Page 2 of
2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Bombs away over Iraq: Who
cares? By Tom
Engelhardt
restaurants, sidewalks and two
PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its
own neighborhoods, including, reported the
Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, "KBR-land" for
civilian contractors and "CJSOTF" (Combined Joint
Special Operations Task Force), "home to a special
operations unit [that] is hidden by especially
high walls".
Radar traffic controllers at
the base now commonly see "more than 550 aircraft
operations in just one day". To the tune of
billions of dollars, Balad's runways and other
facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded
for years of further wear and tear. According to
the military press, construction is to begin this
month
on a US$30 million "state-of-the-art battlefield
command and control system [at Balad] that will
integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq".
National Public Radio's Defense
correspondent Guy Raz paid a visit to the base
last year and termed it "a giant construction site
... [T]he sounds of construction and the hum of
generators seem to follow visitors everywhere.
Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las
Vegas: while the surrounding Iraqi villages get
about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights
never go out at Balad Air Base."
This
gargantuan feat of construction is designed for
the military long haul. As Josh White of the
Washington Post reported recently in a relatively
rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air
power in Iraq, there were five times as many US
air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of
course, started off with a literal bang from those
45,000 kilograms of explosives dropped southeast
of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the
18,000 kilograms of explosives, which got modest
headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes
in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not
the 7,200 kilograms of explosives that White
reports being used north of Baghdad in
approximately the same period; nor, evidently,
another 6,800 kilograms of explosives dropped on
Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these
numbers seem to include US Marine Corps figures
for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)
Who could forget all the attention that
went into the president's "surge" strategy on the
ground in the first half of last year? But which
media outlet even noticed, until recently, what
Bob Deans of Cox News Service has termed the air
"surge" that accompanied those 30,000 surging
troops into the Iraqi capital and environs? In
that same period, air units were increasingly
concentrated in and around Iraq. By mid-2007, for
instance, the Associated Press was already
reporting:
[S]quadrons of attack planes have
been added to the in-country fleet. The air
reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last
year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled
to action over Iraq ... Early this year, with
little fanfare, the air force sent a squadron of
A-10 "Warthog" attack planes - a dozen or more
aircraft - to be based at al-Asad air base in
western Iraq. At the same time it added a
squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcons ... at Balad.
Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft
carrier battle groups have been stationed in
greater numbers in the Persian Gulf and facilities
at sites near Iraq, like the huge al-Udeid Air
Base in Qatar, continue to be upgraded.
Even these increases do not tell the whole
story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of
the Associated Press reported recently that "the
military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can
watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has
soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air,
largely in Iraq". The use of such unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed
Predators, doubled in the first 10 months of 2007
- with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to
4,300 in that period. The army alone, according to
Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The
future promises much more of the same.
(American military spokespeople and
administration officials have, over the years,
decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding"
behind civilian populations - in essence, accusing
them of both immorality and cowardice. When such
spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral
damage" on civilian populations, they regularly
blame the guerrillas for making civilians into
"shields". And all of this is regularly, dutifully
reported in the US press. On the other hand, no
one in our world considers drone warfare in a
similar context, though armed UAVs like the
Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed
Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed
at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air
Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there
that they release their missiles against
"anti-Iraqi forces" or the Taliban, causing
civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.)
As one American pilot, who has fired
Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:
I go from the gym and
step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq ... It takes some
getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind
yourself, "I'm not at the Nellis Air Force Base.
Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking
to my bank, aren't important anymore."
To American reporters,
this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way
barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are
not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts or
among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.
Anyway, 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.
From barbarism to the norm 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.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American
Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory
Culture (University of Massachusetts Press),
has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued
edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
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