Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?

[subsuelo]

by Tom Engelhardt | Asia Times

When, in April 1937, the German Condor Legion dropped 45,000 kilograms of explosives on the Spanish town of Guernica, international outrage followed, and Pablo Picasso was inspired to paint his now famous Guernica. When the US Air Force recently loosed 45,000 kilograms of bombs on a small Sunni farming district in Iraq, there was hardly a peep. These days, only "insurgent" suicide bombings warrant media attention, while the US's air "surge" is politely played down.

...
As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many US air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 45,000 kilograms of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 18,000 kilograms of explosives, which got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 7,200 kilograms of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 6,800 kilograms of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to include US Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)

American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian populations - in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for making civilians into "shields". And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in the US press.

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.

...
Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the US) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the US Air Force looses 45,000 kilograms of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

[acmavm]

1. People notice. Don't think they don't, But they aren't people here in this

country who don't want to see what they're responsible for. What war criminals are doing to innocent people who are sitting on the oil that Americans want for their SUVs and Hummers.

But other nations are not so blind.

[aquart]

2. Someone yelled at me earlier that Bill Clinton took blood money

from a vile Kazahkstan dictator. And I didn't think to tell her that there is no money that isn't dripping, not in this nation. Maybe not in the world.

And somewhere on this board is an article about farmers in India (?) committing suicide because of greedy corporate practices.

The world economy is a bloody messy tangle of corpses. As Americans, we're in a bad position to throw stones at anyone, so drenched are we.

You really shouldn't wonder that we can't look.

[Briar]

6. Well

if the American poeple wanted to hear, I think their media would tell them. What they do want to hear is that the "bad guys" are dead. (Helps the Republicans too - hence the current story about a Taliban commander's remote controlled execution. A "good news" story in our twisted culture.) And if civilians die - somehow we've all been desensitised to the idea of collateral damage. I can tell you the appetite for honesty about war and violence instead of glamorised callousness is not much evident in England (Wales and Scotland may be better).

[subsuelo]

3. And the lead story on this morning's CBS Early Show?

Britney Spears.

[libodem]

4. how can collateral damage

just become a 'phrase', only words. The war has become so sanitized and white washed, that no one cares who gets bombed, anymore. I'm in agony over it. Cheneybush just goes on vacation and sleeps well at night.

[Briar]

5. Remote control assassination...

This passage chilled my blood:

...Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that "the military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq". The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first 10 months of 2007 - with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same...

...As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:
I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq ... It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, "I'm not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren't important anymore."
To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.


How conscious will such push button assassins be of the mayhem and terror they spread? How much will it seem like just a game played on Second Life? How long before it becomes a part of Second Life - your very own cyber wargame. Kill the bad guys and never see the blood?

Everytime I think about buying a satnav, by the way, I reject the notion. I'd be taking advantage of a system run by tight-lipped, close-minded military types whose main interest is: where do I drop the bomb to do the most damage?