[A-List] Dahr Jamail on the Missing Air War in Iraq

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tomdispatch.com (December 13 2005)

Compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt

A project of the Nation Institute


From the destroyed Japanese and German cities of World War II to the 
devastated Korean peninsula of the early 1950s, from the ravaged South
Vietnamese countryside of the late 1960s to the "highway of death" on which 
much of a fleeing Iraqi army was destroyed in the first Gulf War of 1991, air
power has been America's signature way of war. Once, it was also a major part of
Hollywood's version of war-making on the "silver screen". More recently, however,
air war has largely disappeared from consciousness. It simply hasn't been part
of war, as Americans see, read about, or imagine it, on-screen or off. This is
strange.

It's true that, with the exception of a small number of helicopters downed by
rocket-propelled grenades, the present air war in Iraq has been fought without
(American) casualties; it's also been fought largely without publicity and
almost completely without reporters. It's true as well that there are certain
obvious disadvantages to covering an air war rather than a ground war. You can't
follow in the wake of a plane heading at supersonic speeds for a target many
miles away; and it's harder to "embed" reporters in the backseat of a jet, no
less an unmanned predator drone, than in a Humvee. This was true even during the
Vietnam War, although reporters there regularly hitched rides on military
helicopters to bases and hotspots around the country. As a result, despite our
memory of a single iconic photo of a napalmed Vietnamese girl running screaming
down a highway (and she had been seared by a South Vietnamese plane), the fierce
American air campaign in South Vietnam was seldom given the attention it
deserved. I know of only a single exception to this: In 1967, the young Jonathan
Schell managed to talk himself into the backseats of Cessna O-1 forward air
control planes flying "visual reconnaissance" over a heavily populated coastal
strip of Vietnam's Quang Ngai province and in his New Yorker series and
subsequent book, The Military Half, he provided as vivid and devastating an
account as exists of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside from the air
and ground.

It's worth remembering that the US began its war of choice in Iraq with a
massive (and massively promoted) "shock and awe" air and cruise missile attack
on Baghdad. The administration was then proud of our one-sided ability to
inflict massive, targeted damage on that country's capital and happy to have it
televised. But ever since, the air war and its urban destruction have been kept
in the shadows, which might be considered, if not evidence of the military
equivalent of shame, then at least, of an "out of sight/out of mind" mentality.
Whether by design or not, the US military seems to have kept reporters off air
bases and aircraft carriers (after, at least, that first burst of air assault
was over). And with the exception of a few helicopter rides over Iraq granted to
favored reporters and pundits, usually with their favored generals, reporters
simply have not been up in the sky, nor have they - for reasons I find hard to
fathom - bothered to look up for the rest of us (as Dahr Jamail indicates in the
piece that follows). As 2004 ended, one TV journalist wrote me:


"My own experience of Iraq is that while we're all constantly aware of the air
power, we're rarely nearby when it's deployed offensively. Perhaps that explains
why we don't see it. One does 'hear' the airpower all the time though. Fighters
and helicopters used to protect convoys; helis shipping people back and forth to
bases, or hunting in packs across towns; AWACS high up. I've even watched drones
making patterns in the sky. So why don't we film it?"
 
It's a question that still hasn't been answered - or even asked in public.

Yet our air power has been loosed powerfully on heavily populated cities and
towns in a country we've occupied. This has been done, in part, because American
generals have not wanted to send American troops - any more than absolutely
necessary - into embattled cityscapes in an ongoing guerrilla war in which they
might take heavy casualties (which, in turn, would be likely to cause support
for the war to drop at home even more precipitously than it has). Still, it
remains amazing to me that Seymour Hersh's recent important report in the New
Yorker, "Up in the Air", is the first significant mainstream account since the
invasion of Iraq to take up the uses of air power in that country. The piece
certainly caused a stir here, becoming part of the suddenly quickening tempo of
debate about American withdrawal; but, as readers may have noticed, the air war
itself has received no more attention since its publication two weeks ago than
previously, which is essentially none. As I wrote back in August 2004, "You
might think that the widespread, increasingly commonplace bombing of civilian
areas in cities would be a story the media might want to cover in something more
than the odd paragraph deep into pieces on other subjects". You might think so,
but based on recent history, don't hold your breath.

As a result, strangely enough, it has largely been left to writers and reporters
not in Iraq to look up and give Americans a sense of what's going on in the
skies - as Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who until recently covered the
war from Baghdad and is now back in this country, does below. Tom


An Increasingly Aerial Occupation
---------------------------------

by Dahr Jamail

The American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war
being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance - and, 
as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the
bombing.

When the air war shows up at all in our press, it is never as a campaign, but as
scattered bare-bones reports of individual attacks on specific targets, almost
invariably based on military announcements. A typical example was reported by
Reuters on December 4th: "Two US Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided bombs"
which, according to a military spokesperson, killed two "insurgents" after they
attacked an army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad. On the same day,
Reuters reported that "a woman and two children" were "wounded when US forces
conducted an air strike, bombing two houses in Baiji, 180 kilometers (112 miles)
north of Baghdad".

And even this minimalist version of the American air war rarely makes it into
large media outlets in the US


Ignoring the Obvious

Author and media critic Norman Solomon asked the following question recently:
"According to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase 'air war'
appeared in the New York Times this year with reference to the current US
military effort in Iraq? As of early December, the answer is: Zero." Solomon
went on to point out that the phrase "air war" had not appeared in either the
Washington Post or Time magazine even a single time this year.

Curiously enough, US Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) reports are more
detailed than anything we normally can read in our papers. On December 6, 
for example, CENTAF admitted to 46 air missions over Iraq flown on the 
previous day - in order to provide "support to coalition troops, infrastructure
protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt
terrorist activities".

Albeit usually broadly (and vaguely) described, and seldom taking possible
civilian casualties into account, these daily tabulations by the Air Force often
flesh out bare-bones reports with a little extra detail on the nature of the air
war. On that December 6th, for instance, the report added that "Air Force F-16
Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air
support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Balad and
Ramadi".

Not surprisingly, given their source, such reports glide over or underemphasize
potentially damaging information like the fact that bombing runs of this sort
are regularly conducted in heavily-inhabited areas of Iraq's cities and towns
where the resistance may also be strongly embedded. Oblique statements like 
the following are the best you are likely to get from the military: "Coalition
aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations focused on
creating a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections".

As a result, aside from reportage by one of the rare western independent
journalists left in Iraq or the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the US,
the American air assault on Iraq remains devastatingly ill-covered by larger
outlets here. This remains true, even as, militarily, air power begins to move
center stage at a moment when large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops
are clearly being considered by the Bush administration.

I have worked as an independent reporter in Baghdad for over eight months 
during the US occupation of Iraq thus far and I can confirm that a day never
passed in the capital city when the low rumblings of an Apache helicopter or the
supersonic thundering roar of an F-16 fighter jet didn't cause me to look up for
the source of the noise. Many a night I would be awakened by the low, whumping
blades of US helicopters scouring the rooftops of the capital city - flying at
almost building height to avoid rocket-propelled grenades from resistance
fighters. I would oftentimes wonder where they were coming from, as well as
where they were going.

It is impossible, really, to miss the overt signs of the ongoing air war in 
Iraq when you are there, which makes the lack of coverage all the more startling.
At night, while standing on the roof of my hotel in Baghdad during the November
2004 assault on Fallujah, a city some forty-odd miles away, I could see on the
horizon the distant flashes of US bombs that were searing that embattled city.

I often wondered how the scores of journalists in Baghdad working for major
American papers and TV networks could continue to ignore the daily air campaign
the US military was waging right over their heads or within eyesight. Along with
countless eyewitness interviews I did on the damage caused from the air, this is
what prompted me to write "Living Under the Bombs" for Tomdispatch some ten
months ago. But it has only been thanks to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, a
journalist who has never even been to Iraq, that the important subject of the
air campaign there has finally been brought to public awareness on a wider scale.
In a recent interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about his latest piece in
that magazine, aptly titled, "Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?"
he commented, "Clearly there's all sorts of anecdotal reason to believe that the
bombing has gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in
the Sunni Triangle, the four provinces around Baghdad". But he also pointed that,
when it comes to the American air campaign, "There's no statistics ... We don't
know what's going on with the air war".

However, we have at least an idea.


Vietnamizing Iraq

The statistics we can glean from CENTAF indicate a massive rise in the number of
US air missions in Iraq for the month of November as compared to most previous
months. Excluding weekends - for some reason the Air Force does not make the
number of sorties they fly in Iraq and Afghanistan on Fridays and Saturdays
known to the public - 996 November sorties were flown in Iraq according to
CENTAF.

The size of this figure naturally begs the question, where are such missions
being flown and what is their size and nature? And it's important to note as
well that "air war" does not simply mean US Air Force. Carrier-based Navy and
Marine aircraft flew over 21,000 hours of missions and dropped over 26 tons of
ordnance in Fallujah alone during the November 2004 siege of that city.

In his recent article and interview, Hersh rightly reflects the concern of
American military men that, in any proposed draw-down plan for American forces,
Iraqi security forces are likely to be given some responsibility for Air Force
targeting operations. After all, they'll be the ones left on the ground. It's an
idea, he reports, that is "driving the Air Force crazy", because they fear it
may involve them in a future revenge war of ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.

Even Pentagon figures indicate that ten to fifteen percent of laser-guided
munitions don't land where intended, but having those munitions land (or 
not land) where "the Iranians" intend doesn't please US officials. Senior
intelligence personnel complained to Hersh that "Iran will be targeting our
bombers".

Ironically, President Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird recently wrote
an article in Foreign Affairs magazine arguing that his "withdrawal" policy of
"Vietnamization" during that war, actually worked. (It involved withdrawing
American troops while fiercely increasing the American air war in what was then
South Vietnam and surrounding countries.) So, argues Laird, would "Iraqification".


"The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that
the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. I believed then and
still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was
capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now."

Though Laird's rewriting of the history of the last years of the Vietnam War
(and his own dismally failed policies) may be striking at this moment, he is
clearly hardly alone in holding onto the idea that a "withdrawal" that would
involve ever more bombs dropped and missiles fired from American aircraft is now
the way to go. In a classic case of history repeating itself (as tragedy but
also possibly farce), the Bush administration appears to be seriously
considering an "Iraqification" policy of its own.

US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski used to work in the Pentagon
and for the National Security Agency before retiring in 2003. Well known as a
Pentagon whistleblower for speaking out about Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's corrupt Office of Special Plans in which so much of the pre-war
"intelligence" for Iraq was cherry-picked and passed on, Kwiatkowski has been
consistently critical of the Bush Administration.

Kwiatowski believes the administrations' new policy of substituting air power
for troops harkens back to the failure of Vietnam. "Let me see if I have this
right", she says in an interview with Tomdispatch.

"We have a foul-mouthed Texan in the White House, facing a domestically
unpopular war that he never expected to have to fight. In order to stop a
persistent anti-American insurgency in a faraway country, this President will
now escalate the use of air power, striking deep into the heart of insurgency
strongholds and destroying the will of those that support the insurgency.

"This sounds like a replay of Rolling Thunder, March 1965. The Pentagon, led by
the last remnant of those who were supposed to have directly experienced the
danger of politicized wars managed out of the White House and the sheer
uselessness of air power to win hearts and minds, must indeed be out of its
collective mind to support a strategic shift like this."

It is important to note that, as in Vietnam, troop morale in Iraq now seems to
be plummeting. According to the Army's own figures, in a study conducted last
summer with all units in Iraq, 56% of them reported either "low" or "very low"
morale. Keep in mind that towards the end of the war in Vietnam, the Army was 
in a state of ongoing revolt and incipient collapse. By the time direct US
involvement ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the sort
of mixed morale statistics seen in our military in Iraq last summer would have
been an impossible dream.

Getting large numbers of troops out while intensifying the air war might seem
then like a reasonable formula for solving certain of this administration's
problems without abandoning its basic Iraq policies, but this will undoubtedly
prove a perilous undertaking in its own right, as Hersh recently pointed out: 
"A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public
statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American
airpower. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number
of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the
over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase
unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

One can easily imagine the potential for disaster at a future moment when Shia
and Kurdish militia members in Iraqi army uniforms would be calling down
air-strikes on Sunni neighborhoods, settling old scores as civilian casualties
went through the roof.


Current Trends

But visions of a frightful future in Iraq should not be overshadowed by the
devastation already caused by present levels of American air power loosed, 
in particular, on heavily populated urban areas of that country.

CENTAF reports, for example, that on November 14th of this year, "Air Force F-15
Eagles, MQ-1 Predators unmanned aerial vehicles and Royal Air Force Tornado GR4
aircraft flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity of Karabilah.
The F-15s dropped precision-guided bombs and the Predators fired Hellfire
missiles successfully against insurgent positions." The tactic of using
massively powerful 500 and 1,000 pound bombs in urban areas to target small
pockets of resistance fighters has, in fact, long been employed in Iraq. 
No intensification of the air war is necessary to make it a commonplace.

The report from November 14th adds, "Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons flew air
strikes against anti-Iraqi forces near Balad. The F-16s successfully dropped a
precision-guided bomb on a building used by insurgents. F-16s and a Predator
also flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity of Karabilah.
The Predator successfully fired a Hellfire missile against insurgent positions."

The vagueness of certain aspects of such reports from CENTAF is troubling,
however. The reasons for bombing raids are usually given in generic formulas
like this typical one found in official statements released on November 24th 
and 27th: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces
operations to create a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary
elections". Such formulations, of course, tell us, as they are meant to, next to
nothing about what may actually be happening - and as the air war is virtually
never covered by American reporters in Iraq, these and other versions of the
official language of air power are never seriously considered, questioned,
explored, or compared to events on the ground.

Another common mission, as stated on the 17th, 22nd and several other days in
November (and used again in CENTAF's December statements) has been the equally
vague: "included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection,
reconstruction activities, and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist
activities".

One of the busier days for the US Air Force in Iraq recently was the last day 
of November, when 59 sorties were flown. CENTAF reported that "F-15 Eagles
successfully dropped precision-guided munitions against an insurgents' weapons
bunker near Baghdad. F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18
Hornets and F-14 Tomcats provided close-air support to coalition troops in
contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Al Hawijah, Al Mahmudiyah and Fallujah." 
In addition, Royal Australian Air Force were also flying surveillance and
reconnaissance missions that day, as the British Air Force often does on other
days.


Weaponry

A broad overview of the types of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft the US
military is employing in Iraq gives an idea of the scope of the air war
currently underway and the sort of destructive power available on an everyday
basis. It can also offer hints of what we might expect in an air-power
intensified draw-down future.

While this is in no way an inclusive list, fixed-wing aircraft include the F-14D
Tomcat and F/A 18 fighter jets which are being used by the Navy and Marines. The
F-18 fires the laser-guided, 630 pound Maverick Missile (at a cost of $141,442
per shot, by the way). In addition, both the F-14 and F/A 18 fire a 20
millimeter hydraulically operated gatling gun which emits between 4,000 and
6,000 rounds per minute at a range of "several thousand yards".

The Air Force is using F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter jets, along with AF
MQ-1 Predator drones which are armed with Hellfire missiles. AV-8 Harrier
fighter jets have also been used in Iraq as have AC-130 gunships, especially in
urban battles like the fighting for Fallujah last year. These planes are capable
of circling targets for long periods while raining thousands of rounds of
ammunition per minute down from above. Then there is the A-10 Warthog military
jet which is used as ground support, as it is capable of firing 4,200 armor
piercing 30 millimeter rounds per minute.

At this point, bombs used commonly range in explosive power from 250 to 2,000
pounds, with cluster bombs, the MK-77 500 pound fire bomb (napalm) and the
infamous White Phosphorous also having been employed at various moments. The
Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb, ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds, 
was used extensively during the most recent military operation against Fallujah.
The 2,000 pound variety, for example, has the capacity to blast a crater in a
concrete street seventy feet in diameter and thirty feet deep. This size of bomb
has a blast radius of 110 feet within which a human being will die, while
fragmentation from the bomb casing can achieve velocities up to 9,000 feet 
per second and reach areas over 3,000 feet away from the detonation site.

The US military is also using a wide variety of helicopters offensively in Iraq.
These include the Apache, Kiowa, Black Hawk, Cobra, Pave Low, Chinook, and
Iroquois.

Most of the available data - and it's minimal - about how all this airpower is
being used in Iraq comes from the Air Force. One of their news reports from June
2005, for example, typically reported a single incident in which air power was
brought to bear: "Coalition aircraft dropped seven precision-guided bombs while
providing close-air support to coalition troops in the western Al Anbar province
of Iraq on June 11. Anti-Iraqi forces had taken refuge in buildings in an
attempt to shield themselves from coalition attack. An estimated forty
insurgents were killed."

Brigadier General Allen G Peck, deputy combined forces air component commander,
added "Our job was to provide close-air support and intel to coalition troops in
direct contact with anti-Iraqi forces. Airpower support extends well beyond
dropping munitions. Our top priority is providing close-air support and
reconnaissance to our Soldiers, Marines and coalition forces in contact with
enemy forces on the ground."

The Air Force claims that "nearly seventy percent of all munitions used by the
air component since the start of the operation have been precision-guided", 
and "every possible precaution is taken to protect innocent Iraqi civilians,
friendly coalition forces, facilities and infrastructure". However, a serious
study of violence to civilians in Iraq by a British medical journal, the Lancet,
released in October 2004, estimated that 85% of all violent deaths in Iraq are
generated by coalition forces and claimed that many of these are due to US air
strikes. While no significant scientific inquiry has been carried out in Iraq
recently, Iraqi medical personnel, working in areas where US military operations
continue, report to me that they feel the "vast majority" of civilian deaths are
the result of actions by the occupation forces.

Given the US air power already being applied largely in Iraq's cities and towns,
the prospect of increasing it is chilling indeed. As to how this might benefit
the embattled Bush administration, we return to Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski:

"Shifting the mechanism of the destruction of Iraq from soldiers and Marines to
distant and safer air power would be successful in several ways. It would reduce
the negative publicity value of maimed American soldiers and Marines, would
bring a portion of our troops home and give the Army a necessary operational
break. It would increase Air Force and Naval budgets, and line defense
contractor pockets. By the time we figure out that it isn't working to make oil
more secure or to allow Iraqis to rebuild a stable country, the Army will have
recovered and can be redeployed in force."


But if current trends continue, the end of the US occupation in Iraq may more
closely resemble the ending in Vietnam - a view Kwiatkowski agrees with. The
political climate at home may force a decrease in the number of US troops in
Iraq, but the compensatory upswing in air power meant to offset this will be
inevitable and will inevitably lead to unexpected problems. Why? Because the
Bush administration will still be committed to permanently hanging onto a
crucial group of four or five mega-military bases (into which billions of
construction and communications dollars have already been poured) along with 
a massive embassy, directing political and military "traffic" from the heart 
of Baghdad's Green Zone - and that means an unending occupation of Iraq,
something that, air power or no, can only mean endless strife.


Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent
eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, and recently has been giving
presentations about Iraq around the US. He regularly reports for Inter Press
Service, and contributes to the Independent, the Sunday Herald, and Asia Times
as well as Tomdispatch.com. He maintains a website at: 
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com

Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt, a fellow 
at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US
mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves. The service is intended to
introduce you to voices from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who
might offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The End of
Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is
at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation
Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of
California, Berkeley.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42286


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/