The American media continue to ignore the
increasingly devastating air war being waged in
Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi
resistance - and, as usual, Iraqi civilians
continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of
the bombing.
When the air war shows up at
all in the US press, it is never as a campaign,
but as scattered bare-bones reports of individual
attacks on specific targets, almost invariably
based on military
announcements. A typical
example was reported by Reuters on December 4:
"Two US Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided
bombs which, according to a military spokesperson,
killed two 'insurgents' after they attacked an
army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad."
On the same day, Reuters reported that "a
woman and two children" were "wounded when US
forces conducted an air strike, bombing two houses
in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad".
And even this minimalist version of the American
air war rarely makes it into large media outlets
in the US.
Ignoring the obvious
Author and media critic Norman Solomon
asked the following question recently: "According
to the LexisNexis media database, how often has
the phrase 'air war' appeared in the New York
Times this year with reference to the current US
military effort in Iraq? As of early December, the
answer is: zero." Solomon went on to point out
that the phrase "air war" had not appeared in
either the Washington Post or Time magazine even a
single time this year.
Curiously enough,
US Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) reports are
more detailed than anything we normally can read
in our papers. On December 6, for example, CENTAF
admitted to 46 air missions over Iraq flown on the
previous day - in order to provide "support to
coalition troops, infrastructure protection,
reconstruction activities and operations to deter
and disrupt terrorist activities".
Albeit
usually broadly (and vaguely) described, and
seldom taking possible civilian casualties into
account, these daily tabulations by the Air Force
often flesh out bare-bones reports with a little
extra detail on the nature of the air war. On that
December 6, for instance, the report added that
"Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator
and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air support
to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi
forces near Balad and Ramadi."
Not
surprisingly, given their source, such reports
glide over or under emphasize potentially damaging
information like the fact that bombing runs of
this sort are regularly conducted in
heavily-inhabited areas of Iraq's cities and towns
where the resistance may also be strongly
embedded. Oblique statements like the following
are the best you are likely to get from the
military: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi
and coalition ground forces operations focused on
creating a secure environment for upcoming
December parliamentary elections."
As a
result, aside from reportage by one of the rare
Western independent journalists left in Iraq or
the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the
US, the American air assault on Iraq remains
devastatingly ill-covered by larger outlets here.
This remains true, even as militarily, air power
begins to move center-stage at a moment when
large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops
are clearly being considered by the Bush
administration.
I have worked as an
independent reporter in Baghdad for over eight
months during the US occupation of Iraq thus far
and I can confirm that a day never passed in the
capital city when the low rumblings of an Apache
helicopter or the supersonic thundering roar of an
F-16 fighter jet didn't cause me to look up for
the source of the noise.
Many a night I
would be awakened by the low, whumping blades of
US helicopters scouring the rooftops of the
capital city - flying at almost building height to
avoid rocket-propelled grenades from resistance
fighters. I would oftentimes wonder where they
were coming from, as well as where they were
going.
It is impossible, really, to miss
the overt signs of the ongoing air war in Iraq
when you are there, which makes the lack of
coverage all the more startling. At night, while
standing on the roof of my hotel in Baghdad during
the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, a city some
40-odd miles away, I could see on the horizon the
distant flashes of US bombs that were searing that
embattled city.
I often wondered how the
scores of journalists in Baghdad working for major
American papers and TV networks could continue to
ignore the daily air campaign the US military was
waging right over their heads or within eyesight.
Along with countless eyewitness interviews I did
on the damage caused from the air, this is what
prompted me to write "Living Under the Bombs" some
10 months ago.
But it has only been thanks
to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, a journalist
who has never even been to Iraq, that the
important subject of the air campaign there has
finally been brought to public awareness on a
wider scale.
In a recent interview with
Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about his latest piece
in that magazine, aptly titled, "Up in the Air:
Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?" he commented,
"Clearly there's all sorts of anecdotal reason to
believe that the bombing has gone up
exponentially, certainly in the last four or five
months in the Sunni triangle, the four provinces
around Baghdad." But he also pointed that, when it
comes to the American air campaign, "There's no
statistics ... We don't know what's going on with
the air war." However, we have at least an idea.
Vietnamizing Iraq The
statistics we can glean from CENTAF indicate a
massive rise in the number of US air missions in
Iraq for the month of November as compared to most
previous months. Excluding weekends - for some
reason the Air Force does not make the number of
sorties they fly in Iraq and Afghanistan on
Fridays and Saturdays known to the public - 996
November sorties were flown in Iraq according to
CENTAF.
The size of this figure naturally
raises the question, where are such missions being
flown and what is their size and nature? And it's
important to note as well that "air war" does not
simply mean US Air Force. Carrier-based Navy and
Marine aircraft flew over 21,000 hours of missions
and dropped over 26 tons of ordnance in Fallujah
alone during the November 2004 siege of that city.
In his recent article and interview, Hersh
rightly reflects the concern of American military
men that, in any proposed draw-down plan for
American forces, Iraqi security forces are likely
to be given some responsibility for Air Force
targeting operations. After all, they'll be the
ones left on the ground. It's an idea, he reports,
that is "driving the Air Force crazy", because
they fear it may involve them in a future revenge
war of ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.
Even Pentagon figures indicate that 10-15%
of laser-guided munitions don't land where
intended, but having those munitions land (or not
land) where "the Iranians" intend doesn't please
US. officials. Senior intelligence personnel
complained to Hersh that "Iran will be targeting
our bombers".
Ironically, Richard Nixon's
secretary of defense Melvin Laird recently wrote
an article in Foreign Affairs magazine arguing
that his "withdrawal" policy of "Vietnamization"
during that war, actually worked. (It involved
withdrawing American troops while fiercely
increasing the American air war in what was then
South Vietnam and surrounding countries.) So,
argues Laird, would "Iraqification".
The truth about Vietnam that
revisionist historians conveniently forget is
that the United States had not lost when we
withdrew in 1973. I believed then and still
believe today that given enough outside
resources, South Vietnam was capable of
defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do
the same now.
Though Laird's
rewriting of the history of the last years of the
Vietnam War (and his own dismally failed policies)
may be striking at this moment, he is clearly
hardly alone in holding onto the idea that a
"withdrawal" that would involve ever more bombs
dropped and missiles fired from American aircraft
is now the way to go. In a classic case of history
repeating itself (as tragedy but also possibly
farce), the Bush administration appears to be
seriously considering an "Iraqification" policy of
its own.
US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
Karen Kwiatkowski used to work in the Pentagon and
for the National Security Agency before retiring
in 2003. Well known as a Pentagon whistleblower
for speaking out about Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans in which so
much of the pre-war "intelligence" for Iraq was
cherry-picked and passed on, Kwiatkowski has been
consistently critical of the Bush administration.
Kwiatkowski believes the administration's
new policy of substituting air power for troops
harkens back to the failure of Vietnam. "Let me
see if I have this right," she says in an
interview with Tomdispatch.
We have a foul-mouthed Texan in the
White House, facing a domestically unpopular war
that he never expected to have to fight. In
order to stop a persistent anti-American
insurgency in a faraway country, this president
will now escalate the use of air power, striking
deep into the heart of insurgency strongholds
and destroying the will of those that support
the insurgency.
This sounds like a
replay of Rolling Thunder, March 1965. The
Pentagon, led by the last remnant of those who
were supposed to have directly experienced the
danger of politicized wars managed out of the
White House and the sheer uselessness of air
power to win hearts and minds, must indeed be
out of its collective mind to support a
strategic shift like this.
It is
important to note that, as in Vietnam, troop
morale in Iraq now seems to be plummeting.
According to the army's own figures, in a study
conducted last summer with all units in Iraq, 56%
of them reported either "low" or "very low"
morale. Keep in mind that towards the end of the
war in Vietnam, the army was in a state of ongoing
revolt and incipient collapse. By the time direct
US involvement ended with the signing of the Paris
Peace Accords in 1973, the sort of mixed morale
statistics seen in our military in Iraq last
summer would have been an impossible dream.
Getting large numbers of troops out while
intensifying the air war might seem then like a
reasonable formula for solving certain of this
administration's problems without abandoning its
basic Iraq policies, but this will undoubtedly
prove a perilous undertaking in its own right, as
Hersh recently pointed out:
A key element of the 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.
One can easily imagine the
potential for disaster at a future moment when
Shi'ite and Kurdish militia members in Iraqi army
uniforms would be calling down air strikes on
Sunni neighborhoods, settling old scores as
civilian casualties went through the roof.
Current trends But visions of a
frightful future in Iraq should not be
overshadowed by the devastation already caused by
present levels of American air power loosed, in
particular, on heavily populated urban areas of
that country.
CENTAF reports, for example,
that on November 14 of this year, "Air Force F-15
Eagles, MQ-1 Predators unmanned aerial vehicles
and Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 aircraft flew air
strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity
of Karabilah. The F-15s dropped precision-guided
bombs and the Predators fired Hellfire missiles
successfully against insurgent positions." The
tactic of using massively powerful 500 and 1,000
pound bombs in urban areas to target small pockets
of resistance fighters has, in fact, long been
employed in Iraq. No intensification of the air
war is necessary to make it a commonplace.
The report from November 14 adds, "Air
Force F-16 Fighting Falcons flew air strikes
against anti-Iraqi forces near Balad. The F-16s
successfully dropped a precision-guided bomb on a
building used by insurgents. F-16s and a Predator
also flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in
the vicinity of Karabilah. The Predator
successfully fired a Hellfire missile against
insurgent positions."
The vagueness of
certain aspects of such reports from CENTAF is
troubling, however. The reasons for bombing raids
are usually given in generic formulas like this
typical one found in official statements released
on November 24 and 27: "Coalition aircraft also
supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces
operations to create a secure environment for
upcoming December parliamentary elections."
Such formulations, of course, tell us, as
they are meant to, next to nothing about what may
actually be happening - and as the air war is
virtually never covered by American reporters in
Iraq, these and other versions of the official
language of air power are never seriously
considered, questioned, explored or compared to
events on the ground.
Another common
mission, as stated on the 17th, 22nd and several
other days in November (and used again in CENTAF's
December statements) has been the equally vague:
"Included support to coalition troops,
infrastructure protection, reconstruction
activities and operations to deter and disrupt
terrorist activities."
One of the busier
days for the US Air Force in Iraq recently was the
last day of November, when 59 sorties were flown.
CENTAF reported that "F-15 Eagles successfully
dropped precision-guided munitions against an
insurgents' weapons bunker near Baghdad. F-16
Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18
Hornets and F-14 Tomcats provided close-air
support to coalition troops in contact with
anti-Iraqi forces near al-Hawijah, al-Mahmudiyah
and Fallujah." In addition, the Royal Australian
Air Force was also flying surveillance and
reconnaissance missions that day, as the British
Air Force often does on other days.
Weaponry A broad overview of
the types of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft
the US military is employing in Iraq gives an idea
of the scope of the air war currently underway and
the sort of destructive power available on an
everyday basis. It can also offer hints of what we
might expect in an air-power intensified draw-down
future.
While this is in no way an
inclusive list, fixed-wing aircraft include the
F-14D Tomcat and F/A 18 fighter jets which are
being used by the Navy and Marines. The F-18 fires
the laser-guided, 630 pound Maverick Missile (at a
cost of $141,442 per shot, by the way). In
addition, both the F-14 and F/A 18 fire a 20mm
hydraulically operated gatling gun which emits
between 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute at a
range of "several thousand yards".
The Air
Force is using F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter
jets, along with AF MQ-1 Predator drones which are
armed with Hellfire missiles. AV-8 Harrier fighter
jets have also been used in Iraq as have AC-130
gunships, especially in urban battles like the
fighting for Fallujah last year. These planes are
capable of circling targets for long periods while
raining thousands of rounds of ammunition per
minute down from above. Then there is the A-10
Warthog military jet which is used as ground
support, as it is capable of firing 4,200 armor
piercing 30mm rounds per minute.
At this
point, bombs used commonly range in explosive
power from 250-2,000 pounds, with cluster bombs,
the MK-77 500 pound fire bomb (napalm) and the
infamous White Phosphorous also having been
employed at various moments.
The Joint
Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb, ranging from
250-2,000 pounds, was used extensively during the
most recent military operation against Fallujah.
The 2,000 pound variety, for example, has the
capacity to blast a crater in a concrete street 70
feet in diameter and 30 feet deep. This size of
bomb has a blast radius of 110 feet within which a
human being will die, while fragmentation from the
bomb casing can achieve velocities up to 9,000
feet per second and reach areas over 3,000 feet
away from the detonation site.
The US
military is also using a wide variety of
helicopters offensively in Iraq. These include the
Apache, Kiowa, Black Hawk, Cobra, Pave Low,
Chinook and Iroquois.
Most of the
available data - and it's minimal - about how all
this airpower is being used in Iraq comes from the
Air Force. One of their news reports from June,
for example, typically reported a single incident
in which air power was brought to bear: "Coalition
aircraft dropped seven precision-guided bombs
while providing close-air support to coalition
troops in the western al-Anbar province of Iraq on
June 11. Anti-Iraqi forces had taken refuge in
buildings in an attempt to shield themselves from
coalition attack. An estimated 40 insurgents were
killed."
Brigadier General Allen G Peck,
deputy combined forces air component commander,
added, "Our job was to provide close-air support
and intel to coalition troops in direct contact
with anti-Iraqi forces. Airpower support extends
well beyond dropping munitions. Our top priority
is providing close-air support and reconnaissance
to our Soldiers, Marines and coalition forces in
contact with enemy forces on the ground."
The Air Force claims that "nearly 70% of
all munitions used by the air component since the
start of the operation have been
precision-guided", and "every possible precaution
is taken to protect innocent Iraqi civilians,
friendly coalition forces, facilities and
infrastructure".
However, a serious study
of violence to civilians in Iraq by a British
medical journal, the Lancet, released in October,
2004, estimated that 85% of all violent deaths in
Iraq were generated by coalition forces and
claimed that many of these are due to US air
strikes. While no significant scientific inquiry
has been carried out in Iraq recently, Iraqi
medical personnel, working in areas where US
military operations continue, report to me that
they feel the "vast majority" of civilian deaths
are the result of actions by the occupation
forces.
Given the US air power already
being applied largely in Iraq's cities and towns,
the prospect of increasing it is chilling indeed.
As to how this might benefit the embattled Bush
administration, we return to Kwiatkowski:
Shifting the mechanism of the
destruction of Iraq from soldiers and Marines to
distant and safer air power would be successful
in several ways. It would reduce the negative
publicity value of maimed American soldiers and
Marines, would bring a portion of our troops
home and give the Army a necessary operational
break. It would increase Air Force and Naval
budgets, and line defense contractor pockets. By
the time we figure out that it isn't working to
make oil more secure or to allow Iraqis to
rebuild a stable country, the Army will have
recovered and can be redeployed in
force.
But if current trends continue,
the end of the US occupation in Iraq may more
closely resemble the ending in Vietnam - a view
Kwiatkowski agrees with. The political climate at
home may force a decrease in the number of US
troops in Iraq, but the compensatory upswing in
air power meant to offset this will be inevitable
and will inevitably lead to unexpected problems.
Why? Because the Bush administration will
still be committed to permanently hanging onto a
crucial group of four or five mega-military bases
(into which billions of construction and
communications dollars have already been poured)
along with a massive embassy, directing political
and military "traffic" from the heart of Baghdad's
Green Zone - and that means an unending occupation
of Iraq, something that, air power or not, can
only mean endless strife.
Dahr
Jamail is an independent journalist from
Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent eight months
reporting from occupied Iraq, and recently has
been giving presentations about Iraq around the
US. He maintains a website at:
dahrjamailiraq.com
