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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 10:47 am Post subject: 500% Increase in US bombing raids on Iraq |
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| Quote: | 500% Increase in US bombing raids on Iraq
SALEH MAMON explores a little-reported but alarming trend in Washington's war on Iraq.
JUDGING by the TV and newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that Washington's "surge" is restoring peace and normality to Iraq.
The relentless PR offensive comes as no surprise - the US and British establishments are desperate to conceal the truth to make the war domestically acceptable.
Selective, illusory "embedded" reporting is masking the truth about the war, leaving many readers and viewers with the misleading impression that progress is being made.
The Bush government's facade relies on reducing US casualties.
It has managed to achieve this in part by placing Iraqi troops and police in the front line. But it has also massively escalated its air war, a tactic that keeps its troops well out of harm's way.
The US military keeps information on munitions secret. However, daily reports on close-air-support (CAS) missions are released by US central command. They paint a disturbing picture of the growing scale of the air assault.
In 2007, bombs were dropped during 1,447 CAS missions, marking a steep increase from the years 2004-6. Munitions were dropped during 285 missions in 2004, 404 in 2005 and only 229 in 2006.
In the first nine months of 2007 alone, more bombs were dropped by warplanes than in the previous three years put together.
While the arrival of an additional 30,000 US ground troops may have grabbed all the headlines, the real surge has been in the skies. The year 2006-7 saw a 500 per cent rise in bombing raids.
Shocking as these figures are, they do not include guided missiles, unguided rockets and cannon rounds fired by US forces and private contractors.
One weapon conspicuously left out of this summary is the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket, which carries various warheads. It has become the most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system in this violent campaign.
The AC-130 warplane is the helicopter of choice for US special forces. Armed with a Gatling gun firing up to 1,800 rounds a minute, they were used in 2004 to shred entire housing blocks in Baghdad's Sadr City.
However, the Guided Bomb Unit 12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead capable of reducing mansions to rubble, is the most commonly deployed weapon.
The US central command reported that 111,000 pounds of bombs were dropped in Iraq in 2006. Last month, 100,000 pounds of explosives rained on the Arab Jabour area alone during a 10-day onslaught. There were no reports on the damage done to this rich farmland or casualties.
Arab Jabour, which lies 10 miles south of Baghdad, was targeted on the pretext that it was a "hideout" for al-Qaida. It could be that its fate will be shared by many more Iraqis in the months to come as part of a new US policy of high-tech extermination.
Back in 2006, the Lancet published a systematic survey of Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion.
It estimated that, from March 2003 to June 2006, over 13 per cent of 601,000 violent deaths in Iraq had been caused by air strikes. It found that 50 per cent of deaths of Iraqi children under the age of 15 had been delevered from the air.
Given the fivefold increase in bombings since 206, it can be safely assumed that fatalities will increase proportionately.
Recent reports from Amnesty and Oxfam paint a bleak picture of the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq. The noted a vast increase in internally displaced people to around 2 million, putting the number of refugees outside Iraq at over 2 million.
Their reports highlight cases where sectarian strife was the main cause of displacement. Unfortunately, they overlook the impact of bombing raids.
Historical evidence suggests that US "air support" displaced 25 per cent of the population in Laos, 33 per cent in Vietnam and almost a million people in Cambodia during the 1960s. Certainly, the 2004 attack on Fallujah destroyed 75 per cent of the city and resulted in large displacement of its 400,000-strong population.
So, what has happened to their mission of bringing "freedom and democracy" to Iraq? It has metamorphosed into the destruction of people, homes and infrastructure in the name of counter-insurgency. There can be no reconstruction when destruction is the order of the day.
Saleh Mamon is an Iraq Occupation Focus activist. |
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