American smart bombs struck civilian neighborhoods alongside military targets in Iraq

Evidence

Alpert had been a stringer for NBC News, and he flew to Iraq, where he reported firsthand on the civilian devastation wrought by American “smart bombs.” In a 1996 documentary called Fear and Favor in the Newsroom, Alpert described what he saw this way: … Right away on the road, you began to see evidence of destruction from the war, the vehicles that had been hit. Every city that we went to had no electricity, had no telephones, had no running water. We saw evidence of very, very accurate pinpoint bombing. And then we saw evidences of what appeared to be extreme inaccuracy. For example, in Basra, we saw residential neighborhoods that were just wiped out. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the book’s larger arc about how Arabs are portrayed in American media, and with ‘smart bombs’ claims around the First Gulf War.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing which residential neighborhoods in Basra were hit and whether targeting records ever confirmed or denied deliberate strikes.