Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
For the grace of God in the desert hereAnd the desert far away
Democracy is coming to the u.s.a.
--Democracy, Leonard Cohen
I know you're working for the CIA
they wouldn't have you in the Mafia
Why can't we be friends?
Why can't we be friends?
--Why Can't We Be Friends? WAR
__________
Having a target is a great help in life, unless it is the wrong target, of course.
"A massive U.S. aerial bombing campaign launched in Iraq on Thursday attempted to strike a delicate balance — routing members of a newly resurgent al-Qaeda while trying to avoid civilian casualties that could alienate ordinary Iraqis."U.S. planes attacked a rural Sunni area southeast of Baghdad with 40,000 pounds of bombs during a 10-minute period. That surpassed the tonnage that previously had been dropped there during an average month, said Maj. Alayne Conway, a U.S. military spokeswoman.
"The attacks targeted suspected al-Qaeda weapons caches, supply lines and bombmaking sites, Conway said. No civilian casualties were immediately reported, she said, reflecting a central focus of the U.S. military's year-old counterinsurgency strategy: winning the support of the local population (U.S. Air Strikes In Iraq Reflect Targeted Efforts.)"
First, bombs don't do "delicate," regardless of how daintily the bombardier executes his task.
Second, note that these are "suspected supply lines, etc." Does an infantry unit assault a "suspected" enemy bunker? If the target is not hard and definitely pinned down, then it should not be bombed.
Not only does bombing suspected targets not further military objectives, it is costly and wastes valuable ordnance, misutilizing valuable assets.
Iraq Body Count reports "U.S. forces caused an average of 63 Iraqi civilian deaths per month in 2007 — down from 169 per month in 2004." Good news, unless you are one of the 63. And of course, bad news for the nine U.S. soldiers killed earlier this week at the start of a new "drive to kill al-Qaida in Iraq fighters holed up in districts north of the capital."
"Six soldiers were killed and four were wounded Wednesday in a booby-trapped house in Diyala province, where joint U.S.-Iraqi forces were driving through a difficult web of lush palm and citrus groves."
This war is so removed from any reality that might benefit America that it jars the mind. Why is the U.S. chasing this homegrown band of irregulars around their own country, getting killed and maimed in the process of gaining -- what? Al-Qaeda in Iraq didn't even exist until after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This is not a project which will benefit the U.S. either at home or abroad. It is madness.
Dropping bombs on "suspected" targets is as insane as is building airports to facilitate pilgrimages. Who is providing leadership for this fiasco?
More good news for Iraq: U.S. tax season is approaching.
Labels: bombing unconfirmed targets, madness in iraq, phony war on terror, PWOT, war on terrror, WOT as terrorist recruitment tool
posted by rangeragainstwar at 11:24 AM
10 Comments:
Ah yes, here we go again winning the hearts and minds through precision bombing. Bombing lessens the American casualties on the ground and thus they can say that the surge is working. See, fewer American casualties this month. Opps! Sorry about those innocent civilians!
tw,
Right-o, you see the elegance of thing. Dainty bombing, because they are our friends, yes?
--Lisa
i'm with ranger here. there simply is no such thing as "precision" bombing. even the most delicately guided bomb is dropped from a jet going hell bent for leather. and, as always, there is the human error factor.
one of the most chilling moments of my life came after i had called in an arclight strike of b-52s. even though i was many miles away, and up a sharp ridge when the strike happened i felt the earth shaking and often could feel the air concuss around me. when the big planes had done their work (i never got a visual on the planes or heard their engines, they were too high for that) i was sent in for an assesment.
my assesment was that the world had ended. there was nothing left. not even ruins, only smoking ashes and tumbled pieces of what had once been a thriving village complex, with agriculture and fishing. there was no surrounding countryside. i kept on and saw gaping craters, many of them still smouldering, i saw areas where the ground itself (rice paddy earth is highly rich in organic stuff) was burning, like coal. i saw craters where solid rock had glassed over from the heat and the force of the blast.
after about three hours i was able to put my finger on the most disturbing thing. there was an absolute silence. usually in the rain forest or highland cloud range there is a constant thrum and buzz of life going on. here there was nothing. i was in an area that was, in its natural state rain forest, and there weren't any bugs.
they probably have two reasons for becoming re-enamored with air attacks. the first being that the grunts are exhuasted and on the verge of collapse, and there are few if any replacements able to fill the slots of the troops leaving by attrition or by regular rotation. second, even though it has almost zero evidence of success as in either a tactical or a strategic way of thinking (germany and england bombed the living shit out of each other's civilian populations and the effect was not what the attacker's planned on, was usually the opposite). they look at two bombs dropped on japan and figure the rest of the war simply wasn't needed. drop a couple big ones and watch everything work according to plan.
it's sick. it's unrealistic. it is the act of desperate and vile men.
Thank you, MB.
What you have provided is a chillingly elegant description of hell. Even the buzz of insects was obliterated.
In the current totally unjustified aggression, all is collateral damage to the main event: profiteering.
--Lisa
Supposedly these 40,000 pounds of bombs were 38 bombs. That means that most of the bombs dropped were thousand-pounders. Which ain't precision weapons by any means, especially in crowded Baghdad neighborhoods where each bomb will take out half a city block's worth of houses, probably taking out a couple dozen civilians in the process. But of course we don't do body counts (sarcasm intended), so these people aren't dead, they just... aren't.
Yay. It really feels great being the citizen of a country involved in the mass murder of innocents, doesn't it?
TW,Even if the civilians are not innocent the US does not possess the legitimacy to pound them into the ground. jim
MB, your memory reminds me of the old poster sold in the 70's Infantry bookstore.It sowed a devastated battlefield with the grunts shot to hell and one says to another survivor--We won.RIGHT.//The bombing is a requirement of corporate war- the zoomies must get a slice of the pie. Also they need their A@D to look like winners. And so it goes //These bombing campaigns are as close to urban planning that DOD can conceptualize in their wondrous nation building efforts. One should actually laugh if it weren't so sad and misguided.//The new COIN manual stresses legitimacy as the key to the effort and we equate that to bombing.Yep, thats legitimacy for you. //I hope your new year is shaping up. your friend, jim
Badtux, in gwb's world a 1000 lb bomb is as s ubtle as he can think.//My replies to MB and TW are also correct for your observations. // My concern is that America can't see thru this sad state of affairs.Where is a leader saying what you so accurately state?//All that goes around comes around.Thank you lord, thank you jesus. jim
MB,
After thinking about your comments, I'd like to add the following:
The BDA that you discussed is much more legitimate than the bombings we see in Iraq. The war that you were fighting had progressed to the conventional stage, and as a SEAL, you were probably operating in a denied area, which was in fact a free fire zone with minimal civilians present.
The bombings in Iraq are the exact opposite, and have no legitimacy, as yours did. Your actions were wholly appropriate for the scenario in which you were operating.
Putting an arclight on a N. Vietnamese civilian neighborhood to force them to the peace table is much more analogous to what is happening in Baghdad today. It is not the same, but it as inappropriate as aerial bombing in Baghdad.
As an afterthought to your BDA: If they can't take a joke, fuck 'em.
that particular op was a mix of tactical neccessity and strategic realpolitik. it was an area in laos that was a transhipping depot for the trail. supplies were flowing through that area that were killing our guys. i went in alone because the zone was hopping. i mean fucking hot. there was about an 80/20% mix of civilian to military assets but there was no way to separate and define targets explicitly. if the fuel dump is right next to a little ville there isn't much you can do to protect them. if the ammo dump is right next to the headman's hootch there isn't much hope of his kids seeing high school. there weren't things like barracks. there was no way to escape doing a great deal of damage, because of the concentrations there wasn't a feasible way for me to get a closer look. too many of them out patrolling. the closest i was able to get to the main compound was to glass it from over a mile, along with some decent elevation. anything closer would have been suicide. as it was when i moved away and out of the killing zone i had to cover about 30 klicks in less than two days.
the order came from the flight leader of the biggies flight leader to wing, we are to waste this whole goddamned valley.
yeah, they sure did. 8 b52s put an unholy damn damn on an area the size of an average (thinking in terms of 120,000 folks) city. it took them 40 minutes to make two end to end passes.
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