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Oops, Our Bad
Tom Engelhardt
Lew
Rockwell.com
Friday, April 11, 2008
Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror
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 consol 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.
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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 Bush administration has increasingly
relied on air power in its Global 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
1–4) 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 U.S. 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, U.S. air power has, in the last 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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… AP 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 U.S.
helicopters in the city of Baquba in northern Iraq on March 23rd.
("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 U.S. 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 U.S. plane strafed a house in
the southern city of Basra, killing eight civilians, including
two women and a child on March 29th.
According to Iraqi police sources, five people, including four
policemen were killed and three wounded when U.S. helicopters
struck the city of Hilla in southern Iraq. According to another
report, two police cars were also destroyed and an ambulance fired
upon.
A U.S. 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 3rd. ("'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 Shiite militia stronghold of Qibla.")
In most of these cases, the facts remain in dispute (if anyone,
other than the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 Global 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
U.S. 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 U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steven Stover,
rejected Iraqi allegations that U.S. 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 U.S. 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 AP, 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…
U.S. 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 U.S. commander
General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this 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, Lt. Gen.
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 U.S. 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.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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