DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Oops, our bad By Tom Engelhardt
Let's start with a few simple propositions.
First, the farther away you are from the ground, the clearer things are likely
to look, the more god-like you are likely to feel, the less human those you
attack are likely to be to you. How much more so, of course, if you, the
"pilot," are actually sitting at a console at an air base near Las Vegas,
identifying a "suspect" thousands of miles away via video monitor, "following"
that suspect into a house, and then letting loose a Hellfire missile from a
Predator drone cruising somewhere over Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or the tribal
areas of Pakistan.
Second, however "precise" your weaponry, however "surgical" your strike,
however impressive the grainy snuff-film images you
can put on television, war from the air is, and will remain, a most imprecise
and destructive form of battle.
Third, in human terms, distance does not enhance accuracy. The farther away you
are from a target, the more likely it is that you will have to guess who or
what it is, based on spotty, difficult to interpret or bad information, not to
speak of outright misinformation; whatever the theoretical accuracy of your
weaponry, you are far more likely to miscalculate, make mistakes, mistarget, or
target the misbegotten from the air.
Fourth, if you are conducting war this way and you are doing so in heavily
populated urban neighborhoods, as is now the case almost every day in Iraq,
then civilians will predictably die "by mistake" almost every day: the child
who happens to be on the street but just beyond camera range; the "terrorist
suspect" or insurgent who looks, at a distance, like he's planting a roadside
bomb, but is just scavenging; the neighbors who happen to be sitting down to
dinner in the apartment or house next to the one you decide to hit.
Fifth, since World War II, air power has been the American way of war.
Sixth, since November 2001, the George W Bush administration has increasingly
relied on air power in its "war on terror" to "take out" the enemy, which has
meant regular air strikes in cities and villages, and the no less regular, if
largely unrecorded, deaths of civilians.
Seventh, in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq (as well as in the tribal areas
along the Pakistani border), the use of air power has been "surging". You can
essentially no longer read an account of a skirmish or battle in one of Iraq's
cities in which air power is not called in. This means (see propositions one to
four) a war of constant "mistakes", and of regularly mentioned "investigations"
into the deaths of "militants" and "insurgents" who, on the ground, seem to
morph into children, women and elderly men being pulled from the rubble.
Eighth, force creates counterforce. The application of force, especially from
the air, is a reliable engine for the creation of enemies. It is a force
multiplier (and not just for US forces either). Every time an air strike is
called in anywhere on the planet, anyone who orders it should automatically
assume that left in its wake will be grieving, angry husbands, wives, sisters,
brothers, relatives, friends - people vowing revenge, a pool of potential
candidates filled with the anger of genuine injustice. From the point of view
of your actual enemies, you can't bomb, missile, and strafe often enough,
because when you do so, you are more or less guaranteed to create their newest
recruits.
Ninth, US air power has, in the past six and a half years, been an effective
force in a war for terror, not against it.
Who's counting?
What does this mean in practice? It means something simple and relentless; it
means dead people you might not have chosen to kill, but that you are
responsible for killing nonetheless - and even if you don't know that, or are
unwilling to acknowledge it, others do know and will draw the logical
conclusions.
What does this mean in practice? Consider just a typical collection of some of
the small reports on air strikes in Iraq that have slipped into our world,
barely noticed, in recent days:
Six US-allied Sunni fighters from the "Awakening" movement were reportedly
killed in strikes by an AH-64 Apache helicopter on two checkpoints in the city
of Samarra on March 22. ("The US military denied the checkpoint it attacked ...
was manned by friendly members of the so-called awakening councils and said
those killed were behaving suspiciously in an area recently struck by a
roadside bomb ... It ... said the incident was under investigation ...
Associated Press Television News footage of the aftermath showed awakening
council members loading bodies into a pickup.")
Fifteen people in a single family were reportedly killed by US helicopters in
the city of Baquba in northern Iraq on March 23. ("The US military forces were
not available to comment on the reports ... ")
In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, five civilians, including a judge, Munaf
Mehdi, were reportedly killed and ten wounded from strikes by "fixed-wing
aircraft" in a "battle with suspected al-Qaeda Sunni Arab militants" on March
26. ("Preliminary assessment," according to the US military, "indicates that
despite coalition forces' efforts to protect them, several civilians were
injured or killed during the ensuing gunbattle.")
According to the Iraqi police, a US plane strafed a house in the southern city
of Basra, killing eight civilians, including two women and a child on March 29.
According to Iraqi police sources, five people, including four policemen were
killed and three wounded when US helicopters struck the city of Hilla in
southern Iraq. According to another report, two police cars were also destroyed
and an ambulance fired on.
A US F/A-18 carried out a "precision strike" against a house in Basra,
reportedly killing at least three civilians, two men and an elderly woman,
while burying a father, mother, and young boy in the rubble on April 3.
("'Coalition forces are unaware of any civilians killed in the strike but are
currently looking into the matter,' the military said ... Associated Press
Television News showed cranes and rescue workers searching for survivors in the
concrete rubble from the two-story house that was leveled in the Shi'ite
militia stronghold of Qibla.")
In most of these cases, the facts remain in dispute (if anyone, other than the
US military, even cares to dispute them); the numbers of dead may, in the end,
prove inaccurate; and the equivalent of he says/she says is unlikely to be
settled because, most of the time, no reporter will follow up or investigate.
Such cases generally follow a pattern: The US military issues a brief battle
description in which so many militants/insurgents/terrorists have been taken
out from the air; local officials or witnesses claim that the dead were, in
part or whole, ordinary citizens; the US military offers a denial that
civilians were killed; if the story doesn't die, the military announces that an
investigation is underway, which no one generally ever hears about again. Only
on rare occasions, in our world, do such incidents actually rise to the level
of real news that anyone attends to.
There may be an Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website and an Iraq Body Count
website, but there is no Afghan version of the same, nor is there a global body
count (www.gbc.com) to consult on such "war on terror" civilian deaths from the
air. Usually, when such events recur, there aren't even names to put with the
dead bodies and the reports themselves drop almost instantaneously beneath the
waves (of news) without ever really catching our attention. Even if you believe
that ours is the only world that really matters, that we are the only people
whose lives have real value, that doesn't mean such deaths won't matter to you
in the long run.
After all, what we don't know, or don't care to know, others care greatly
about. Who forgets when a loved one is suddenly killed in such a manner? Even
if we aren't counting bodies in the air-war subsection of the president's "war
on terror", others are. Those whom we think of, if at all, as "collateral
damage" know just what's happened to them and to their neighbors. And they have
undoubtedly drawn the obvious conclusions.
Our 'strike weapons' and theirs
Here's the sorry reality: Such occurrences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere
in the "arc" of territory that the Bush administration has, in a mere few
years, helped set aflame are the norm. Our "mistakes," that is, are legion and,
in the process of making them, our planes, drones, and helicopters have killed
villagers by the score, attacked a convoy of friendly Afghan "elders," and
blown away wedding parties. For us, "incidents" like these pass by in an
instant, but not for those who are on the receiving end.
The attacks of 9/11 are usually not placed in such a context. We consider
ourselves special, even unique, for having experienced them. But think of them
another way: One day, out of the blue, death arrives from the air. It arrives
in a moment of ultimate terror. It kills innocent civilians who were simply
living their lives.
This happened to us once in a manner so spectacular, so devastating as to make
global headlines. But small-scale versions of this happen regularly to people
in that "arc of instability" - and, if there were to be a global body count
organization for such events, it would long ago have toted up a death toll that
reached past that of September 11, 2001.
Let's remember that, after 9/11, Americans, from the president on down, spent
months, if not years in mourning, performing rites of remembrance, and swearing
revenge against those who had done this to us. Do we not imagine that others,
even when the spotlight isn't on them, react similarly? Do we not think that
they, too, are capable of swearing revenge and acting accordingly?
The above list of incidents covers just a couple of weeks in one embattled
country - and just the moments that made it into minor news reports that I
happened to stumble across. But if you read reports from Iraq carefully these
days, few describing US military operations in that country seem to lack at
least a sentence or two on air operations - on what is really a little noticed
"air surge" over that country's cities and especially the heavily populated
slum "suburb" of eastern Baghdad, Sadr City (once known as Saddam City) largely
controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. With perhaps two and a half
million inhabitants, if it were a separate city, it would be the country's
second largest.
Here, for instance, are a few lines from a recent Los Angeles Times piece by
Tina Susman on escalating fighting in Baghdad:
American helicopters
fired at least four Hellfire missiles and an Air Force jet dropped a bomb on a
suspected militia target ... A US military spokesman in Baghdad, Lieutenant
Colonel Steven Stover, rejected Iraqi allegations that US airstrikes and
gunfire have killed mainly civilians. 'There might be some civilians that are
getting caught, but for the most part, we're killing the bad guys.' 'We're very
precise,' he said, adding that many airstrikes had been called off when it was
not possible to get a 'clean hit' that would avoid hitting noncombatants.
Or this from Sameer N Yacoub of the Associated Press:
The US military
said one of its drones launched a Hellfire missile during the night at two
gunmen shooting at government forces in a different part of Sadr City.
Or this: "Three US airstrikes in northeastern Baghdad have killed 12 suspected
gunmen and wounded 15 civilians, Iraqi police and US military say."
Each of these came out while this piece was being written, as did this:
According to the Associated Press, air strikes in a remote province of
Afghanistan aimed at a warlord allied with the Taliban may have killed numerous
civilians. ("Other provincial leaders said many civilians were killed in the
hours-long clash, which included airstrikes in the remote villages of Shok and
Kendal ... US officials and the Afghan Defense Ministry have denied that any
civilians were killed.")
Whatever happened in these latest air attacks, the deaths of civilians are not
some sideline result of the "war on terror"; they lie at its heart. If your
care is safety - a subject brought up repeatedly by senators who wanted to know
from US commander General David Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker last week
whether the "surge" had made "us" safer - then, the answer is: This does not
make you safer.
And yet, don't expect this counterproductive way of war to end any time soon.
After all, the air force already has underway its "2018 bomber", due for
delivery the same year that, according to the chief American trainer of Iraqi
forces, Lieutenant General James Dubic, the Iraqi army will theoretically be
able to guard the country's frontiers effectively. And don't forget the 2018
bomber's successor, "a true 'next generation' long-range strike weapon" that
"may be a traditional bomber or an exotic 'system of systems,' with features
such as hypersonic speed". Maybe by then, the Iraqis will actually be
successfully defending their borders.
Until then, think of the US air war for terror as a Catch 2,200 - every
application of force from the air resulting in the creation of a counterforce
on the ground, another kind of "strike weapon" for the future, while those
collateral bodies pile ever higher. Perhaps, by 2018 or 2035,
worldbodycount.com will be operative.
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
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
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