Iraq: US Airstrikes Increase by 500%
This month there were massive airstrikes
in the region south of Baghdad involving
38 bombers dropping 40,000 pounds
of bombs in 10 minutes
Iraqis face guided missiles, unguided rockets
and cannon rounds fired by
helicopter gunships and warplanes
Bullshit Bush Claims the ‘Surge’ Brings Peace
The US has unleashed a ferocious bombing campaign on Iraq and Afghanistan, with devastating effects on the population. This surge in the “air war” is largely hidden behind talk of “recent successes” for the occupations.
According to figures released by the US military – known as “airpower summary of close air support missions” – in 2006 there were 229 US bombing missions. But last year this rose to 1,447 – more than a 500 percent increase.
The most frequently used munition in this campaign of air bombardment is the Guided Bomb Unit 12, a laser guided bomb with a 500 pound “general purpose warhead”. This warhead is capable of reducing houses to rubble.
In 2006 over 111,000 pounds of bombs were dropped on targets in Iraq. Extrapolating for 2007, it can be estimated that 500,000 pounds have been dropped.
This month there were massive airstrikes in the region south of Baghdad involving 38 bombers dropping 40,000 pounds of bombs in 10 minutes. This is a portent of the kind of high-tech destruction Iraqis face.
These figures do not include guided missiles, unguided rockets and cannon rounds fired by helicopter gunships and warplanes. One weapon left out is the Hydra-70 rocket which is a widely used helicopter launched weapon system.
US special forces often use aircraft which wield a Gatling gun that fires up to 1,800 rounds a minute. The damage caused by these munitions is unimaginable.
Within a matter of minutes aerial bombardment can destroy homes, infrastructure and workplaces.
Historical evidence attests that the US air war during the 1960s and 1970s displaced 25 percent of the population in Laos, 33 percent of Vietnamese and almost a million people in Cambodia.
Although the number of Iraqi casualties is contested, the highly credible survey published in the Lancet medical journal estimated that from March 2003 to June 2006 over 13 percent of the “excess” 601,000 violent deaths in Iraq were caused by airstrikes.
The authors of the report have also attributed half the deaths of Iraqi children under 15 to these airstrikes. With a fivefold increase in bombings, Iraqi fatalities can be expected to increase proportionately.
The vast increase in the numbers of refugees – two million internally displaced people and an equal number fleeing abroad – bears witness to this devastation.
Although there are no maps to track the damage to populated urban areas and villages throughout Iraq, there have been vivid eyewitness accounts of the destruction in Fallujah and Baghdad where residential and commercial buildings have been reduced to rubble.
American Media Failure to Cover Bombing Atrocities
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 45,000 kilograms 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 Colonel 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.
From Barbarism to the Norm
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 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.
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 overall 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 the US 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 US Marine Corps 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 Associated Press 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 US 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 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 US) 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 US Air Force looses 45,000 kilograms 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.
