U.S. Intensified Bombing Campaigns in
In one of the largest airstrikes since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, American warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on Sunni farmlands south of Baghdad Jan. 10. The targets were suspected al Qaeda positions near citrus groves around the town of Arab Jabour. In November, leaders of a Sunni Arab militia group allied with the U.S. reported American bombs killed 45 members of their group, when they were mistaken for al Qaeda fighters. In October, 15 women and children were killed when U.S. planes attacked a suspected enemy position in the Lake Thar Thar region northwest of Baghdad.
The Associated Press reported that there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007, coinciding with President Bush's troop escalation. More than 30 tons of the ordinance dropped have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.
Afghanistan has also endured an intensification of U.S. and NATO airstrikes which has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of civilians killed. In mid-2007, Afghan President Hamid Karzai held a press conference to condemn what he called the "careless operations of NATO and international forces" that he asserted was killing innocent victims.
Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Foreign Policy in
Focus columnist Conn Hallinan, who examines the U.S. military's bombing
tactics and how the resulting civilian casualties exacerbate hostility
toward occupation forces.
CONN HALLINAN: One of the things
that's happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan is that there's been an
enormous step-up in the airwar. There's been a five-fold increase in
the air war over the last year in Iraq; there's been a two-fold
increase in Afghanistan, but there was a 20-fold increase in the year
before. So, what we're seeing is enormous stepped-up air operations.
And those air operations result in large numbers of civilian
casualties. In Afghanistan, it's reached the point where the NATO
forces are asking the Americans to stop the air attacks, because
they're creating such hostility on the ground. And in the case of Iraq,
the number of civilian casualties is rising steadily.
The air
war is largely a result of the fact that we don't have enough troops;
there's no way we can get enough troops, so we're relying on air power.
And we can all talk about things like surgical strikes, but you know, a
thousand-pound bomb from 30,000 feet –- even laser-guided –- hits a
village, it's hardly surgery, at least not the kind that you'd want
someone to take a piece of your appendix out with, anyhow.
BETWEEN
THE LINES: Conn, we recently heard the United States Air Force dropped
40,000 pounds of bombs on the outskirts of Baghdad. Maybe just as an
example of what you're talking about, what do we know about that
bombardment and the resulting casualties?
CONN HALLINAN: Well,
it's really in some ways, somewhat of a shift in tactics. There are
three kinds of bombings that we do. One is what they call strategic
bombing, and that's what we did in Afghanistan –- which is that we
basically didn't have any troops in Afghanistan. What we did was, we
just went over the country and we flattened everything. It's a kind of
a bombing that you sort of think of in World War II -- long-range,
strategic kind of bombing.
And then the other kind of bombing
is this tactical bombing, where you have a unit and you call in an
airstrike because you happen to be in a place where you suddenly get
ambushed or you get outnumbered and you call in airstrikes to help out
the troops on the ground.
But the kind of huge amount of bombs
that were dropped on Baghdad –- this is what they call "shaping the
battlefield." And that's actually the term that was used by the
Pentagon. It doesn't involve troops. What we do is, we go in, we have
intelligence -- as you know, our intelligence in Iraq has been so good
over the years –- we have intelligence that there are insurgents in
this area, or al Qaeda or something like that. We shape the battlefield
by bringing in B1 bombers, F-16s, some of these robot airplanes like
the Predator and the Reaper, that kind of stuff. And we just flatten
one of these villages. Now, we probably do kill insurgents. We also
kill everybody else that's in the village. All of those people are
members of klans, they're all members of tribes. We've just signed a
blood feud with all those people that were killed.
A lot of
times, this shaping of the battlefield ends up killing our own people.
This kind of bombing is the worst kind of thing that you can possibly
do if you have any interest in winning hearts and minds --and we simply
have given up on winning hearts and minds -- and the idea is that we're
going to terrorize the population with a bombing campaign. It never
worked before. Bombing campaigns have never worked to terrorize a
population. Take World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam
War -- even the Kosovo War, in which the Serbs gave up for reasons that
didn't really have to do the with bombing. Bombing just makes people
angry, and they are angry at you. They're angry at us and it tends to
drive people together, it doesn't tend to intimidate them, it just
makes them very, very angry.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Conn Hallinan,
in your article, "Death at a Distance: The U.S. Air War," you wrote
about the possibility of the prosecution of war crimes here, by our
nation, in terms of these bombardments, some of which have killed
dozens or hundreds of civilians.
CONN HALLINAN: Well, you know,
one of the things that the Geneva Conventions are absolutely clear on
is that if you have a target, which is a mixed target -- that is, you
have enemy soldiers, or insurgents, and you have a civilian population
–- you have to treat the target as civilian. Now, how do you prosecute
a war crime? The United States doesn't even recognize the war crimes
court at The Hague. But it doesn't mean that this isn't going to come
back to haunt us. So it comes back to haunt us by undermining
international law. It comes back to haunt us, by creating, sowing a
whole generation of people who hate the United States. I think it does
that. I think it also creates a terrible situation for our own soldiers
and there are going to be consequences for that, and they're going to
be years down the line.
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