The same old bombs

In a New Yorker article earlier this week titled Up in the Air, Seymour Hersh says Bush plans to draw down ground troops and to continue fighting the insurgency by relying more on air power.

It's a great article, and its depictions of Bush's conviction that he has been divinely chosen to prosecute this bloody, evil war give us all even more reason to fear the crazy bastard. The Brits would say he's "barking mad"—and they'd be right.

Hersh is of course a great journalist, and I have in the past wondered where we'd be without him. But I have to quibble with him a bit on this one.

A main point of his piece is that Bush's new plan would entail Iraqis calling in air strikes by American aircraft. The Iraqis couldn't be trusted not to target, say, personal or political rivals.

There's something to that, but it overlooks the barbarity of what's likely going on at present, and gives the impression that caution is currently being exercised with regard to "collateral damage." I really do wonder...

Today, in Toward a Greater Air War in Iraq, Ron Jacobs does a little simple tabulation exercise that could be performed by any journalist:

At this point, it seems that the US is using its air power in Iraq (and Afghanistan) for what they call close-support operations. Usually this means that the air attacks are on a relatively small scale and that bombs and rockets are targeted at individual buildings and city blocks. Still, the number of air support missions is not small. In fact, according to a November 28, 2005 press release from the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, "Coalition aircraft flew 46 close-air support missions Nov. 27 for Operation Iraqi Freedom. They (the missions) supported coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities, and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities. Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations to create a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections." These 46 missions were followed by 42 more on November 28th. That's 88 acknowledged air support missions in two days. (In addition, 18 more close support missions were reported in Afghanistan for the 28th of November). Multiply that by seven days in a week and it becomes 308 flight combat missions in Iraq alone [per week]. Given the nature of the weaponry, even so-called close air support means that there will be civilian deaths. It's pretty much impossible to kill only one or two people with a quarter-ton bomb or even a 50 pound rocket.

Read the whole article...

That's a whole lotta bombing going on, and a whole lotta "accidental" deaths, even if the air strikes all involve "precision" weaponry. The Pentagon ain't saying, and reporters ain't reporting, but my strong suspicion is that these air strikes hardly ever involve super-expensive "smart" weapons and there's not a lot of surgical precision involved. I suspect, especially given that this war has dragged on much longer than its planners had anticipated, that the cheaper "dumb" bombs are doing most, if not all, of the work.

I've linked to it before, and I'll link to it again, but this article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about the weapons used in the first Gulf War is probably a pretty good guide to what's being used in this one:

One little-known fact is that of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped, only 6,520 tons-7.4 percent-were precision-guided ordnance, according to official Pentagon figures. Most of the weapons used were conventional, and very destructive, bombs and artillery. The military has not provided a breakdown of the weapons used but an air force spokesman has acknowledged that the "full complement of tactical munitions was employed throughout Desert Storm" and that he "wouldn't disagree with" a long list of destructive air-launched ordnance presented to him for confirmation that they were used in the war [including cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives such as the notorious Daisy Cutter].

The article concludes that, contrary to the way the first Gulf War was sold, "This was not a surgical war; it was a slaughter. History may judge high technology the winner, but human beings were certainly the victims."

This is corroborated by Sven Lindqvist's brilliant, disturbing and powerful A History of Bombing:

On the television screen the war looked like a computer game, without blood, without civilian injuries. The image was dominated by cruise missles that sneaked around streetcorners and, with perfect precision, found their military targets. What we saw seemed to be a new kind of war that fulfilled the demands of both humanitarianism and military efficiency--custom-made destruction without messy side effects. It was only afterward that we found out how tightly controlled that propaganda image really was.

In reality it was the same old bombs striking the same old villages. The French general Pierre Gallois, who visited Iraq immediately after the war, reported: "I drove for 2,500 kilometres in my four-wheel-drive and in the villages everything was destroyed. We found bomb fragments dating from 1968, left over from the Vietnam War. This was the same kind of bombing I did half a century ago in World War II."

Really one has to wonder what exactly has changed since the discovery of bombing's not inconsiderable "terror effects." In 1921, a memo from inside the British Air Ministry stated that misrepresenting the true nature of aerial bombardment might be the best thing for all concerned: "It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of the 'barbarity' of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in nature ... to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible."