Airpower and the surge

13 thoughts on “Airpower and the surge”

1. Interesting but, isn’t General Petreaus suppose to be bringing in his much ballyhooed new counterinsurgency hearts and minds thing? It is his call(more air strikes), right? If so, what could he be thinking? A 500lb bomb dropped on a gas line in Sadr City isn’t fooling anyone.

2. General David Petraeus supposedly “trained” the Iraqi “security forces,” which we know today as “Shiite Death Squads.” When his manifest failure as a “trainer” began to undermine his carefully scripted reputation, he punched his ticket and rotated back to America where he supposedly authored “the book” on counter-insurgency. When it became clear that “the book” didn’t exactly say anything more than my old Vietnamese version of it did thirty-five years ago (when such colonial doctrines of ours didn’t work either), General Petraeus punched his ticket again, claimed that he didn’t really write “the book” himself, and rotated back to Iraq for a fourth star, promising to report “signs of progress” back to Deputy Dubya Bush in three months, or six months, or — what the hell — in 50 years, “just like Korea.”
   So now, in the predicable desperation of a military command completely lost in a desert sandstorm of its own making, we have resorted to increased aerial bombardments of civilian city neighborhoods for no other reason than that we have excess ordnance in the area that makes it possible. As Thomas Friedman said in cheering on the insane invasion of Iraq in the first place: “We had to hit somebody.” Now that we have hit those Iraqi “somebodies” for over four years only to have them keep hitting us back ever harder, we vent our rage and frustration by wrecking more of a hapless foreign country, just like we did the worse we performed on the ground in Southeast Asia — simply because we could and can.
   Mindless, amoral militarism doesn’t even begin to describe the Lunatic Leviathan got loose to run amok in the world again because the American people have not the first idea what deep piles of bloody shit their vaunted military creates whenever it gets the go-ahead for another unnecessary Ordnance Expenditure Expedition. As former Clinton Administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used to ask rhetorically: “Why even have this big expensive military if you won’t use it?”
   Given those entrenched, endemic attitudes of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” (or fling it) permeating all levels of the American political “elite” (in both right wings of our one corporate party), it appears that America — as presently constituted — has become little but a rogue, failed state that refuses to look at its own ugly reflection in the mirror. Certainly, golden-boy General Petraeus had better find a way to punch his ticket again and get the hell out of Iraq before all those f*ck-up-and-move-up failures of his come home to tarnish his carefully manicured reputation. In General David Petraeus and his ilk, Parkinson’s Law has met the Peter Priciple and produced our own worst bureaucratic enemy, which, as Pogo said, “is us.”

3. Not long ago on another blog I described Petraeus as “nothing but an ambitious f*** who cares more about finding a way to promote his career than about what happens to his troops in Iraq.” Shortly after that I got an e-mail from a U.S. Army officer (who asked to remain anonymous, of course) congratulating me on having read the General so well.
   Ray McGovern in a recent interview said that one of Petraeus’s colleagues at West Point has described him as the kind of guy who would marry the commandant’s daughter to get ahead.

4. If you believe the Lancet paper from October 2006 (I’m agnostic), the reported number of US-caused civilian deaths is just a drop in the bucket compared to the reality. If you look at Iraq Body Count’s numbers for the first two years (they released a study back in the summer of 2005), in most months the reported number of US-inflicted civilian deaths was about 1 per day. Not in the opening two months and not during the two months when Fallujah was assaulted, but for nearly all other months, that was the claim. This is an amazingly low figure, especially when the US was supposedly capturing or killing thousands of insurgents each month.
   As for air strikes, it’s possible that the reported numbers of bombs are low, or alternatively, as Nick Turse has speculated in the Nation and elsewhere, other forms of weaponry (rockets, for instance) are the main cause of death. I realize the point of your post is that the number of deaths is going up, but I doubt we really know much of anything about what the true figures are.

5. This sense of despair is poignantly conveyed in the words of two Mesopotamian lamentations that ironically survive only in fragmentary form. The anonymous verses were composed thousands of years ago, though, with a change of script and language, they could easily have been written in modern Iraq.
   
   Dead men, not potsherds
   littered the way.
   In the wide streets
   where the crowds once gathered and cheered,
   the corpses lay scattered.
   In the fields where the dancers once danced
   the dead were heaped up in piles…….
   This is my house:
   where food is not eaten,
   where drink is not drunk,
   where seats are not sat in,
   where beds are not made,
   where jars lie empty,
   and cups are overturned,
   where harps no longer vibrate
   and tunes no longer sing.
   This is my house:
   without a husband,
   without a child,
   without even
   me.

6. “As for air strikes,” I’m not quite so sure as “Donald” is that we are to judge them entirely by our usual bottom-line practical standards about enemy deaths going up or down as a consequence thereof.
   It seems to me that there is a geistlich factor involved, not quite what one would call “spiritual” in English, but somewhere in that vicinity. “You terrorist bad guys can never be really safe, for we militant Republicans can strike you down from on high.” Something like that.
   In a strict West Point view, that’s utter nonsense: a truck full of dynamite parked next door could wreak quite as much mischief to one’s apartment and one’s neighborhood as anything “from on high” could, and probably much more accurately if one’s apartment or neighborhood should happen to have been the enemy target.
   It’s all imagination, if you like, and maybe my own imagination was warped long ago with all those fictional accounts of “World War Three” in which the bad guys of Moscow invariably strike from above exclusively and do not ever condescend to mere dynamite in dump trucks.
   It’s all imagination, if you like, but perhaps w might synchronize our imaginations all the same. When you dream such dark dreams, then, is your subconscious more worried about being blown up from the side, or “from on high,” or even perhaps from underneath? Which terrorism terrorizes YOU most?
   Back in the good old days, one would have had to make additional distinctions about “from the side,” for to be wounded on one’s front side advancing was accounted honourable and gallant ever after, whereas to be wounded on one’s backside fleeing — but let’s not talk about that!
   Nowadays the subtle distinctions once made by our more chivalous ancestors seem to have have become otiose. I never myself dream about any perishing of the lateral sort, behind or before or left or right. Do you? If so, I’d be very glad to hear about it, for I have gorged myself upon accounts of “World War III” and have probably quite unfairly neglected all other Avenues of Disaster.
   And then there’s “9/11,” that very curious affair that was undoubtedly Crawford-terroristically “from on high” in some sense, and yet, to rain down ‘Justice for Muslims’ upon the American evildoers from the sky with basically only boxcutters? That plan was certainly not World War Three, but it also was nothing else that my imagination has ever thought of before. Subsequent reflection has failed to clarify, and subsequent imagination is nil, as far as I am concerned. My imagination in effect writes “9/11” off as a policy-irrelevant fluke and freak.
   Yet what can Imagination ever understand about Policy?

7. There has never been any actual policy, military or otherwise, since our troops reached Baghdad — just catchphrases and spin. Bush is only buying time, and the easiest way to do that is through brutality. COIN? Yeah, right. Heart of Darkness is more like it.

8. Whatever it meant by using “air strikes,” or what General David Petraeus doing, the milestone for this long battle is the draft hydrocarbons law that US waiting for it eagerly pushing in on all front to get this law passed.
   Recently some media reported Gates saying:
   ”We would certainly be happier if there were faster progress on the political front,” Gates said. He noted that the Iraqis missed a May 31 deadline for passing an energy law — one of many political obstacles yet to be overcome.
   It’s really irony he talking about ” political front” which is noting to do with laws and orders here as much as set up the internal conflicts and chaos between those in the poppet government, with all the country is just a miss and the security other major things that making causing this chaos right now in Iraq.
   So using air strikes, or General David Petraeus heavy handed dealing with Iraqis just is cover-up and pressure to shut up any opposition or may be demonstrations that may be breaks off if this law pass, as we know there are a strong oppositions to this law between Iraqis with different sectors and parties, those parties playing their games of thieving the oil and black-marketing oil products to local Iraqis and the conflicts of interest with US drafted oil law that will take control of the OIL fields and industry of Iraq Oil forever

9. The American War on Vietnam grew bloodier and more inconclusive for America year by year until — in 1968 — the American public turned off on it and just wanted it over. Our bureaucratic military (with Senator Mad Dog John McCain a living relic, even today) refused to face its justifiable defeat (where it had no business fighting) and so lobbied ever-more-strenuously for greater and and greater levels of violence to use against what Henry Kissinger called “a little fourth rate power” that he “refused to believe didn’t have a breaking point.” So, Nixon and Kissinger and their f*ck-up-and-move-up generals concocted a dual “strategy” of slowly reducing the number of American ground forces in-country (to try and undercut political anti-war opposition at home) while simultaneously ramping up massive air bombardments against the Vietnamese. Neither of these dual “components” individually, nor both of them in combination, worked. The anti-war opposition in America only grew till it became society-wide and the Vietnamese only fought with greater determination.
   None of these lessons ever penetrated the schizophrenic “mind” of the American Lunatic Leviathan. Once again, I offer General David “train ’em till you can’t trust ’em” Petraeus as the very personification of my point. You have to wonder what, if anything, West Point teaches its young shavetails when they don’t seem to ever learn — despite regular promotions (for “fitness”) up to the highest ranks — even the most fundamental lesson of “counter insurgency”: namely, that the American military has never done it successfully since our own Civil War. Our officers and enlisted men seldom speak any language other than English (and that badly) and they never can resolve the cognitive dissonance of trying to occupy foreign nations at the point of a gun while piously insisting on the moral purity manifest in all the killing that they do in places that do not require them to do any such thing.
   We had “counter insurgency” manuals and training programs — including effective foreign language courses — forty years ago. Apparently, the American Army misplaced these materials and abandoned these educational systems. Thus General Petraeus could get away with first proclaiming that he “wrote the book” on the subject and then later claim that he only presided over a military base where someone else did the writing. No wonder he has (near the end) resorted to the same spastic increase of “air power” bombardments (as a transparently desperate measure to hide the fact of failure on the ground) that his equally clueless forebears did in Vietnam and Washington D.C. for at least a decade — a time frame within the living memory of many of us who took a dragooned part in the last of our famously failed Ordnance Expenditure Expeditions.
   Not only did General Petraeus not “write the book” on “counter insurgency,” but he obviously never even read and/or understood the ones we used to have long, long ago. Again, I have to concur with the judgment of military historian Martin Van Crevald who has said: “The American military in Iraq is completely incompetent. All they can do is train Iraqis in how to fight Americans. How stupid can they be?” Too stupid to stipulate, I would answer while listening to Bruce Hornsby’s lament in his song Defenders of the Flag that “If these guys are the good ones, I don’t want to know the bad.” From the Best and the Brightest to the Worst and the Dullest, the American military’s “countering” of “insurgencies” never seems to do anything but bankrupt America while feeding young American solidiers to the “insurgents” (always “in their last throes”) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
   What kind of country in its collective right mind would blindly “support” this kind of manifest mediocrity? Like JFK’s ship of state, our government “leaks from the top,” and like the proverbial dead fish, it “rots from the head first.” Personally, I tend to associate a great deal of this leaking and rotting with our very own four-star fraud, General David Petraeus, who will probably receive a Medal Of Freedom after he dutifully reports (at some unspecified time in the future) “signs of progress” that no one but those invested in the Warfare Welfare gravy train can see and truly appreciate.

10. Petraeus wrong? How so? He will retire in 2009 and be welcome on any corporate board or foundation he chooses. His net worth will soar to the 8 figures. Publishers will offer huge advances for his memoirs, probably modeled on Bremer or Franks, certainly not Grant. The major networks will all welcome him as commentarist. Anything that goes wrong in Iraq will not be a big deal to him, since it will not be “on my watch.” Until retirement, the surge and various other shows of force will keep the game going.
    Air strikes are exhilarating. You command a magnificent jet, roar like Thor over an exotic landscape, and unleash a terrific blast on a target, roasting some presumed baddies. You then pull out the throttle, get a big G rush, and head back to base. With no aerial threats, and only a small risk of hits by ground fire, you get to pull off all kinds of macho acrobatics. Successful sorties translate to citations and promotions. To your peers, you are a prince. Back home, you are a hero (avenger of 9/11). Unlike close ground combat, aerial engagements seldom produces angst, provided there is little risk of being shot down. Pilots fear a crash or being captive, but do not get PTSD. To them, it’s all about great machines, hte joy of flight, the support of buddies, the honor of mission, and bombs away. The rest is an abstraction. “Collateral damage” is best kept out of sight, out of mind.
    Reliance on air strikes may get more pronounced, and reckless, as US forces withdraw to the mega-bases (in 2009?). Heaven knows who will determine the targeting or how much disorder or ground setbacks they will try to redress with bombs and missiles delivered from above. Nonetheless, the manufacturers’ EPS should stay strong. Perhaps the stocks will “out-perform.”

11. “Air strikes are exhilarating. You command a magnificent jet, roar like Thor over an exotic landscape,, (&c. &c.)
    Well, well: we don’t get much of that element around here! At least a little bit more of it would be helpful. Dr. Cobban is to be praised for allowing comment even of the “Everything you damnfool doves ever thought is wrong!” variety, yet when we get some, either it is mere assertions and slogans, or else it is pro-aggression in the same good gray prose of Academe as everything else. This present stuff, however, is different.
    Mr. Koch is a little bit stingy with the active ingredient, though, as if only John McCains in cockpits (plus all red-blooded twelve-year-old boys) are in a position to enjoy Uncle Sam’s invasions and occupations. The President of the United States qualifies, honoris causâ, for both these categories, although that may be more a personal fact than a political one. None of the insider accounts I know of claim that we broke our promises and trampled on reason and international law and marched to Baghdad and camped there and generally did our best to make the world less reliable and orderly to gratify George Walker Bush alone. At very least there was “a small band of willful men,” say more than three chief invasionists but less than thirty, a Neo-Con Cabal, if you insist. Usually Dubya himself is represented as not having been part of the willful band, exactly, but more like its dupe — as if the supposed bandits saw the twelve-year-old side of their boss too, as perhaps they did. The bandits proper are represented in the “roar like Thor” fashion only as deliberate verbal cartooning, I believe: though their goals and motives were bad, they were nevertheless the sort of goals and motives that could be — indeed, that actually had been — thought up and written up in a tribal language far more like Dr. Cordesman’s bloodless PowerPoint jargon than like ActionComic.
    The deeper background is well known: as a maker of policy, one simply can’t engage in organized violence these days unless one alleges urgent self-defense, however flimsily and implausibly, and therefore one can’t advocate one’s preferred violences in anything but sober-to-eyeglazing prose. (I’m not sure how that “and therefore” works, though I’m pretty sure it does work.)
    This canon of taste or etiquette only applies to policy-makers. Once Herman Kahn has written On Thermonuclear War in a grave style that even Anthony Cordesman might envy, less responsible persons can turn it into Dr. Strangelove. Or turn into whatever the right-wing contemporary equivalent of the Kubrick film was — perhaps Mr. Philip Wylie’s two potboilers about World War Three taken together might be nominated. (I’d like to see more attention paid to PopCult at JWN and elsewhere partly because I’m very weak on it myself. Has anybody produced a best-selling thriller yet that is specifically about and in favor of the GOP attack on the former Iraq, with or without the actual names changed? I’ve looked at a couple of books that might have been written to boost Global-War-on-Terrorism, mostly by attributing the vilest things imagination can come up with to some character with an Arabic-looking name. Sad stuff.)
    It is also not quite the right stuff at the moment, not the “roar like Thor” stuff. Video can do that sort of effect better, no doubt, although Mr. Koch shows that mere literature is not out of the running altogether. If we attempt to look at this situation as a Republican Party extremist might, have not certain opportunities to recommend the aggression and conquest and occupation to America been overlooked or inadequately utilized? Is there not what one might call an “imbalance of explosions,” with most of those shown on television being THEIR explosions rather than “ours”? If Americans were by and large Shiites or other political masochists, this asymmetry would be admirable, for it would be of cardinal importance to demonstrate endlessly that “we” are spotlessly innocent victims, and almost never anything other than innocent victims. Perhaps for a time after the Pentagon/WTC attacks that product really did suit the national palate, but several years have passed, and surely by now “we” have relapsed into a more normal or traditional frame of mind?
    A few authentic GOP extremists, mostly associated with The Weekly Standard, have vaguely seen what I am trying to point out, and rejoiced that Rear-Colonel F. Kagan’s Surge of ’07™ allows the invasionites to tear up the bad old Casey-Abizaid ROE, rules of engagement, and replace them with more vigorous and ‘proäctive’ Petraeus-Odierno ones. However since even these insightful few talk about the matter in High Cordesmanesque and print their stuff at far upmarket outlets like TWS where the thriller-reading classes are not likely to encounter it, the net effect on popular opinion is negligible. Moreover, liberalized ROE would not do the whole trick as I conceive it, because what they need to right the balance is impressive explosions, not just more small-arms fire.
    Technically, wouldn’t explosions be easier for Fox News to propagandize with? Explosions can be impressive even from a safe long distance, whereas getting good shots of a fire fight is both dangerous and difficult. There is also the benefit that from a distance, “collateral damage” is unlikely to be visible, although at the same time one can’t usually show on video that the noncollateral damage has achieved anything of military value. We are really talking about P.R. here, Madison Avenue rather than West Point, however, so it is in the last analysis optional that anything military should have been achieved, as long as there are more of “our” explosions to be seen happening. The invasionites might even drop bombs out in the desert on nothing at all for the pictures’ sake — except that they have shown that they can’t keep secrets, and after they got caught doing that, they’d be in worse hot water than if they had not tried it on in the first place.
    None of this is exactly Mr. Koch’s “roar like Thor.” To get something closer to that would require an employee of Murdoch actually embedded in the cockpit, camera in hand. I don’t know whether that arrangement would be feasible either militarily or cinematically. Assuming that the thing can be done at all, there is the difficulty that it could not in any case be done regularly, or even frequently. It is rather too obviously a stunt. Still, to do it once or twice might come to the aid of the Party.
    Alternatively, whatever happened to all those “smart bombs” from Secretary Albright’s War? Mount a camera in your cruise missile that keeps running as you direct the missile down the chimney of some (supposed) den of al-Qá‘ida — mightn’t that do? There would be only blackness at the end instead of a thrilling explosion, but the blackness would conceal any unfortunate damage to Chinese diplomats, or whomever. For that matter, you could easily (?) arrange to have another camera record the explosion itself from afar. Perhaps video of some quite different distant, but impressive, explosion would do as well, although that plan once again raises the risk of getting caught with your thumb on the scale, and therefore might better be dispensed with.
    ==
    Mr. Koch and I are not on exactly the same wavelength. He evidently likes to play at being the young John McCain, whereas my game is rather to imagine managing the current Karl Rove’s cards for him. De gustibus non disputandum. We do partially come together in that we are both trying, in some sense, to think like Republicans. Sort of.

12. Powell talked a lot about the current war in Iraq. He expressed quite a bit of anger and frustration with the conduct of the war. He didn’t get too specific about who he was angry at (hopefully, he will someday!), however, he did talk in detail about his reservations prior to the start of the war, and the many lost opportunities later on. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say that the war had been a complete mistake, though. Still, he had a lot to say about the lack of adequate forces on the ground in Iraq at the beginning of the occupation, and the absence of a coherent plan to deal with the power vacuum that was created by the fall of Saddam’s regime. As to the current plan to surge additional troops into Iraq to try and quell the sectarian violence, he was not at all optimistic about the long term success of the plan. He likened it to putting a heavier lid on an already boiling pot! He said that peace in Iraq can only come through a political process among the Iraqi people, and that there is simply no military solution to the present violence there. He also talked about involving the neighboring countries, and the need for the U.S. to have dialogue with them.

13. Shocking and Awful – The Real Face of Occupation
    http://www.archive.org/details/ddtvshock1

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