When in doubt, 'liberate' from the air

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak03.html

Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq's security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad - presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued "the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working". That's more rubbish.

Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there's virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming - they stick to base - fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora - but it will be back.

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's "surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.

Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable "collateral damage" of these attacks - families, women, children, assorted "non-combatants". The US Air Force does not even take responsibility - claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.

The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.