Dispatch from Iraq,

Dahr Jamail on the Missing Air War in Iraq

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt 

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. forces conducted an air strike, bombing two houses in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad."

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

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 U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S., 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 40-odd miles away, I could see on the horizon the distant flashes of U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

Prev Page - Next Page >>