Seymour Hersh warned a few months back that the Pentagon was going to be relying more on airpower in the next phase of the Iraq War.

Now there is more evidence to prove it.

Bradley Graham of The Washington Post reveals that the number of U.S. air strikes has gone up by a factor of five in the last year, with U.S. pilots now going on four sorties a day and dropping their 500-pound bombs.

Military analysts expect this reliance on air power to continue—or even to increase—as the U.S. withdraws some of its ground troops.

Those sorties are killing civilians, though we’re not seeing the video on our nightly news and the Pentagon is not tabulating the deaths, or at least not making the tally public.

But “scores of noncombatants” have died in the U.S. offensive in western Iraq, many from U.S. airstrikes, Ellen Knickmeyer of the Post reports.

Some of these noncombatants were children, and some died when they were in buildings that insurgents were also using, Knickmeyer reports.

The killing of children is nothing new in war, but we don’t hear Bush or Rumsfeld focusing on it.

No, that might detract from the story line, that might mar the saintly image that they paint of the U.S. in Iraq.

But we, as citizens of the United States, can’t stand idly by as our country continues to bomb innocent young bystanders in Iraq.

There will be many more bodies of youngsters in small graves in Iraq if we don’t insist on an immediate halt to this bombing.

Before the Vietnam War ended, one of the most powerful demands from the peace movement was to stop the bombing.

We must make that demand again, as loudly as possible.

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983.

© The Progressive

###