on bombing Fallujah

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FL08Ak02.html


-long snip-

Think of it this way: Imagine the history of the development of the plane and of bombing as, in shape, a giant, extremely top-heavy diamond. In 1903, one fragile plane flies 36 meters. In 1911, another only slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy some primordial law, drops a bomb. In 1945, vast air armadas take off to devastate chosen German and Japanese cities. On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas is compacted into the belly of the Enola Gay, a lone B-29, which drops its single bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city and so many of its inhabitants. And then just imagine that the man who commanded the US Army Air Forces, both the armadas and the Enola Gay, General Henry "Hap" Arnold (according to Robin Neillands in The Bomber War, The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany), "had been taught to fly by none other than Orville Wright, one of the two men credited with inventing the first viable airplane". Barely more than a generation took us from those 36 meters at Kitty Hawk past thousand-plane bomber fleets to the Enola Gay and the destruction of one city from the air by one bomb. Imagine that.

-snip-


'Hotels had crumbled into the street'

With that in mind, here's the thing in Iraq - and I'm not sure you can even call it strange: American reporters can now be found embedded with tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle units. ("Captain Paul Fowler sat on the curb next to a deserted gas station," writes Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe. "Behind him, smoke rose over Fallujah. His company of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles had roamed the eastern third of the city for 13 days, shooting holes in every building that might pose a threat, leaving behind a landscape of half-collapsed houses and factories singed with soot. 'I really hate that it had to be destroyed. But that was the only way to root these guys out,' said Fowler, 33, the son of a Baptist preacher in North Carolina. 'The only way to root them out is to destroy everything in your path.'") American reporters can climb aboard Surcs (Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech Swift Boat equivalents, as John Burns of the New York Times did recently, to "roar up the Euphrates on a dawn raid". They can follow US patrols as they bust down Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. They can even describe the perilous, missile-avoiding "corkscrew" landings their planes make as they are first delivered to Baghdad International Airport and the IED- (improvised explosive device) and suicide-car-bomber-strewn roadway in from the airport. The only thing they evidently don't do once they get to Iraq - and I base this solely on the reporting of the war that comes back to us - is look up. The Iraqi air seems to be filled with all kinds of jets, fearsome AC-130 Spectre gunships, Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones, and ubiquitous Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma helicopters that - now that the highways are so perilous - are the preferred method of military transport and that seem to hover endlessly over potential urban battlefields.

-snip-

But if the Old City of Najaf (evidently still largely unreconstructed) and the whole city of Fallujah are now memorials to US firepower and a US willingness to call down retribution from the skies, air power has been used far more widely across much of heavily populated urban Iraq without any press comment whatsoever, on or off editorial pages. Let me offer just a few examples from many to give a sense of the range of Iraqi cities hit from the air in recent months:

-snip-

Tall Afar: "Soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, also known as the Stryker Brigade, launched a fierce attack on Tall Afar on Thursday ... The fighting, which included three air strikes involving AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter jets, killed 67 insurgents, according to the US military" (Washington Post, September 12).

-snip--

Samarra: "By US military estimates, about 125 rebels were killed and more than 80 captured. Most of the deaths occurred early Friday in the first hours of the strike, when US helicopter gunships blasted suspected rebel positions with rocket fire" (Los Angeles Times, October 4).

(the list went on...)

Here is a response by the marine commander in Fallujah, Lieutenant-General John Sattler, to a question at a November 18 briefing by a New York Times reporter on the fighting in Fallujah:

General Sattler: Yeah. Approximately four days ago we were averaging somewhere along 50 precision - and I stress the word "precision" - about 50 precision air strikes a day ... Today we had three air strikes - three precision-guided munition air strikes today.

That's about the size of what we know. To the extent that we know anything about the loosing of air power on heavily populated urban areas, we only know what an uninquisitive press has been told by the military and stenographically recorded, which means we know remarkably little. Here, however, is the impression of the British Broadcasting Corp's Stuart Richie, just a week ago on the US air campaign in northern Iraq:

I found an empty camp bed, but sleep was virtually impossible - troops moving in and out all night by helicopter and Hercules planes. Fighter planes also seemed to be on the go all through the night, this time on sorties to Mosul, I believe.
Fighter planes "on the go all through the night"? Is this not worth a single newspaper or magazine article?

-snip-
the article goes on....finally asking the media why we know so little
----------------------------------


war crimes