[WCUSP] Bombs away over Iraq

[yvonne simmons]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174887/bombs_away_over_iraq

posted January 29, 2008 3:34 pm

Tomgram: Bombs Away Over Iraq


Looking Up
Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour 
By Tom Engelhardt 
A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned
Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal
suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which
members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council
were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa
tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school
shootings that happen in the United States.")
Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:



"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it
had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the
farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes
targeted buried bombs and weapons caches. 
"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly
100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has
been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd
story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times: 


"The threat from buried bombs was well known before
the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground,
the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of
bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."
Farrell led his piece with news that an American
soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew
up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected
armored vehicle that the American military is counting
on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq." 

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in
one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis;
in another a roadside bombing that killed an American
soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing
story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of
explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area
south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the
far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the
New York Times, it was buried inside a single
sentence. 

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the
subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive
use of air power in Iraq since the Bush
administration's invasion of 2003 and probably
represents a genuine shifting of American military
strategy in that country. Despite, a few humdrum wire
service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has
bothered to cover the story adequately either. 

For those who know something about the history of air
power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at
the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000
figure might have rung a small bell. 

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil
War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the
German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town
of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing,
then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market
day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000
people, including refugees, in the town which was
largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than
1,600 people may have died there (though some
estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped
about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the
town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000
figures lies a sad history of our age. 

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10
miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target
of the latest 100,000-pound barrage has recently been
largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi
allies. The American military now refers generically
to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as "al Qaeda,"
so in situations like this it's hard to tell exactly
who has held this territory. 

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no
reporters were present when the explosives rained
down. In the Spanish situation, however, four
reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including
George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed
to the scene of destruction. Steer's first piece for
the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was
headlined "The Tragedy of Guernica" and called the
assault "unparalleled in military history."
(Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab
Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that
this had been an attack on a civilian population,
essentially a terror bombing. 

The self-evident barbarism of the event -- the first
massively publicized bombing of a civilian population
-- caused international horror. It was news across the
planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting
of the last century, Picasso's Guernica, as well as
innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of
art. 

As Ian Patterson writes in his book, Guernica and
Total War: 


"Many attacks since then, including the ones we have
grown used to seeing in Iraq and the Middle East in
recent years, have been on such a scale that
Guernica's fate seems almost insignificant by
comparison. But it's almost impossible to overestimate
the outrage it caused in 1937… Accounts of the
bombing were widely printed in the American press, and
provoked a great deal of anger and indignation in most
quarters…"
Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and
Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the
intervening 71 years, which included the German
bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well
as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of
Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied
fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities; the U.S.
atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold
War era of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in which
two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in
airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the
massive, years-long U.S. bombing campaigns against
North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia; the American air power "victories" of
Gulf War I and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush
administration's shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile
assault on Baghdad in March 2003, which, though meant
to "decapitate" the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed
not a single Iraqi governmental or Baath Party figure,
only Iraqi civilians. In those seven decades, the
death toll and damage caused by war -- on the ground
and from the air -- has increasingly been delivered to
civilian populations, while the United States has come
to rely on its Air Force to impose its will in war. 

One hundred thousand pounds of explosives delivered
from the air is now, historically speaking, a
relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq
in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an
aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did
that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a
figure that, as again last week, the military was
proud to publicize without fear of international
outrage or the possibility that "barbarism" might come
to mind: 


"From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the
air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra
and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets
and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of
ordnance, said Lt. Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public
affairs officer."
As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or
Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq
being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there -- in
person or by satellite phone -- to check out the
damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the
mainstream media, bombing is generally only
significant if it's of the roadside or suicide
variety; if, that is, the "bombs" can be produced at
approximately "the cost of a pizza," (as IEDs
sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are
cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies.
>From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just
doesn't have the ring of something that matters. 

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's
success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language
in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral
damage" stands in for the civilian dead -- even though
in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be
considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising
percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of
course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided"
weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even
virginal. Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance,
described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this
disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference: 


"The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape
the battlefield and take out known threats before our
ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any
advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs
and other weapons."
Reports -- often hard to assess for credibility --
have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating
that there were civilian casualties, possibly
significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads
were "cut off" and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and
farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to
Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance,
Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced
into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of
fighting, through "smoldering citrus groves." 

But how could there not be civilian casualties and
property damage? After all, the official explanation
for this small-scale version of a "shock-and-awe"
campaign in a tiny rural region was that American
troops and allied Iraqi forces had been strangers to
the area for a while, and that the air-delivered
explosives were meant to damage local infrastructure
-- by exploding roadside bombs and destroying weapons
caches or booby traps inside existing structures. As
that phrase "take out known threats before our ground
troops move in" made clear, this was an attempt to
minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi)
troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to
bear in a situation in which local information was
guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a
scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this,
increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war
in Iraq. 

The ABCs of Air War in Iraq 

So let's focus, for a moment, on American air power in
Iraq and gather together a little basic information
you're otherwise not likely to find in one place. In
these last years, the Pentagon has invested billions
of dollars in building up an air-power infrastructure
in and around Iraq. As a start, it constructed one of
its largest foreign bases anywhere on the planet about
80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Air Base has
been described by Newsweek as a "15-square-mile
mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle
depots," whose air fields handle 27,500 takeoffs and
landings every month. 

Reputedly "second only to London's Heathrow Airport in
traffic worldwide," it is said to handle congestion
similar to that of Chicago's O'Hare International
Airport. With about 140,000 tons a year of cargo
moving through it, the base is "the busiest aerial
port" in the global domains of the Department of
Defense. 

It is also simply massive, housing about 40,000
military personnel, private contractors of various
sorts, and Pentagon civilian employees. It has its own
bus routes, fast-food restaurants, sidewalks, and two
PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its own
neighborhoods including, reported the Washington
Post's Thomas Ricks, "KBR-land" for civilian
contractors and "CJSOTF" (Combined Joint Special
Operations Task Force), "home to a special operations
unit [that] is hidden by especially high walls." 

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see
"more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day."
To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad's runways
and other facilities have been, and continue to be,
upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According
to the military press, construction is to begin this
month on a $30 million "state-of-the-art battlefield
command and control system [at Balad] that will
integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq." 

National Public Radio's Defense Correspondent Guy Raz
paid a visit to the base last year and termed it "a
giant construction site… [T]he sounds of
construction and the hum of generators seem to follow
visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the
base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi
villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the
lights never go out at Balad Air Base." 

This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for
the military long haul. As Josh White of the
Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare
(and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in
Iraq, there were five times as many U.S. air strikes
in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started
off with a literal bang from those 100,000 pounds of
explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage
assumedly includes the 40,000 pounds of explosives,
which got modest headlines for being delivered in a
mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous
week, but not the 16,500 pounds of explosives that
White reports being used north of Baghdad in
approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another
15,000 pounds of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour
more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to
include Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have
evidently not been released.) 

Who could forget all the attention that went into the
President's surge strategy on the ground in the first
half of last year? But which media outlet even
noticed, until recently, what Bob Deans of Cox News
Service has termed the "air surge" that accompanied
those 30,000 surging troops into the Iraqi capital and
environs? In that same period, air units were
increasingly concentrated in and around Iraq. By
mid-2007, for instance, the Associated Press was
already reporting: 


"[S]quadrons of attack planes have been added to the
in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has
almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B
bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq… Early
this year, with little fanfare, the Air Force sent a
squadron of A-10 ‘Warthog' attack planes -- a dozen
or more aircraft -- to be based at Al-Asad Air Base in
western Iraq. At the same time it added a squadron of
F-16C Fighting Falcons… at Balad."
Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft-carrier battle
groups have been stationed in greater numbers in the
Persian Gulf and facilities at sites near Iraq like
the huge al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar continue to be
upgraded. 

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of
the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated
Press reported recently that "the military's reliance
on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and
sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than
500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq." The use of
such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including
Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first
ten months of 2007 -- with Predator air hours
increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The
Army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in
action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the
same. 

(American military spokespeople and administration
officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and
Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian
populations -- in essence, accusing them of both
immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do
admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian
populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for
making civilians into "shields." And all of this is
regularly, dutifully reported in our press. On the
other hand, no one in our world considers drone
warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like
the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed
Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed at
computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base
outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release
their missiles against "anti-Iraqi forces" or the
Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. 

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles
from Nellis, put it: 


"I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or
Iraq… It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis
you have to remind yourself, 'I'm not at the Nellis
Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago,
like talking to my bank, aren't important anymore.'"
To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly,
nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those
pilots are not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts
or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.) 

Anyway, here's the simple calculus that goes with all
this: Militarily, overstretched American forces simply
cannot sustain the ground part of the surge for much
longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who
surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon
be coming home. But air power won't be. Air Force
personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty
in the region. In Vietnam back in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air
power ramped up. This seems once again to be the
pattern. There is every reason to believe that it
represents the American future in Iraq. 

>From Barbarism to the Norm 

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans
who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is
because American reporters, who have covered every
other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look
up. 

It should be no surprise then that news of a future
possible escalation of the air war was first raised by
a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so
couldn't look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled
"Up in the Air," New Yorker investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh suggested that "a key element of [any]
drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's
public statements, is that the departing American
troops will be replaced by American airpower… The
danger, military experts have told me, is that, while
the number of American casualties would decrease as
ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of
violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would
increase unless there are stringent controls over who
bombs what." 

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was
deafening. Only one reporter, as far as I know, has
even gone up in a plane -- David S. Cloud of the New
York Times, who flew in a B-1 from an unnamed "Middle
Eastern airfield" on a mission over Afghanistan.
Thomas Ricks traveled to Balad Air Base and did a
superb report on it in 2006, but no reporter seems to
have bothered to hang out with American pilots, nor
have the results of bombing, missile-firing, or
strafing been much recorded in our press. The air war
is still largely relegated to passing mentions of air
raids, based on Pentagon press releases or
announcements, in summary pieces on the day's news
from Iraq. 

Given American military history since 1941, this is
all something of a mystery. A Marine patrol rampaging
through an Iraqi village can, indeed, be news; but
American bombs or missiles turning part of a city into
rubble or helicopter gunships riddling part of a
neighborhood is, at best, tag-on, inside-the-fold
material -- a paragraph or two, as in this AP report
on the latest fighting in an undoubtedly
well-populated part of the city of Mosul: 


"An officer, speaking on condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to release the
information, said three civilians were wounded and
helicopters had bombarded buildings in the
southeastern Sumar neighborhood, which has seen
frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces that have
led to a series of raids."
The predictably devastating results of helicopters
"bombarding" an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi
city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the
normal "collateral damage" of war as we know it. In
our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its
genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum
ordinariness (if, of course, you don't happen to be an
Iraqi or an Afghan on the receiving end), the stuff of
largely ignored Air Force news releases. It is as
unremarkable (and as American) as apple pie, and
nothing worth writing home to mom and the kids about. 

Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take
another look. Or for the online world to take up the
subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream
journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.)
will actually look up, notice those contrails in the
skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles
landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum,
no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000
pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge
of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin
pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war
into works of art, at least one of which will become
iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what,
almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has
really meant for Iraqis. 

In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the
way. 

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American
Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture
(University of Massachusetts Press), has been
thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that
deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in
Iraq. 

[Note on Air-War Readings: The Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS) published a study in
December 2007 on the air war in Iraq, which can be
read by clicking here (PDF file). Figures on the
rising intensity of air power in that country can be
found there -- of a sort that the Washington Post only
recently reported on. For some historical background
on U.S. air power and the bombing of noncombatants, I
suggest checking out Mark Selden's "A Forgotten
Holocaust." 

Those who, in these years, wanted to find out
something substantive about the air war in Iraq had to
look to independent sites on line. At Tomdispatch, I
began writing on the air war in 2004. See, for
instance, "Icarus (armed with Vipers) Over Iraq";
others have taken up the subject at this site since:
See Dahr Jamail's "Living Under the Bombs"; Nick
Turse's "Bombs Over Baghdad, The Pentagon's Secret Air
War in Iraq" and "Did the U.S. Lie about Cluster Bomb
Use in Iraq" (both of which involved the sort of
reporting, long distance, that American journalists
should have been doing in Iraq); and Michael
Schwartz's "A Formula for Slaughter: The American
Rules of Engagement from the Air," among other pieces.
On the air war in Afghanistan, see my "'Accidents of
War,' The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of
Air Power."] 

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt 



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