The US forces invited families back to Arab Jabour only four weeks ago

Roads to Iraq calls attention to this:

Radio Sawa broadcast on December 11 the good news from the American forces that the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha had been definitively cleared of the last vestiges of AlQaeda. Here's what their website reported that day

Joseph Inge, fourth brigade, third American infantry division, said his forces with the aid of the Awakening forces had been able to clear out the last strongholds of AlQaeda in the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha south of Baghdad. He told Radio Sawa: "We have secured the area by freeing it from the threat of AlQaeda, with the assistance of local citizens". And Captain Inge called on the families that had fled to return to their homes in those areas, promising every type of support and assistance to those families.

On Thursday 40 "targets"--described by the miitary as "reported AlQaeda safe-havens"--were hit by a total of 40,000 pounds of bombs dropped on Arab Jabour in a 10-minute raid by the American Air Force assisted by another brigade, the second, of the same third American infantry division that had invited families back into the area only three weeks ago. The military had no information on how many people it killed.

It is the same old question that keeps coming back in so many forms: Was this incompetence, a mistaken declaration of the all-clear, followed by a slight course-correction? To believe that, you'd have to believe that there were in fact 40 AlQaeda locations where three weeks before the Americans had said there were none, in an area that they now controlled. Controlled with the assistance of their new-found local allies, that is. Or was this bombing motivated by something else, perhaps connected with the politics of the Awakenings, because certainly the scope of this bombing suggests the concept of making this area into a shock-and-awe example of something: US military spokesman later told AP that this was "one of the largest air-strikes since the onset of the war"; and the AP reporter says it "recalled the Pentagon's 'shock and awe' raids in the 2003 invasion".