Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?
By Tom Engelhardt
A January 21 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 US military also said in a
statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds [8,600 kilograms] 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 22 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 IEDs [improvised
explosive devices].
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 past
days - those 45,000 kilograms or so of explosives that US 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 George W 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 45,000
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), 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 45,000
kilograms of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two
45,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.
Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 16 kilometers south of the Iraqi
capital that was the target of the latest 45,000-kilogram 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, Pablo 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 US atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold
War-era of mutually assured destruction in which two superpowers threatened to
use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive,
years-long US bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; the American air power "victories" of the first
Gulf War and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration's shock-and-awe,
air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003. The latter, though
meant to "decapitate" the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi
governmental or Ba'ath 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.
Forty-five thousand kilograms 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 Lieutenant 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 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.
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 past 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
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in
Iraq".
