Page 4 of 5 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Death from
above By Tom Engelhardt
the "extensive procedures"
in place "to avoid civilian casualties". "We think
the procedures that we have in place are good -
they work," he told reporters. US spokespeople
have recently indicated that NATO is not about to
"change its use of air power against the Taliban".
So, in Afghanistan, the future is already
clear enough. More Taliban attacks mean more air
strikes mean more dead
noncombatants ("including
women and children") mean more alienated, angry
Afghanis in a spiral of devolution to which no end
can yet be foreseen.
Air war: Iraq
Striking as this rise in civilian deaths
may be for Afghanistan, it gains extra importance
for what it signals about the future of Iraq.
Afghanistan is, in a sense, the maimed,
de-feathered canary in the mine of US air power.
In Iraq, as all now know, the US military
has reached its on-the-ground limits. With about
156,000 troops surged into place (and many tens of
thousands of armed private security contractors,
or mercenaries, surging into that country as
well), the occupation forces have, it seems,
reached their maximum numbers. By next spring at
the latest, unless tours of duty in Iraq are
lengthened from an already extended 15 months to
18 months - a notoriously unpopular move for a
notorious unpopular administration - Bush's
"surge", like some tide, will have to recede.
Downsizing, if not withdrawal, will arrive
whether anyone wants it to or not. In fact, as
Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times has
reported, US commanders in Iraq already assume
that such a downsizing is on the way; that, by
autumn, Congress will impose some kind of
timetable for a partial withdrawal. They are
adjusting their "surge" tactics accordingly.
With Bush's approval ratings sinking into
the mid-20% range, senior Republican senators,
including Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete
Domenici, and possibly even John Warner are
jumping the administration's Iraqi ship (or, at
least, edging toward the rail). Pressure is
building in Congress and within the Republican
Party for a change of course. Bush himself has
stopped promising Americans "victory", and is
instead pathetically begging for "patience" on the
home front until "the job is done".
The
next stage of the war in Iraq is, in a sense,
already in sight. While that might seem like
mildly encouraging news to the ever-increasing
numbers of Americans who want to see it all over,
it should give pause to Iraqis, who are sure to be
on the receiving end of what such a partial
withdrawal will mean.
The Wall Street
Journal's Jochi Dreazen and Greg Jaffe, for
instance, recently reported on planning for an
ongoing occupation of Iraq by Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates and "allies in the Bush
administration" ("In strategy shift, Gates
envisions Iraq troop cuts"). Gates, they revealed,
is "seeking to build bipartisan support for a
long-term US presence in Iraq by moving toward
withdrawing significant numbers of troops ... by
the end of President Bush's term". He is in search
of a new Washington Consensus - "a modern-day
version of president Harry Truman's 'Cold War
consensus'", as he puts it - in which a far
smaller US force (possibly 30,000-40,000 troops)
would "operate out of large bases far from Iraq's
major cities" for years, even decades, to come.
There's nothing new in this, of course.
Such a "Plan B" was, in fact, "Plan A" when the
Bush administration first rumbled into Baghdad in
April 2003. The administration's top officials
always expected to draw down US forces quickly
into the 30,000 range and garrison them in four or
more enormous bases outside of Iraq's urban areas.
This was the occupation they planned for, not the
one they got. It now goes under the rubric of the
"Korea model".
If such a plan were indeed
put into operation in 2008-09, it would surely
mean one thing that is almost never mentioned in
Washington, or even by critics of the war: a
significant increase in the use of US air power.
Actually, bombs are already being dropped
in Iraq in 2007 at almost twice the rate of the
previous year. In this sense, the Afghan model is
available as an example of things to come, as is
the historical model of the Vietnam War in the
period in which president Richard Nixon was
employing what might now be called the "Gates
Plan". It was then called "Vietnamization". Nixon
was intent on withdrawing all US ground combat
troops, while leaving behind tens of thousands of
American advisers, who were to continue training
the South Vietnamese military, as well as sizable
numbers of troops to guard America's enormous
bases in that country. Not surprisingly, that
period saw an unprecedented escalation of the air
war over South Vietnam. It was a time of
unparalleled (but under-reported) brutality,
destruction, and carnage in the Vietnamese
countryside.
Any similar "Iraqification"
plan would surely have an equivalent effect, the
gap in manpower being plugged by air power. And
the Washington "consensus" Gates hopes for is
already forming. The two leading Democratic
candidates for president, Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama, adhere to it. Both call for
"withdrawal" from Iraq, but define withdrawal (as
Gates would) as the "redeployment" of US "combat
brigades" (possibly less than half the US forces
in that country at present).
In other
words, we are almost guaranteed that, either this
winter or in the spring of 2008 (as the
presidential election looms), some kind of
drawdown, surely to be headlined as a "withdrawal"
plan, will begin and that significantly lower
levels of troops will be supported by a rise in
air strikes - and in Iraq, unlike Afghanistan,
this means the bombing not of peasant villages but
of urban neighborhoods.
This, in turn,
means that we should prepare ourselves for a rise
in "incidents", in "mistakes", in the
"inadvertent" or "errant" death of civilians in
escalating numbers. Whether in Vietnam,
Afghanistan or Iraq, the formula, with a guerrilla
war, is simple and unavoidable: Air Power =
Civilian Deaths. Or put another way, "Incidents" R
Us.
A history of mistakes Let's
start with the nature of modern war. The very
phrase "collateral damage" should be tossed on to
the junk heap of history. For the past century,
war has increasingly targeted civilians.
Between World War I and the 1990s,
according to Richard M Garfield and Alfred I
Neugut in War and Public Health, civilian
deaths as a percentage of all war deaths rose from
14% to 90%. These figures are obviously
approximate at best, but the trend line is clear.
In a sense, in modern warfare, it's the military
deaths that often are the "collateral damage";
civilian deaths - "including women and children" -
turn out to be central to the project. The Lancet
study's figures for Iraq indicate as much.
If modern war has largely been war against
noncombatant populations, then the airplane -
which, even more than artillery, represented war
from a distance - was its ultimate terror weapon.
The invention of the atomic bomb, the culmination
of the dreams of air power as an "ultimate
weapon", signaled this in an
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