| Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) |
From: Coyote <mmealing_-at-_direct.ca>
To: no_to_nato_-at-_flora.org
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 16:16:03 -0800
References: <00e301c4db00$1b5ed820$74b54418@du.shawcable.net>
Dear Trudy:
(1) I couldn't find anything on Missile Protest riffraff
(2) I append a recent article from the Brtitish Daily Mirror on US use
of Napalm in Iraq - at least twice!
(3)I append a recent article from Mother Jones on bombing, which says
nothing about napalm but is nevertheless relevant.
2 & 3 per brief searches via alltheweb.com
Peace/Mark Mealing
Trudy Thorgeirson wrote:
> At a Citizen's inquiry I heard of two things I would like to find
> information on-
> it seems a morning CBC- and I'm not sure if it was radio or TV- called
> missile Defense protesters riffraff. I think his name was David--- - but not
> sure.
> And napalm being used in Falujah. Nothing in North American papers but in
> UK papers.
(2)
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14920109&method=full&siteid=106694&headline=fallujah-napalmed-name_page.html
FALLUJAH NAPALMED
Nov 28 2004
US uses banned weapon ..but was Tony Blair told?
By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor
US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining
insurgents in and around Fallujah. News that President George W. Bush
has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and
jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments
around the world.
And last night Tony Blair was dragged into the row as furious Labour MPs
demanded he face the Commons over it. Reports claim that innocent
civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human
fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh. Outraged critics have also
demanded that Mr Blair threatens to withdraw British troops from Iraq
unless the US abandons one of the world's most reviled weapons. Halifax
Labour MP Alice Mahon said: "I am calling on Mr Blair to make an
emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It
begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"
Since the American assault on Fallujah there have been reports of
"melted" corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries. Last August
the US was forced to admit using the gas in Iraq. A 1980 UN convention
banned the use of napalm against civilians - after pictures of a naked
girl victim fleeing in Vietnam shocked the world. America, which didn't
ratify the treaty, is the only country in the world still using the weapon.
(3)
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/12/12_400.html
Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq
The loosing of air power on Iraq's cities is the great missing story of
the postwar war. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it?
By Tom Engelhardt
December 6, 2004
The human imagination is quicker off the mark than any six-gun, bomb, or
JDAM missile. Long before humans made it into airplanes, whole cities
were being destroyed from the air -- in an avalanche of popular fiction.
By the late 19th century London had gone down in flames more than once
and New York soon would follow; genocidal wars from the air were
repeatedly imagined and described in which whole nations, whole races,
were wiped out. In 1913, over three decades before the first atomic bomb
was dropped, HG Wells had already imagined and named "atomic weapons" in
The World Set Free, his novel about a 1950s atomic air war.
When it came to fantasies and fears of destruction we knew no bounds. As
the scholar Stephen Weart has written in Nuclear Fear, A History of Images:
"Right from the start [the] new idea of atomic weapons was linked to an
even more impressive idea: the end of the world. When [scientist
Frederick] Soddy first told the public about atomic energy, in May 1903,
he said that our planet is ‘a storehouse stuffed with explosives,
inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only
awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.'
This was an entirely new idea: that it might be technically possible for
someone to destroy the world deliberately. Yet the idea slipped into the
public mind with suspicious ease… For example, in 1903 the irrepressible
Gustave Le Bon got into newspaper Sunday supplements in various
countries by imagining a radioactive device that could ‘blow up the
whole earth' at the touch of a button.'"
In fact, for almost half a century before 1945, such weapons were the
property only of science fiction. Michael Sherry in his magisterial (if
highly detailed) history, The Rise of American Air Power, offers this
comment on the machine that delivered the first of those atomic devices
of our imagination to a real city, "More than any other modern weapon,
the bomber was imagined before it was invented." Should we be amazed or
horrified, proud or ashamed to have so actively imagined a century or
more of future horrors of our own making? The imagination worked so
quickly, but at least as miraculous was how quickly the inventors and
the scientists followed.
I doubt that any invention other than the airplane has so combined the
wonder of creation, of the defiance of obvious human limits, and of
destruction so intimately and for so long; so long, in fact -- at least
to judge from the non-coverage of the air war the Bush administration
has unleashed in "postwar" Iraq against heavily populated urban centers
-- that we (or our reporters) have evidently simply become inured to the
very idea of it. Now, it seems, the wonder and even the horror of air
power is largely gone, but the inventions, the destruction, and the
carnage remain. The odd thing is this: No sooner had we human beings
risen above the earth in powered flight -- think Icarus -- than we
expressed the wonder of that event by dropping bombs from the planes
that took us into the heavens. After that, it was just a straight line
up (or do I mean down?) for the next near century.
Look at it this way: the Wright Brothers' "whopper flying machine"
leaves the beach at Kitty Hawk for the first time on December 17, 1903.
That initial flight lasts all of twelve seconds before the plane hits
the sand 120 feet away. Later the same day, the plane flies 859 feet in
59 seconds before, on a final flight, it totals itself and is no more.
Only five years later, the Wright brothers are demonstrating their new
invention in the skies over Washington for the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
By 1911, two years short of a decade after its invention, the plane is
wedded to the bomb. According to Sven Lindqvist's (irritatingly
organized but fascinating) labyrinth of a book, A History of Bombing,
one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out of his delicate monoplane and
dropped the bomb -- a Danish Haasen hand grenade -- on the North African
oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he attacked the
oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were
dropped during this first air attack." On the "natives" in the colonies,
naturally enough. What better place to test a new weapon? And that first
attack, as perhaps befits our temperaments, was, Lindqvist tells us, for
revenge, a kind of collective punishment called down upon Arabs who had
successfully resisted the advanced rationality (and occupying spirit) of
the Italian army. Given where we've ended up, it would be perfectly
reasonable to consider this moment the beginning of modern history, even
of modernism itself.
A generation, no more, from Kitty Hawk to 1,000-bomber raids over
Germany. Another from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to "shock and awe"
in Iraq. No more than a blink of history's unseeing eye. Between 1911
and the end of the last bloody century, villages, towns and cities
across the Earth were destroyed in copious numbers in part or in full by
bombs. Their names could make up a modern chant: Chechaouen, Guernica,
Shanghai, London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Damascus, Pyongyang, Haiphong, Grozny, Baghdad, and now
Falluja among too many other places to name (and don't even get me
started on the bomb-ravaged colonial countryside of our planet from
Kenya to Malaya). Millions and millions of tons of bombs dropped;
millions and millions of dead, mostly, of course, civilians. And from
the Japanese and German cities of World War II to the devastated Korean
peninsula of the early 1950s, from the ravaged southern 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.
Think of it this way: Imagine the history of the development of the
plane and of bombing as, in shape, a giant, extremely top-heavy diamond.
In 1903, one fragile plane flies 120 feet. In 1911, another only
slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy some primordial law,
drops a bomb. In 1945, vast air armadas take off to devastate chosen
German and Japanese cities. On August 6, 1945, all the power of those
armadas are compacted into the belly of the Enola Gay, a lone B-29,
which drops its single bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city and so
many of its inhabitants. And then just imagine that the man who
commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces, both the armadas and the Enola Gay,
General Henry "Hap" Arnold (according Robin Neillands in The Bomber War,
The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany), "had been taught to fly
by none other than Orville Wright, one of the two men credited with
inventing the first viable airplane." Barely more than a generation took
us from those 120 feet at Kitty Hawk past thousand-plane bomber fleets
to the Enola Gay and the destruction of one city from the air by one
bomb. Imagine that.
Then imagine that both civilian plane flight and the killing of enormous
numbers of civilians from the air (now subsumed in the term "collateral
damage") have over that not-quite-century become completely normal parts
of our lives. Too normal, it seems, to spend a lot of time thinking
about or even writing fiction about. When we get on a plane today, what
do we do --close the window shade and watch a movie on a tiny TV screen
or, on certain flights, TV itself in real time as if we were still in
our living rooms. So much for either shock or awe. Today, American
planes regularly bomb the distant cities of Iraq and no one even seems
to notice. No one, not even reporters on the spot, bothers to comment.
No one writes a significant word about it. Should we be amazed or
horrified, proud or ashamed?
"Hotels had crumbled into the street"
With that in mind, here's the thing in Iraq -- and I'm not sure you can
even call it strange: American reporters can now be found embedded with
tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle units. ("Captain Paul Fowler sat on the
curb next to a deserted gas station," writes Anne Barnard of the Boston
Globe. "Behind him, smoke rose over Fallujah. His company of tanks and
Bradley Fighting Vehicles had roamed the eastern third of the city
[Falluja] for 13 days, shooting holes in every building that might pose
a threat, leaving behind a landscape of half-collapsed houses and
factories singed with soot. ‘'I really hate that it had to be destroyed.
But that was the only way to root these guys out,' said Fowler, 33, the
son of a Baptist preacher in North Carolina. ‘The only way to root them
out is to destroy everything in your path.'") American reporters can
climb aboard Surcs (Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech Swift Boat
equivalents, as John Burns of the New York Times did recently, to "roar
up the Euphrates on a dawn raid." They can follow U.S. patrols as they
bust down Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. They can even describe the
perilous, missile-avoiding "corkscrew" landings their planes make as
they are first delivered to Baghdad International Airport and the IED
and suicide car-bomber strewn roadway in from the airport. The only
thing they evidently don't do once they get to Iraq -- and I base this
solely on the reporting of the war that comes back to us -- is look up.
The Iraqi air seems to be filled with all kinds of jets, fearsome AC-130
Spectre gunships, Hellfire-Missile-armed Predator drones, and ubiquitous
Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma helicopters that -- now that the highways
are so perilous -- are the preferred method of military transport and
that seem to hover endlessly over potential urban battlefields.
The Old City of Najaf that abuts the holy Shrine of Imam Ali was largely
destroyed in August, partially from the air in the midst of bitter
fighting between American troops and relatively lightly armed,
ill-trained but tenacious young Shiite men loyal to the radical cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr. ("Few in the shrine could sleep through the ominous
rumble of American AC-130 Specter gunships, capable of firing 1,800
bullets per minute. When the bombs fell closer than ever, hundreds rose
to march and chant in the courtyard, saying they hoped their voices
boosted the morale of the Mahdi Army.") In one of our last acts before a
cease fire was declared, according to Dexter Filkins of the New York
Times, we used "a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about
130 yards away from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to
American commanders as ‘motel row…' [R]eports indicated the hotel was a
redoubt for al-Sadr fighters… The official said the strike had been ‘100
per cent successful,' demolishing the hotel." Filkins later described
the post-truce moment this way: "[The rebels] stood in a scene of
devastation. Hotels had crumbled into the street. Cars were blackened
and twisted where they had been hit. Goats and donkeys lay dead on the
sidewalks. Pilgrims from out of town and locals coming from home walked
the streets agape, shaking their heads, stunned by the devastation
before them."
Similarly, much of the city of Falluja has just been devastated in
fighting in which American fire power of every sort was called in. The
razing of that city began with weeks of "targeted" air attacks on what
were termed insurgent "safe havens." Falluja is now a wasteland and,
while fantasies about its reconstruction abound, the fighting only
continues. (At least 20 U.S. troops have died there, to almost no press
attention, since the city was declared secure and the operation deemed a
"success.") Falluja remains cordoned off; up to 250,000 Fallujan
refugees are still unable to return; and American military strategists,
who over the months since the first failed Marine attempt to take the
city in April planned its eventual destruction, are now evidently
planning to "ask" the "head of every household" (read: males) "to wear
an identification badge" once back in the city.
But if the Old City of Najaf (evidently still largely unreconstructed)
and the whole city of Falluja are now memorials to American fire power
and an American willingness to call down retribution from the skies, air
power has been used far more widely across much of heavily populated
urban Iraq without any press comment whatsoever, on or off editorial
pages. Let me offer just a few examples from many to give a sense of the
range of Iraqi cities hit from the air in recent months:
Baqubah: "Some 30 insurgents were stationed in buildings near the
stadium in eastern Baqubah, apparently to obstruct US forces from
reaching downtown. Rather than clear the buildings -- two vacant schools
and a swimming pool -- Colonel Pittard decided to demolish them with
four 500-lb. bombs" (the Christian Science Monitor, July 21)
Tall Afar: "Soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, also
known as the Stryker Brigade, launched a fierce attack on Tall Afar on
Thursday… The fighting, which included three airstrikes involving AC-130
gunships and F-16 fighter jets, killed 67 insurgents, according to the
U.S. military." (the Washington Post, Sept. 12)
Sadr City, Baghdad: "Hospital officials in Sadr City, a vast slum in
northeast Baghdad that is overwhelmingly hostile to the American
occupation, said one person had been killed in an overnight airstrike by
the Americans. For weeks, the military has been deploying an AC-130
gunship and fighter jets over the area to try to rout the Mahdi Army, a
militia loyal to the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr." (the New
York Times, Oct. 6)
Kut: "A U.S. helicopter struck Sadr's office in Kut, killing two
people..." (the Washington Post, April 9)
Samarra: "By U.S. military estimates, about 125 rebels were killed and
more than 80 captured. Most of the deaths occurred early Friday in the
first hours of the strike, when U.S. helicopter gunships blasted
suspected rebel positions with rocket fire." (the Los Angeles Times,
October 4 [scroll down])
Mosul: "A semblance of calm has returned to Mosul after U.S. forces
carried out air strikes on insurgents, but residents say Iraq's third
largest city remains tense and Iraqi police are nowhere to be seen. U.S.
war planes struck rebel areas in the southwest of the city late on
Thursday after two days of widespread violence in which groups of
insurgents rampaged, burning police stations, stealing weapons and
tipping the city towards chaos." (Reuters, Nov. 12)
Karbala: "American AC-130 gunships and tanks battled militiamen near
shrines in this Shiite holy city Friday." (the Associated Press, May 21)
Falluja: "Highly accurate, 500-pound bombs called JDAMs -- Joint Direct
Attack Munition -- were dropped on suspected insurgent hideouts
overnight in the southern sector of the city, military sources said. The
U.S. Air Force also used AC-130 Spectre gunships, armed with 105 mm
cannons and 40 mm guns, to blast remaining insurgent pockets." (CNN,
Nov. 16)
Hiyt: "...near the town of Hiyt...[a]ir strikes were called in on the
mosque position. The mosque is partially damaged and is currently on
fire…" (Aljazeera, Oct. 12)
Baghdad Airport (and elsewhere): "US forces struck at targets near
Baghdad airport on Friday evening while attack helicopters and F-16
fighter jets carried out raids elsewhere in Iraq in operations against
resistance fighters... Earlier, a US helicopter gunship killed seven
people allegedly preparing to launch rocket attacks on an American
military base in Iraq." (Aljazeera, Nov. 16)
Towns south of Baghdad: "More than 5000 men supported by Cobra
helicopters, F-18 hornets and F-16s, will launch raids in and around the
so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad." (the Scotsman, Nov. 24)
This far-from-exhaustive list is taken from the summary press reports on
the war that appear almost daily. Normally, only a few lines, as above,
are devoted to the air war against urban areas which is, by the nature
of the situation, a war of terror. Such anodyne reports represent the
bare minimum the military offers journalists in Iraq on the subject. I
have yet to see any cumulative figures on air strikes in Iraq per day,
week, or month, maps of the reach of the air war, or more than a few
photos of its results; nor, in fact, have I found a single article of
any significance on the air war in Iraq itself, discussing military
strategy or even the problems Air Force strategists or pilots feel they
face, no less what it's like for civilians (or rebels) in most of Iraq's
major cities to experience such periodic attacks, or what kinds of
casualties result (or who the casualties actually are), or what, if any,
may be the limitations on the use of air power, or what its effects on
the insurgency seem to be, or, in fact, anything on any aspect of the
regular bombing, missiling, or strafing of city neighborhoods.
Here is a response by the Marine Commander in Falluja, Lieutenant
General John Sattler, to a question at a November 18th briefing by a New
York Times reporter on the fighting in Falluja:
"GEN. SATTLER: Yeah. Approximately four days ago we were averaging
somewhere along 50 precision -- and I stress the word "precision" --
about 50 precision airstrikes a day… Today we had three air strikes --
three precision-guided munition air strikes today."
That's about the size of what we know. To the extent that we know
anything about the loosing of air power on heavily populated urban
areas, we only know what an uninquisitive press has been told by the
military and stenographically recorded, which means we know remarkably
little. Here, however, is the impression of the BBC's Stuart Richie,
just a week ago on our air campaign in northern Iraq:
"I found an empty camp bed, but sleep was virtually impossible -- troops
moving in and out all night by helicopter and Hercules planes. Fighter
planes also seemed to be on the go all through the night, this time on
sorties to Mosul, I believe."
Fighter planes "on the go all through the night"? Is this not worth a
single newspaper or magazine article?
Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq
Given the history of twentieth century war, which is, in many ways,
simply the history of bombing cities, should our "war reporters" not
have been prepared for this? Shouldn't anyone have been thinking about
the destruction of cities when it's been such a commonplace? Shouldn't
major papers have insisted on embedding reporters in Air Force units (if
not on the planes themselves)? Shouldn't reporters have visited our air
bases and talked to pilots? Does no one remember the magnitude of the
air war in Vietnam (or Laos or Cambodia), no less any other major war
experience of our lifetimes? A glance at the history of American war
tells us air power is as American as apple pie and that Americans were
dreaming of cities destroyed from the air long before anyone had the
ability to do so. As H. Bruce Franklin tells us in his book War Stars,
The Superweapon and the American Imagination, as early as 1881, a former
naval officer, Park Benjamin wrote a short story called "The End of New
York" that caused a sensation. In it the city was left in ruins by a
Spanish naval bombardment. By 1921, air-power visionary Billy Mitchell
was already flying mock sorties over New York and other East coast
cities, "pulverizing" them in "raids" sensationalized in the press, to
publicize the need for an independent air force. ("The sun rose today on
a city whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits…" began the
New York Herald after Mitchell's "raid" on New York City, a line that
should still send small shudders through us all and remind us how much
the sensational of the previous century has become the accepted of our
world.)
It would seem hard to forget that the "invasion" of Iraq began from the
air -- as much a demonstration of power meant for viewers around the
world as for Saddam Hussein and his followers. Who could forget those
cameras strategically placed on the balconies of Baghdad hotels for the
shock-and-awe son-et-lumičre show -- dramatic explosions in the night
(with everything but a score to go with it). Does no one remember Air
Force claims that air power alone could win wars? In all the articles
now being written about our overextended ground forces, does no one want
to write about how the military is trying to fill the urban gap with air
power?
Is there some secret I'm missing here? Not a single article anywhere in
the American press, no less on a front page. (About the closest you can
get is an exceedingly modest September Associated Press piece by Robert
Burns entitled, Air power gains more prominent role in Iraq
counterinsurgency efforts.) Doesn't anyone find it strange that, back in
1995, our papers -- from their front pages to their editorial and op-ed
pages -- were convulsed by a single contested air-war exhibit being
mounted at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the bombing
of Hiroshima? A historical argument about the use of air power half a
century ago merited such treatment, but the actual -- and potentially
hardly less controversial -- use of air power against the cities of Iraq
doesn't merit a peep? I can find but a single press example of an
American reporter in the air in this post-war war. Over a year ago, on
November 17, 2003, the New York Times' Dexter Filkins wrote Over
Baghdad: Wary Targets, Yet Confident ("It is not a good time to be a
helicopter pilot in the skies over Iraq"), focusing on the dangers to
American pilots in the Iraqi skies. From a passage like the following,
one can sense much about the year between then and now in Iraq --
something of a corkscrew downward like that landing at Baghdad
International: "[Lt. Col. James Schrote, who commands a fleet of 16
Black Hawks here], a veteran of the ill-fated American venture in
Somalia 10 years ago, said the city he flies over today has much to
recommend it over the Somali capital, Mogadishu, then without a
government and broken up by feuding warlords. ‘Baghdad is much more
civilized than that,' he said."
That, as far as I can tell, is it. Now, it's true that any air war is
harder to report on than a ground war, especially if reporters aren't
allowed in planes or on helicopters (as they are on the river boats and
in the Bradleys, for instance). But hardly impossible. Most reporters in
Baghdad, after all, have at least been witnesses to air attacks in the
capital itself. In one case, an American helicopter even missiled a
crowd in a Baghdad street only a few hundred yards from the heavily
fortified American heartland, the capital's Green Zone, killing a
reporter for al Arabiya satellite network while he was reporting in
footage seen only briefly on American TV but repeatedly around in the
world. Life under the helicopters is a story that might be written. At
the very least, the subject could be investigated. Airmen could be
interviewed. Victims could be found. The literature could be read
because, as it happens, Air Force people are thinking carefully about
the uses of air power in the Iraqi counterinsurgency war, even if
reporters aren't. Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas F.
Searle's piece on Making Air Power Effective Against Guerrillas. (If I
can find it, they can.) Searle is a military defense analyst with the
Airpower Research Institute at Maxwell AF Base in Alabama and he concludes:
"Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical advantage the United
States has over its foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major
combat and ignoring counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have
marginalized ourselves in the global war on terrorism. To make airpower
truly effective against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the
joint force commander or the ground component commander to tell us what
to do. Rather, we must aggressively develop and employ airpower's
counterguerrilla capabilities."
Journalists in Iraq could report on the new airborne weaponry being
deployed and tried out there. After all, like other recent American
battlefields, Iraq has also doubled as a laboratory for the corporate
development and testing of ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for
instance, could be done on the newly armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
(UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in Iraq. (The
people who name these things have certainly seen too many scifi movies.)
In a piece in Defense Daily, a "trade" publication (Ann Roosevelt, "Army
Prepares For Armed UAV Operations," November 3), we read:
"The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations using an unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) armed with a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman's [NOC]
Viper Strike munition, a service official said… The Army is arming the
Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)- Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV,
under an approximately $4 million Quick Reaction Capability contract
with Northrop Grumman that will be completed in December, John Miller,
Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike, told Defense Daily… The
Hunter can carry two Viper Strike missiles. The Hunter UAV has been used
in Iraq "since day one," [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program manager Medium
Altitude Endurance] said. The precise Viper Strike munition is important
because, "it has very low collateral damage, so it's going to be able to
be employed in places where you might not use 500-pound bombs or might
not use a Hellfire munition, [but] you'll be able to use the Viper
Strike munition."
Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up
in a plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq, as
Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small forward air
controller's plane during the Vietnam War. (From this he wrote a report
for the New Yorker magazine, "The Military Half," which remains
unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the destruction of the
Vietnamese countryside and which can be found collected in his book, The
Real War.) But that's a lot to hope for these days. The complete absence
of coverage, however, is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast
permanent military base facilities the U.S. has been building in Iraq to
the tune of billions of dollars -- hey, we're capable of constructing,
if not reconstructing, quite effectively in Iraq when it really matters
-- the loosing of air power on Iraq's cities is the great missing story
of the postwar war. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it?
Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated
civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities
such a humdrum event, after the last century of destruction and
threatened destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother to attend
to? Is the Bush administration really to be given another remarkable
free ride?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture
among other books.
[Thanks for research help to Nick Turse.]