Icarus (armed with vipers) over
Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
NEW
YORK - The human imagination is quicker off the mark
than any six-gun, bomb, or JDAM missile. Long before
humans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being
destroyed from the air - in an avalanche of popular
fiction. By the late 19th century London had gone down
in flames more than once and New York soon would follow;
genocidal wars from the air were repeatedly imagined and
described in which whole nations, whole races, were
wiped out. In 1913, more than three decades before the
first atomic bomb was dropped, H G Wells had already
imagined and named "atomic weapons" in The World Set
Free, his novel about a 1950s atomic air war.
When it came to fantasies and fears of
destruction we knew no bounds. As the scholar Stephen
Weart has written in Nuclear Fear, A History of
Images:
Right from the start [the] new idea of
atomic weapons was linked to an even more impressive
idea: the end of the world. When [scientist Frederick]
Soddy first told the public about atomic energy, in
May 1903, he said that our planet is "a storehouse
stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful
than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a
suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to
chaos". This was an entirely new idea: that it might
be technically possible for someone to destroy the
world deliberately. Yet the idea slipped into the
public mind with suspicious ease ... For example, in
1903 the irrepressible Gustave Le Bon got into
newspaper Sunday supplements in various countries by
imagining a radioactive device that could "blow up the
whole earth" at the touch of a button.
In
fact, for almost half a century before 1945, such
weapons were the property only of science fiction.
Michael Sherry in his magisterial (if highly detailed)
history The Rise of American Air Power offers
this comment on the machine that delivered the first of
those atomic devices of our imagination to a real city:
"More than any other modern weapon, the bomber was
imagined before it was invented." Should we be amazed or
horrified, proud or ashamed to have so actively imagined
a century or more of future horrors of our own making?
The imagination worked so quickly, but at least as
miraculous was how quickly the inventors and the
scientists followed.
I doubt that any invention
other than the airplane has so combined the wonder of
creation, of the defiance of obvious human limits, and
of destruction so intimately and for so long; so long,
in fact - at least to judge from the non-coverage of the
air war the administration of US President George W Bush
has unleashed in "postwar" Iraq against heavily
populated urban centers - that we (or our reporters)
have evidently simply become inured to the very idea of
it. Now, it seems, the wonder and even the horror of air
power is largely gone, but the inventions, the
destruction, and the carnage remain.
The odd
thing is this: No sooner had we human beings risen above
the earth in powered flight - think Icarus - than we
expressed the wonder of that event by dropping bombs
from the planes that took us into the heavens. After
that, it was just a straight line up (or do I mean
down?) for the next near-century.
Look at it
this way: the Wright Brothers' "whopper flying machine"
leaves the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the
first time on December 17, 1903. That initial flight
lasts all of 12 seconds before the plane hits the sand
120 feet (36 meters) away. Later the same day, the plane
flies 262 meters in 59 seconds before, on a final
flight, it totals itself and is no more. Only five years
later, the Wright brothers are demonstrating their new
invention in the skies over Washington for the US Army
Signal Corps. By 1911, two years short of a decade after
its invention, the plane is wedded to the bomb.
According to Sven Lindqvist's (irritatingly organized
but fascinating) labyrinth of a book, A History of
Bombing, one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out
of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb - a
Danish Haasen hand grenade - on the North African oasis
Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he
attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each
weighing two kilos, were dropped during this first air
attack."
On the "natives" in the colonies,
naturally enough. What better place to test a new
weapon? And that first attack, as perhaps befits our
temperaments, was, Lindqvist tells us, for revenge, a
kind of collective punishment called down upon Arabs who
had successfully resisted the advanced rationality (and
occupying spirit) of the Italian army. Given where we've
ended up, it would be perfectly reasonable to consider
this moment the beginning of modern history, even of
modernism itself.
A generation, no more, from
Kitty Hawk to 1,000-bomber raids over Germany. Another
from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to "shock and awe"
in Iraq. No more than a blink of history's unseeing eye.
Between 1911 and the end of the last bloody century,
villages, towns and cities across the Earth were
destroyed in copious numbers in part or in full by
bombs. Their names could make up a modern chant:
Chechaouen, Guernica, Shanghai, London, Coventry,
Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Damascus,
Pyongyang, Haiphong, Grozny, Baghdad, and now Fallujah
among too many other places to name (and don't even get
me started on the bomb-ravaged colonial countryside of
our planet from Kenya to Malaya). Millions and millions
of tons of bombs dropped; millions and millions of dead,
mostly, of course, civilians.
And from the
Japanese and German cities of World War II to the
devastated Korean Peninsula of the early 1950s, from the
ravaged southern Vietnamese countryside of the late
1960s to the "highway of death" on which much of a
fleeing Iraqi army was destroyed in the first Gulf War
of 1991, air power has been America's signature way of
war.
Think of it this way: Imagine the history
of the development of the plane and of bombing as, in
shape, a giant, extremely top-heavy diamond. In 1903,
one fragile plane flies 36 meters. In 1911, another only
slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy some
primordial law, drops a bomb. In 1945, vast air armadas
take off to devastate chosen German and Japanese cities.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas is
compacted into the belly of the Enola Gay, a lone B-29,
which drops its single bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the
city and so many of its inhabitants. And then just
imagine that the man who commanded the US Army Air
Forces, both the armadas and the Enola Gay, General
Henry "Hap" Arnold (according to Robin Neillands in
The Bomber War, The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi
Germany), "had been taught to fly by none other than
Orville Wright, one of the two men credited with
inventing the first viable airplane". Barely more than a
generation took us from those 36 meters at Kitty Hawk
past thousand-plane bomber fleets to the Enola Gay and
the destruction of one city from the air by one bomb.
Imagine that.
Then imagine that both civilian
plane flight and the killing of enormous numbers of
civilians from the air (now subsumed in the term
"collateral damage") have over that not-quite-century
become completely normal parts of our lives. Too normal,
it seems, to spend a lot of time thinking about or even
writing fiction about. When we get on a plane today,
what do we do - close the window shade and watch a movie
on a tiny TV screen or, on certain flights, TV itself in
real time as if we were still in our living rooms. So
much for either shock or awe. Today, US planes regularly
bomb the distant cities of Iraq and no one even seems to
notice. No one, not even reporters on the spot, bothers
to comment. No one writes a significant word about it.
Should we be amazed or horrified, proud or ashamed?
'Hotels had crumbled into the
street' With that in mind, here's the thing in
Iraq - and I'm not sure you can even call it strange:
American reporters can now be found embedded with tank
or Bradley Fighting Vehicle units. ("Captain Paul Fowler
sat on the curb next to a deserted gas station," writes
Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe. "Behind him, smoke
rose over Fallujah. His company of tanks and Bradley
Fighting Vehicles had roamed the eastern third of the
city [Fallujah] for 13 days, shooting holes in every
building that might pose a threat, leaving behind a
landscape of half-collapsed houses and factories singed
with soot. 'I really hate that it had to be destroyed.
But that was the only way to root these guys out,' said
Fowler, 33, the son of a Baptist preacher in North
Carolina. 'The only way to root them out is to destroy
everything in your path.'") American reporters can climb
aboard Surcs (Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech
Swift Boat equivalents, as John Burns of the New York
Times did recently, to "roar up the Euphrates on a dawn
raid". They can follow US patrols as they bust down
Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. They can even
describe the perilous, missile-avoiding "corkscrew"
landings their planes make as they are first delivered
to Baghdad International Airport and the IED-
(improvised explosive device) and
suicide-car-bomber-strewn roadway in from the airport.
The only thing they evidently don't do once they get to
Iraq - and I base this solely on the reporting of the
war that comes back to us - is look up. The Iraqi air
seems to be filled with all kinds of jets, fearsome
AC-130 Spectre gunships, Hellfire-missile-armed Predator
drones, and ubiquitous Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma
helicopters that - now that the highways are so perilous
- are the preferred method of military transport and
that seem to hover endlessly over potential urban
battlefields.
The Old City of Najaf that abuts
the holy Shrine of Imam Ali was largely destroyed in
August, partially from the air in the midst of bitter
fighting between US troops and relatively lightly armed,
ill-trained but tenacious young Shi'ite men loyal to the
radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. ("Few in the shrine
could sleep through the ominous rumble of American
AC-130 Spectre gunships, capable of firing 1,800 bullets
per minute. When the bombs fell closer than ever,
hundreds rose to march and chant in the courtyard,
saying they hoped their voices boosted the morale of the
Mahdi Army.") In one of our last acts before a ceasefire
was declared, according to Dexter Filkins of the New
York Times, the US used "a 2,000-pound, laser-guided
bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards away from the
shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American
commanders as 'motel row' ... Reports indicated the
hotel was a redoubt for al-Sadr fighters ... The
official said the strike had been '100% successful',
demolishing the hotel."
Filkins later described
the post-truce moment this way: "[The rebels] stood in a
scene of devastation. Hotels had crumbled into the
street. Cars were blackened and twisted where they had
been hit. Goats and donkeys lay dead on the sidewalks.
Pilgrims from out of town and locals coming from home
walked the streets agape, shaking their heads, stunned
by the devastation before them."
Similarly, much
of the city of Fallujah has just been devastated in
fighting in which US firepower of every sort was called
in. The razing of that city began with weeks of
"targeted" air attacks on what were termed insurgent
"safe havens". Fallujah is now a wasteland and, while
fantasies about its reconstruction abound, the fighting
only continues. (At least 20 US troops have died there,
to almost no press attention, since the city was
declared secure and the operation deemed a "success".)
Fallujah remains cordoned off; up to 250,000 Fallujan
refugees are still unable to return; and American
military strategists, who over the months since the
first failed marine attempt to take the city in April
planned its eventual destruction, are now evidently
planning to "ask" the "head of every household" (read:
males) "to wear an identification badge" once back in
the city.
But if the Old City of Najaf
(evidently still largely unreconstructed) and the whole
city of Fallujah are now memorials to US firepower and a
US willingness to call down retribution from the skies,
air power has been used far more widely across much of
heavily populated urban Iraq without any press comment
whatsoever, on or off editorial pages. Let me offer just
a few examples from many to give a sense of the range of
Iraqi cities hit from the air in recent months:
Baqubah: "Some 30 insurgents were stationed in
buildings near the stadium in eastern Baqubah,
apparently to obstruct US forces from reaching downtown.
Rather than clear the buildings - two vacant schools and
a swimming pool - Colonel Pittard decided to demolish
them with four 500-pound bombs" (Christian Science
Monitor, July 21).
Tall Afar: "Soldiers from the
3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, also known as the
Stryker Brigade, launched a fierce attack on Tall Afar
on Thursday ... The fighting, which included three air
strikes involving AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter jets,
killed 67 insurgents, according to the US military"
(Washington Post, September 12).
Sadr City,
Baghdad: "Hospital officials in Sadr City, a vast slum
in northeast Baghdad that is overwhelmingly hostile to
the American occupation, said one person had been killed
in an overnight air strike by the Americans. For weeks,
the military has been deploying an AC-130 gunship and
fighter jets over the area to try to rout the Mahdi
Army, a militia loyal to the firebrand Shi'ite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr" (New York Times, October 6).
Kut: "A US helicopter struck Sadr's office in
Kut, killing two people ..." (Washington Post, April 9).
Samarra: "By US military estimates, about 125
rebels were killed and more than 80 captured. Most of
the deaths occurred early Friday in the first hours of
the strike, when US helicopter gunships blasted
suspected rebel positions with rocket fire" (Los Angeles
Times, October 4).
Mosul: "A semblance of calm
has returned to Mosul after US forces carried out air
strikes on insurgents, but residents say Iraq's
third-largest city remains tense and Iraqi police are
nowhere to be seen. US warplanes struck rebel areas in
the southwest of the city late on Thursday after two
days of widespread violence in which groups of
insurgents rampaged, burning police stations, stealing
weapons and tipping the city towards chaos" (Reuters,
November 12).
Karbala: "American AC-130 gunships
and tanks battled militiamen near shrines in this
Shi'ite holy city Friday" (Associated Press, May 21).
Fallujah: "Highly accurate 500-pound bombs
called JDAMs - Joint Direct Attack Munition - were
dropped on suspected insurgent hideouts overnight in the
southern sector of the city, military sources said. The
US Air Force also used AC-130 Spectre gunships, armed
with 105mm cannons and 40mm guns, to blast remaining
insurgent pockets" (CNN, November 16).
Hiyt:
"... Near the town of Hiyt ... air strikes were called
in on the mosque position. The mosque is partially
damaged and is currently on fire ..." (Al-Jazeera,
October 12).
Baghdad Airport (and elsewhere):
"US forces struck at targets near Baghdad airport on
Friday evening while attack helicopters and F-16 fighter
jets carried out raids elsewhere in Iraq in operations
against resistance fighters ... Earlier, a US helicopter
gunship killed seven people allegedly preparing to
launch rocket attacks on an American military base in
Iraq." (Al-Jazeera, November 16).
Towns south of
Baghdad: "More than 5,000 men supported by Cobra
helicopters, F-18 Hornets and F-16s, will launch raids
in and around the so-called Triangle of Death south of
Baghdad" (The Scotsman, November 24).
This
far-from-exhaustive list is taken from the summary of
press reports on the war that appear almost daily.
Normally, only a few lines, as above, are devoted to the
air war against urban areas which is, by the nature of
the situation, a war of terror. Such anodyne reports
represent the bare minimum the military offers
journalists in Iraq on the subject. I have yet to see
any cumulative figures on air strikes in Iraq per day,
week, or month, maps of the reach of the air war, or
more than a few photos of its results; nor, in fact,
have I found a single article of any significance on the
air war in Iraq itself, discussing military strategy or
even the problems US Air Force (USAF) strategists or
pilots feel they face, no less what it's like for
civilians (or rebels) in most of Iraq's major cities to
experience such periodic attacks, or what kinds of
casualties result (or who the casualties actually are),
or what, if any, may be the limitations on the use of
air power, or what its effects on the insurgency seem to
be, or, in fact, anything on any aspect of the regular
bombing, missiling, or strafing of city neighborhoods.
Here is a response by the marine commander in
Fallujah, Lieutenant-General John Sattler, to a question
at a November 18 briefing by a New York Times reporter
on the fighting in Fallujah:
General Sattler: Yeah. Approximately four
days ago we were averaging somewhere along 50
precision - and I stress the word "precision" - about
50 precision air strikes a day ... Today we had three
air strikes - three precision-guided munition air
strikes today.
That's about the size of what
we know. To the extent that we know anything about the
loosing of air power on heavily populated urban areas,
we only know what an uninquisitive press has been told
by the military and stenographically recorded, which
means we know remarkably little. Here, however, is the
impression of the British Broadcasting Corp's Stuart
Richie, just a week ago on the US air campaign in
northern Iraq:
I found an empty camp bed, but sleep was
virtually impossible - troops moving in and out all
night by helicopter and Hercules planes. Fighter
planes also seemed to be on the go all through the
night, this time on sorties to Mosul, I
believe.
Fighter planes "on the go all
through the night"? Is this not worth a single newspaper
or magazine article?
Icarus (armed with
vipers) over Iraq Given the history of
20th-century war, which is, in many ways, simply the
history of bombing cities, should US "war reporters" not
have been prepared for this? Shouldn't anyone have been
thinking about the destruction of cities when it's been
such a commonplace? Shouldn't major papers have insisted
on embedding reporters in USAF units (if not on the
planes themselves)? Shouldn't reporters have visited US
air bases and talked to pilots? Does no one remember the
magnitude of the air war in Vietnam (or Laos or
Cambodia), no less any other major war experience of our
lifetimes?
A glance at the history of US war
tells us air power is as American as apple pie and that
Americans were dreaming of cities destroyed from the air
long before anyone had the ability to do so. As H Bruce
Franklin tells us in his book War Stars, The
Superweapon and the American Imagination, as early
as 1881 a former naval officer, Park Benjamin, wrote a
short story called "The End of New York" that caused a
sensation. In it the city was left in ruins by a Spanish
naval bombardment. By 1921, air-power visionary Billy
Mitchell was already flying mock sorties over New York
and other east-coast US cities, "pulverizing" them in
"raids" sensationalized in the press, to publicize the
need for an independent air force. ("The sun rose today
on a city whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled
bits ..." began the New York Herald after Mitchell's
"raid" on New York City, a line that should still send
small shudders through us all and remind us how much the
sensational of the previous century has become the
accepted of our world.)
It would seem hard to
forget that the "invasion" of Iraq began from the air -
as much a demonstration of power meant for viewers
around the world as for Saddam Hussein and his
followers. Who could forget those cameras strategically
placed on the balconies of Baghdad hotels for the
shock-and-awe son et lumiere show - dramatic
explosions in the night (with everything but a score to
go with it). Does no one remember USAF claims that air
power alone could win wars? In all the articles now
being written about overextended US ground forces, does
no one want to write about how the military is trying to
fill the urban gap with air power?
Is there some
secret I'm missing here? Not a single article anywhere
in the US press, no less on a front page. (About the
closest you can get is an exceedingly modest September
Associated Press piece by Robert Burns titled "Air power
gains more prominent role in Iraq counterinsurgency
efforts".) Doesn't anyone find it strange that, back in
1995, US papers - from their front pages to their
editorial and op-ed pages - were convulsed by a single
contested air-war exhibit being mounted at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the bombing
of Hiroshima? A historical argument about the use of air
power half a century ago merited such treatment, but the
actual - and potentially hardly less controversial - use
of air power against the cities of Iraq doesn't merit a
peep?
I can find but a single press example of
an American reporter in the air in this postwar war.
More than a year ago, on November 17, 2003, the New York
Times' Dexter Filkins wrote "Over Baghdad: Wary targets,
yet confident" ("It is not a good time to be a
helicopter pilot in the skies over Iraq"), focusing on
the dangers to American pilots in the Iraqi skies. From
a passage such as the following, one can sense much
about the year between then and now in Iraq - something
of a corkscrew downward like that landing at Baghdad
International: "[Lieutenant-Colonel James Schrote, who
commands a fleet of 16 Black Hawks here], a veteran of
the ill-fated American venture in Somalia 10 years ago,
said the city he flies over today has much to recommend
it over the Somali capital, Mogadishu, then without a
government and broken up by feuding warlords. 'Baghdad
is much more civilized than that,' he said."
That, as far as I can tell, is it. Now, it's
true that any air war is harder to report on than a
ground war, especially if reporters aren't allowed in
planes or on helicopters (as they are on the river boats
and in the Bradleys, for instance). But hardly
impossible. Most reporters in Baghdad, after all, have
at least been witnesses to air attacks in the capital
itself. In one case, a US helicopter even missiled a
crowd in a Baghdad street only a few hundred meters from
the heavily fortified US heartland, the capital's Green
Zone, killing a reporter for al-Arabiya satellite
network while he was reporting in footage seen only
briefly on US television but repeatedly around in the
world.
Life under the helicopters is a story
that might be written. At the very least, the subject
could be investigated. Airmen could be interviewed.
Victims could be found. The literature could be read
because, as it happens, USAF people are thinking
carefully about the uses of air power in the Iraqi
counterinsurgency war, even if reporters aren't.
Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas F Searle's
piece on "Making air power effective against
guerrillas". Searle is a military defense analyst with
the Airpower Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force
Base in Alabama, and he concludes:
Air power remains the single greatest
asymmetrical advantage the United States has over its
foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major
combat and ignoring counter-guerrilla warfare, we
airmen have marginalized ourselves in the global war
on terrorism. To make air power truly effective
against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the
joint force commander or the ground component
commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must
aggressively develop and employ air power's
counter-guerrilla capabilities.
Journalists
in Iraq could report on the new airborne weaponry being
deployed and tried out there. After all, like other
recent US battlefields, Iraq has also doubled as a
laboratory for the corporate development and testing of
ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for instance,
could be done on the newly armed unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator
in Iraq. (The people who name these things have
certainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in
Defense Daily, a "trade" publication (Ann Roosevelt,
"Army prepares for armed UAV operations", November 3),
we read:
The army in Iraq is poised to start
operations using an unmanned aerial vehicle armed with
a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman's Viper Strike
munition, a service official said ... The army is
arming the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)-Northrop
Grumman Hunter UAV, under an approximately $4 million
Quick Reaction Capability contract with Northrop
Grumman that will be completed in December, John
Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike,
told Defense Daily ... The Hunter can carry two Viper
Strike missiles. The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq
"since Day 1", [Lieutenant-Colonel Jeff] Gabbert
[program manager Medium Altitude Endurance] said. The
precise Viper Strike munition is important because "it
has very low collateral damage, so it's going to be
able to be employed in places where you might not use
500-pound bombs or might not use a Hellfire munition,
[but] you'll be able to use the Viper Strike
munition".
Of course, it would be a
reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up in a
plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq,
as Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small
forward air controller's plane during the Vietnam War.
(From this he wrote a report for The New Yorker
magazine, "The military half", which remains
unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the
destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and which can
be found collected in his book, The Real War.)
But that's a lot to hope for these days. The
complete absence of coverage, however, is a little
harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent
military base facilities the US has been building in
Iraq to the tune of billions of dollars - hey, we're
capable of constructing, if not reconstructing, quite
effectively in Iraq when it really matters - the loosing
of air power on Iraq's cities is the great missing story
of the postwar war. Is there no reporter out there
willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing,
and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban
centers and the partial or total destruction of cities
such a humdrum event, after the last century of
destruction and threatened destruction, that no one
thinks it worth the bother to attend to? Is the Bush
administration really to be given another remarkable
free ride?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs
the Nation Institute'sTomdispatch.com
, is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The End of
Victory Culture among other books. This article is
used with permission.
