Iraq: A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air
BAGHDAD - Many Iraqis believe the dramatic escalation in U.S. military use of air power is a sign of defeat for the occupation forces on the ground.
U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of this year as over the first half of 2006, according to official information.
They dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first half of 2007, compared to 86 in the first half of 2006. This is also three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data.
The Air Force has also been expanding its air bases in Iraq and adding entire squadrons. It is now preparing to use a new robotic fighter known as the Reaper. The Reaper is a hunter-killer drone that can be operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.
“We find it strange that the big strategists of the U.S. military have actually failed in finding solutions on the ground and are now back to air raids that kill more civilians than militants,” former Iraqi army brigadier-general Ahmed Issa told IPS.
“On the other hand, they are giving away the land to local forces that they know are incapable of facing the militants, who will grab the first chance of U.S. withdrawal to bases to hit back and hold the ground again.”
“Going back to air raids is an alarming sign of defeat,” Salim Rahman, an Iraqi political analyst from Baghdad told IPS. “To bombard an area only means that it is in the hands of the enemy.”
“Our area is under threat of air raids all the time,” Mahmmod Taha from the Arab Jboor area southwest of Baghdad told IPS. “Each time they bombed our area, civilians were killed by the dozens, and civilians’ houses were destroyed. They could not fight the resistance face to face, and so they take revenge from the air.”
May 2007 was the most violent month for U.S. forces in Iraq in nearly three years, according to the U.S. Department of Defence.
There were 6,039 attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government forces, 1,348 roadside bombs detonated under their vehicles, 286 “complex ambushes” involving roadside bombs and coordinated teams of attackers were carried out, 102 car bombs exploded, 126 U.S. soldiers were killed and 652 were wounded.
The U.S. forces have been hitting back at predominantly Sunni areas such as those around Fallujah. But the forces have also targeted Shia pilgrims around Najaf in the south.
“Air raids are back even in Shia areas like Sadr City in Baghdad and many southern cities like Diwaniya, Samawa, and Kut where the al-Mehdi militia (of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) controls the ground,” Abbas Abdul-Mehdi from Diwaniya told IPS while on a visit to Baghdad. “Their bombs fall on our heads, while the militiamen know how to hide and escape.”
The U.S. forces are looking to do more of all this. “There are times when the Army wishes we had more jets,” F-16 pilot Lt. Col. Steve Williams, commander of the 13th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron told reporters.
“What the U.S. forces are doing now is increasing their air force potential in a last attempt to crush the fighters with the minimum casualties possible,” retired Iraqi Army colonel Mustafa Abbood from Baghdad told IPS. “It is a desperate attempt to make Iraqis turn against their fellow-fighters. It failed in Fallujah, and I do not see how it will work elsewhere.”
Iraqis around Baghdad say they have noticed more air traffic in recent months. “There is a notable increase in the number of airplanes flying in the Iraqi skies,” Amjad Fadhil, a farmer from Latifiya, south of Baghdad, told IPS. “F-16s and helicopters are roaring like monsters everywhere.” There are more than 100 U.S. aircraft crisscrossing Iraqi air space at any one time.
Air Force engineers are working long hours to upgrade Balad air base, just north of Baghdad, which already supports 10,000 air operations per week. One of the two 11,000-foot runways has been reinforced to withstand five to seven years more of hard use.
Ten-year-old Salli Hussein lost both her legs when her home was bombed by a U.S. jet fighter near the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad in November 2006. Her 11-year-old brother, Akram, and cousin Tabarak were torn to pieces in that missile attack.
“I want to have legs again so that I can play with my friends and make Mama happy,” she told this IPS correspondent.
Ali, IPS correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service
Congratulations, you Gutless Wonders. (with apologies to the late, great Mr. Vonnegut)
if only the US military would drop cars loaded with explosives then the US sheeple might see that we also use car bombs.
same indiscrimiate terrorism.
Our military would have much more integrity if it were run by women instead of the wussies it’s run by now. What ever happened to looking a people in the eye before you murder and maim them in their own country for doing nothing to you?
Using campaign spending limits to get America better politicians is the only way to solve America’s problems enough. And if you think “clean money” public financing of our campaigns will do it, you’re sadly mistaken.
gen·o·cide (jĕn’ə-sīd’) pronunciation
n.
The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
We are asked to give generously to stop genocide in Darfur, Rwanda, and elsewhere. We remember the death of six million Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers. Remember the Armenians. You can go to jail for remembering them in Turkey.
What do we call the killing of over a million Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan? What do we call the desire to raze Iran with nuclear weapons? Bringing democracy and freedom to the Middle East.
Escalating air attacks over Iraq will lower the US body count at the expense of thousands more Iraqis. The philosophy of “bombing them back to the stone age” was used in Vietnam to the tune of over two million Vietnamese. It didn’t work, just added to the load of misery carried by the Vietnamese villager and farmer. Now we propose to escalate the same thing in Iraq? They say they can kill people by flying remote controlled drones from a comfy chair in Nebraska, just like a video game! My God, what have we become?
Let’s start calling it like it is. Stop the genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get us out of the Middle East! Ask the Israelis to stop the genocide in Palestine. STOP GIVING OR SELLING EVERYBODY WEAPONS!!!
If the poor and the vanishing middle class in America can be considered a “national, racial, political, or ethnic group,” then we are not far from instituting genocide in America — again.
Let’s stop the pussyfooting around and start calling a spade a spade. Stop the genocide in Iraq, get our troops home! That will be one small step towards sanity, then let’s work on the same for Afghanistan. And let’s stop giving others weapons to do our killing for us.
But WHY do they hate us!?!?!?!
www.unknown-arts.org/politics
Very insighful and well written, libertas fugit. You rule.
But I don’t see how it could work. We discuss at length the power behind the military-industrial complex. We discuss till the cows come home that with removal of posse comitis and the possible forthcoming economic crash, we are verging on becoming a highly-controlled dictatorship.
Who is going to tell the weapons-makers or the well-funded military not to play war? It wont be the President or the compliant Congress. Finally, these people are indiscriminate as to whom they sell the latest gadgets of death and genocide (all weapons are equal, some weapons are more equal than others).
Come on! these are million dollar smart bombs and missiles. They work like Chocolate Mousse’s machine gun in Top Secret! and only hit the bad guys in a room full of innocents.
Libertas fugit–
Your entry above reminded me of a scene from the Godfather movie when Michael calmly proposes that he go shoot the guy who tried to kill Don Corrleone.
Hot-headed Sonny starts mocking him and reminds Michael that “it ain’t like when you shoot from a mile away, this kind of killing has to be face to face bada-boom, bada-bing where you get the guys blood and guts all over your nice suit.
This is the genius of all Air Forces. They permit people to push a button from miles away from the target and they don’t have to see the splattered blood and guts of the all too human victims of their carnage.
It ought to be required that proper ladies and gentlemen like the picturesd Bethany Slack and her colleagues, be required to view (in person if at all pssible–but via video tape failing that) the splattered remains of innocents whose lives they have destroyed.
Maybe if we made them dig the graves and place the human remains into them like allied armies made the Germans do when liberating places like Buchenwald and Dachau it might make what they do just a tad more personal.
Failing that, if I am the Iraqi insurgency I am planning some sort of operation against Balad Air Base and particularly the personnel who are stationed there.
I hope someone does not trip over the extension cord to the flight simulator. God forbid Capt. Slack might accidently drop a bomb on the Green Zone.
reminds me of something I read in Wilfred Burchett’s book “Vietnam : Inside Story of the Guerrilla War”.
The first thing I thought of when I read about the air base’s runway being strengthened - the Viet Cong took out one of the US Air Force’s major air bases in South Vietnam one night, with little more than mortars.
But have you also noticed something else, proof that the tide is turning? This news agency quoted Iraqis as the acknowledged experts in insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare. They ignored the US Air Force and Pentagon air power experts - presumably as they have been proved incompetent by this current Iraqi resistance.
Anyway, this goes to prove a pet thesis of mine - air power’s a hammer, not a screwdriver, and you don’t use hammers to extract teeth.
Reliance on air power? I wonder if that means the surge is in its last throes?
“Air Force engineers are working long hours to upgrade Balad air base, just north of Baghdad, which already supports 10,000 air operations per week.”
“One of the two 11,000-foot runways has been reinforced to withstand five to seven years more of hard use.”
Very telling about Bush & co plans in Iraq
Lobo Gris
Islam is bad because they strap bombs to their chest and die with their victims.
Christianity is good because they strap bombs to planes and survive to do it all again the next day. (That’s called “civilized” and the ones doing the flying are called “brave.”)
hmmmm…. stereotyping gets you no where, but it does make you say, “hmmmmm.”
With 4 MILLION Iraqis dead, wounded or homeless this is GENOCIDE.
Thank goodness we have big screen tv’s, Jazzercise and stock car racin’ or we might have to actually pay attention to the God-awful mess we’ve made of the world.
When does American Idle start-up again?
Peace to you and yours.
It’s not the military who chooses this type of warfare it’s the American public with no stomach for casualties. The ones who think less than 4000 dead in a 4 year anti-insurgency campaign is heavy casualties.
The military prefers the jump in civilian casualties which is what has happened (up 1/3 in July)
as opposed to more soldier deaths. This has always been known, bodies pile up all over the place, but the deaths within the US Military need to kept down as the MSM picks up on those.
Let’s give the public credit though, they know it’s no different then any other war, where civilians are routinely wiped out in the fight against “terrorists”. Rummy is up on the Hill right now testifying about the cover up around one rather famous Army Ranger. (as opposed to talking about the huge numbers of women and children killed by the US since the start of ‘catch Osama’)
It’s not the military who chooses this type of warfare it’s the American public with no stomach for casualties. The ones who think less than 4000 dead in a 4 year anti-insurgency campaign is heavy casualties.
Pshaw, yeah, 4000 dead, no big deal. (And several thousand Iraqis, but who’s counting? No, I mean literally - nobody’s counting.)
After all, it was only 3000 dead that got us into this mess in the first place. /snark
Strike from the air, this sounds a lot like Israel’s military tactics against Palestine.
Vietnam - the nights belonged to the Vietcong while U.S. forces retreated to their bases. Towards the end of the Vietnam war we increased the number of bombs dropped. A futile attempt to kill an enemy living underground.
On the run up to the Iraqi invasion (preemptive war based on lies) all the former military advisers stated that the war would be won on the ground. It seems we have lost that battle a long time ago. Now Bush fights to save face for his party and mistakes while so many Iraqis must suffer.
Our government meddled in the national affairs of Iran long ago and now they are an Islamic state. It would be safe to assume that Iraq will become much like Iran in the not to distant future.
Bush is solid proof that pot smoking, cocaine snorting, alcoholic rich kids do not make good presidents. Bush is also proof that if you give an idiot a gun he’s gonna kill someone. The world’s strongest military in the hands of the world’s most incompetent man.
Okay, I’m done…
Fuck the troops.
Every individual has the moral responsibility whether or not to pull the trigger or push the button. Neither the governments or people of Afghanistan or Iraq have ever harmed or plotted to harm us. So fuck the troops and everyone sporting a “Pray for” or “Support our” troops magnet or bumper sticker. To all the left wingers who oppose the war (not wars), but support the troops, I say bullshit; you can’t oppose the killing and support the killers - and that’s their mission, kill, destroy, occupy, plunder.
Only one goddam democrat has had the balls to label our actions (in Iraq only) immoral.
As for the troop withdrawal bill, its a farce. With only one exception, every Democrat candidate - from the whore of Wal-mart down - support this bill which calls for an indefinite U S military presence and Iraqi cession of 50% of its oil to U S corporations.
Except for our children and the mentally incompetent (not counting G W), there are no innocent bystanders among us. To standby and do nothing makes us vulnerable to retribution and a never-ending cycle of violence which will continue to bleed our country of young lives and treasure, ensconce the worst of the corporate-owned demopublican/republicrats and enrich the military-industrial complex - all of whom profit from intentionally created chaos.
Prior to the war on Iraq, his aides asked G W what he wanted them to do. He told them to create chaos. This is the economic concept of “creative destruction”; profit from the creation of chaos (incite and arm both sides of a conflict, Arab and Israeli), profit from the chaos ensuing from the conflict itself and profit from the chaotic aftermath (spoils of war and reconstruction).
Wake up people or expect more 9/11 blowback.
Ask yourself what you’d do if you were an Iraqi or Afghan whose family was blown to shreds and dismissed as “collateral damage, your niece raped and killed along with her family, your door broken down and your wife and daughters man-handled, tortured and penned up for years without justification, your city’s infrastructure intentionally destroyed, no means of employment, living in constant fear etc, etc.
You tell ‘em, fuqbushthetroops. The Nuremburg principle of law applies to war as well as peace. In terms of morality, US troops are babies that need to grow up fast. They won’t, because they are rewarded for their moral (and often physical) cowardice and punished for moral bravery.