, a Special Operations combat controller from the 720th Special Tactics Group, taught the team how to call in close air support using binoculars, a laser target designator, Global Positioning System devices and other equipment. But with a 15,000-foot minimum altitude imposed on pilots for their safety, it was sometimes impossible for pilots in the cockpits to see what the team saw from the ground. Some would fly near the target, use their own binoculars to peer down, and talk about what they saw with the Special Forces team members.

"The general lay of the land, it's brown and dusty mud," said J.T [a spotter]. "So a lot of the lower fighting positions, they really couldn't see. It's really hard to pick up the contrast, or the lack of it. They'd say, 'I see a city. I see a town.' I would say, well no, you see a cluster of five buildings. In one of these buildings you'll see a cluster of vehicles. While they may look like Toyota Land Cruisers, they are used to move troops and ammunition. This area here is all bad guys."

Some pilots refused to drop munitions if they weren't convinced. But, [Special Forces veteran Tom] Rosenbarger said, his Air Force colleagues adapted quickly, especially after he sneaked them copies of initial bomb damage assessment reports showing ample amounts of military equipment destroyed in "villages" occupied by Taliban forces.

So, I really doubt that the U.S. would have indiscriminately wiped out blocks and blocks of, say, Kandahar from the air had we faced a Jenin-like situation there. Also, it doesn't detract from the overall justice of the Israeli cause to admit that there were some Israeli tactics reportedly used in Jenin that one hopes that the U.S. military would never employ — such as using civilians as human shields.

Here is the New York Times yesterday:

The [Israeli] soldiers acknowledged that they used Palestinian civilians as shields as they moved house to house. "Yes, because of the snipers," a soldier said. "If the sniper sees his friend there, he won't shoot."

He added that the Palestinians were instructed to open the doors. "We had a soldier who opened a door and was killed by a booby-trap that went off in his face. We let them open the door. If he knows it's booby-trapped, he won't open it."

This soldier said no Palestinians had been killed that way.

Now, all this said, the Palestinian charges of a massacre in Jenin seem risible, as Ariel Cohen argues in a strong NRO piece today. The Israelis seem to have tried to give civilians as much warning as possible, given the circumstances, to evacuate homes about to be smashed, and it is certainly true that a country like Syria, if confronted with a similar fight, would have simply shelled all of Jenin to the ground.

The larger point to be made is that it wouldn't have been necessary for Israel to fight in such densely populated quarters in the first place had the Palestinian fighters not attempted to hide among the civilian population, and as many homes would not have had to be bull-dozed had they not been booby-trapped. In this respect, the Palestinians have a bit of a spin problem, celebrating the fierce resistance of their fighters at the same time they try to argue that Jenin was a massacre of civilians.

Finally, the Israelis paid dearly for their victory in Jenin — there is little doubt of the valor and skill of their soldiers. Newsday has a compelling, and mostly exculpatory, account of the battle today.

It quotes at length a Palestinian woman's account, which rings true:

"They [the Israelis] came and told people to leave their houses," she said. Then she elevated her hands over her head. "We saw women, men and families walking and raising their hands. If they had stayed a moment longer their houses would have fallen on them."

Then the [Israeli] soldiers moved into her house to set up a sniper's post. "To be honest, the soldiers who were in the house did tell the women to go out because they were going to bulldoze the houses," she said. "But I said that maybe you will not shoot me, maybe the shahab [fighters] will shoot me. So I stayed and they didn't bulldoze my house."

"But they had a map," the 39-year-old English teacher continued. "I saw it. It was an aerial map, and they had outlined the houses they were going to destroy, in magic marker. They had blue squares around each house, in every neighborhood."

Saleh saw people shot as well, but not her people. "I saw one occupation soldier who was in my house," she said. "He was looking out the window and he got shot, shot in the head. I think the wound was very serious."

Through the wall of her house and into her neighbor's home, Israeli troops blasted a massive hole, large enough for fully equipped soldiers to easily move through. The soldiers also commandeered the home of her neighbor, Haniyeh al-Kharbiya, for use as a command center. "They made us stay in one room," al-Kharbiya said. "They did bring us food and water. But they did not let us leave the room. We could not go to the bathroom. We had to pee in bottles."

While the troops were camped in her house, 13 other Israeli soldiers stumbled into an ambush set by Palestinian fighters and were killed in a massive explosion. Al-Kharbiya remembers the moment vividly. "We couldn't hear the explosion because of all the heavy shelling going on," she said. "But the soldiers were crying. And after that they started bulldozing houses like crazy. They started rocketing houses like crazy. But the soldiers protected us from the rockets.

"Toward the end, after they had exterminated all the shebab [the Palestinian fighters], they had a big party," she said. "They were dancing and drinking. They were dancing to Arabic music, to Umm Kalthoum," the legendary Egyptian singer. "I had to clean up all the wine bottles."

Some massacre.