"Accidents" of War-The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power

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"Accidents" of War
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-07-09 15:20. Media

The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power
By Tom Engelhardt, http://tomdispatch.com/post/174817

The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked up the morning after from an Army publicity release. These proved fairly typical for the war. On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville," as it was known to U.S. forces in the area) a significant success. "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory," and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hide-out tunnels. Six-and-a-half hours later, ‘Pink Village' had become ‘Red, White and Blue Village."

All these dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former AP reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village -- the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. Over 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies had been slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker in a nearly day-long rampage.

Things move somewhat faster these days -- after all, Vietnamese villagers and local officials didn't have access to cell phones to tell their side of the slaughter -- but from the military point of view, the stories these last years have all still seemed to start the same way. Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, they have been presented by U.S. military spokesmen, or in military press releases, as straightforward successes. The newspaper stories that followed would regularly announce that 17, or 30, or 65 "Taliban insurgents" or "suspected insurgents," or "al-Qaeda gunmen" had been killed in battle after "air strikes" were called in. These stories recorded daily military victories over a determined, battle-hardened enemy.

Most of the time, that was the beginning and end of the matter: Air strike; dead enemies; move on to the next day's bloody events. When it came to Iraq, such air-strike successes generally did not make it into the American press as stories at all, but as scattered, ho-hum paragraphs (based on military announcements) in round-ups of a given day's action focused on far more important matters -- IEDs, suicide car bombs, mortar attacks, sectarian killings. In many cases, air strikes in that country simply went unreported.

From time to time, however, another version of what happened when air strikes were called in on the rural areas of Afghanistan, or on heavily populated neighborhoods in Iraq's cities and towns, filtered out. In this story, noncombatants died, often in sizeable numbers. In the last few weeks "incidents" like this have been reported with enough regularity in Afghanistan to become a modest story in their own right.

In such news stories, a local caregiver or official or village elder is reached by phone in some distant, reporter-unfriendly spot and recounts a battle in which, by the time the planes arrive, the enemy has fled the scene, or had never been there, or was present but, as is generally the case in guerrilla wars, in close proximity to noncombatants going about their daily lives in their own homes and fields. Such accounts record a grim harvest of dead civilians -- and they almost invariably have a repeated tagline when it comes to those dead: "including women and children." In an increasing number of cases recently, reports on the carnage have taken not over a year, or weeks, or even days to exfiltrate the scene, but have actually beaten the military success story onto the news page.

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are the untold story. K&R!!!

At least in part. What the f**k does "Shock and awe" mean if not "terrorize into submission"?

and stop glamorising war or imagining that it can be honorable. It isn't. It's about winning at the least cost to oneself and the most cost to "the enemy". The article goes on:


...Here's the simplest truth of air power, then or now. No matter how technologically "smart" our bombs or missiles, they will always be ordered into action by us dumb humans; and if, in addition, they are released into villages filled with civilians going about their lives, or heavily populated urban neighborhoods where insurgents mix with city dwellers (who may or may not support them), these weapons will, by the nature of things, by policy decision, kill noncombatants. If an AC-130 or an Apache helicopter strafes an urban block or a village street where people below are running, some carrying weapons and believed to be "suspected insurgents," it will kill civilians. The disadvantage of "distant war" is that you normally have no way of knowing why someone is running, or why they are carrying a weapon, or usually who they really are.

Once Americans find themselves engaged in a guerrilla war, the urge is naturally to bring to bear military strengths and limit casualties -- and the fear is always of sending American troops into an "urban jungle," or simply a jungle, where the surroundings will serve to equalize a disproportionate American advantage in the weaponry of high-tech destruction. In distant war, particularly wars where Americans alone control the skies and can fly in them with relative impunity, the trade-off is clear indeed: our soldiers for their civilian dead "including women and children."

This is not an aberrant side effect of air war but its heart and soul. The airplane is a weapon of war, but it is also a weapon of terror -- and it is meant to be. From the beginning, it was used not to "win over" enemy populations -- after all, how could that be done from the distant skies? -- but to crush or terrorize them into submission. (It has seldom worked that way.)

Then, there's another factor that has to be added in. What if you don't really care -- not all that much anyway -- who is running in the street below you? Since 1945, American air power has regularly been used to police the imperial borders of the planet. It has, that is, been released against people of color, against what used to be called the Third World...