The War on Terror is Civil War: and Civilians Pay

Think "accidental killing", think air strikes. The sudden, searing, mindlessly penetrating plunge of "smart bombs", ripping apart walls, flesh, blood vessels, skulls, upholstery, plastics. "Precision strikes" guided by "intelligence" that right here where a family shares dinner lurk terror agents of the dreaded al-Qaeda. The explosion detonates as commanded, oblivious to the objects, arsenals, food, children, mothers, photos, clothing. The "smart bomb" knows nothing - not the slightest thing, yet more such weapons shine like trophies in American armories, the crown jewels of weapons technology, applied physics, the culmination of decades, even centuries, of development. Would that such development and focus had been applied to the human landscape, to resolving conflicts, to negotiation, even to the consequences of such weapons! Could we then avoid killing the innocent?

But no, our sophisticated weapons only plunge us deeper into the grotesque, self-replicating, bloody polyphony of war, growing ever more complex, each battlefront knotting on itself like a long rope shaken in a large box over and over again. We never designed or planned the knots. It's those laws of physics acting out again. So why don't we study those laws that apply to the rigors of human conflict?

Where's the logic? It's touted as pro-democracy, but an invasion is not a "liberation". Freedom cannot be achieved by force. It's sold as pro-security, but the war on terror is necessarily a guerilla war - one without borders - whose battlefield is the streets where children play, the homes where families sleep and eat. What security can be found in such a war? It's not a fire, not cleansing the world of a scourge. It's cancer, creating more of the scourge as it grows, feeding on itself.

Wars must run their course, as if on inertia, until they run into an obstacle: a mountain range, an ocean, a more powerful enemy. Then finally, they stop. Triage. The bleeding recedes, and life re-emerges... But the Superpower's war, the "Global War on Terror" has no visible barriers. The Kush Mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan shelter Osama bin Laden, the godfather of al-Qaeda, the mastermind of 9/11. But the Kush Mountains do not stop the Global War on Terror. As if opening a giant quantum puzzle-turned-Pandora's box, we opened the war on terror, called it global, and so it was. Wherever we send our troops, it follows.

Iraq was a sovereign state. We invaded, and al-Qaeda cells sprung up where they never set foot before, like cancerous lesions. Iraq is now an international malignancy. Civilian deaths mean the people will hate and blame us. To them, we are the invaders, seeking oil and empire.

We didn't like Saddam Hussein, so we replaced him with chaos and a breeding ground for al-Qaeda. One wonders, to fill Guantanamo with someone? To justify having a war on terror, must we then create terrorists?

Wherever we see Islamic government, we see terrorism. Somalia claimed to have an Islamic government, many calling it another Taliban. We then saw it as a threat. Pandora's box again. So we opened it up as a "new front" in the war on terror. Our "precision air strikes" struck a Somali village on "intelligence" that three al-Qaeda operatives were there, and instead we killed innocent civilians and livestock. The operatives had been there - approximately - but managed to escape - to this very day. Meanwhile, this battlefront has degenerated into a killing field between Ethiopians, al-Qaeda inspired insurgents, and other Somali troops and warlords, so horrific that the humanitarian disaster ensuing is being described by those who know, such as David Case here, as "another Darfur." Even Ethiopia can hardly afford this war, but it was largely their "starring role" in aiding the United States in its Global War on Terror that embroiled them for the whole of 2007 - and counting. Another international malignancy.

Iran is an Islamic republic. The Bush administration sees them as a threat, constantly nagging the nation and the world to see them as a source and sponsor of terrorism. Half the point of President Bush's trip to the Middle East was to convince Arab governments that Iran is a threat and to mobilize them against it. Public threats against Iran have been a source of scandal by their unsubstantiated claims, yet many still insist we must attack Iran. With, of course, "precision air strikes." Any hit, of course, will hit civilians - who then, no doubt, will become justifiably enraged against - who else? That crazy Superpower, of course. This feeds right into President Ahmedinejad's propaganda. Where the country doesn't go malignant, the rhetoric does.

Afghanistan was supposed to be the grand success story of the War on Terror. But the Taliban is back, stronger than ever. The civilian population is bearing the brunt of the bloodshed. Their initial positive response to the United States is dwindling. Is this how we win the war on terror?

No one argues that civilian deaths are not tragic, or even that they are really avoidable. Many argue that the end - a high-minded and philosophical concept of security and even democracy - justifies the means - brute force, bloodshed. But that's the wrong point.

The question is not "does the end justify the means?" The question is, do the means have any rational, cause-effect relationship with the end? Absolutely not.

War in itself does not cause or create security for the powerful. In fact, it usually exacerbates any lack of security, may even destroy security. War does not create or cause democracy certainly. By defeating an undemocratic foe, one does not leave democracy as the natural consequence. In the case of the war on terror, chaos and violence have been the consequence. And in most cases, more terror. Score more wins for al-Qaeda, which has now morphed into something even Osama bin Laden doesn't really control.

The War on Terror is essentially a kind of "civil war". It is a war of man against man within the "civil" boundaries not of his nationhood, but his very humanity. It is touted as a war of the "humane" vs. the "inhumane", of the "innocent" vs. the "terrorist." But do these definitions hold water in the face of reality on the ground? Our terrorists are to others "liberators", "freedom fighters", defenders of their respective homelands against foreign invaders. By conducting wars of invasion, we give them cause to defend their definitions, to engage their civilian populations in such definitions, to gain sympathy. Like all civil wars, the War on Terror is essentially a war for the civil societies in which they are waged. It is a war against two conflicting ideologies within a civil society, tearing them apart. This kind of war can never achieve security so much as it achieves devastation of the entire civilian population.

So even as the U.S. military machine hides or downplays its air strikes on targets that unavoidably achieve "collateral damage", the goal such air strikes supposedly achieves is not foiled so much by the sweeping targets of the weapons or even of the intelligence, but rather by the very nature of the war that is being fought.

Is it not a shame that we put the great minds of our nation to use in developing the formidable technologies of war, rather than the even more formidable science and understanding of negotiation and discourse as a means of achieving peaceful coexistence? The mind is too wonderful to waste centuries on in pursuit of continuously-generating enemies. Is the suicide bomber in fact a symbol of what we are doing - collective suicide?

Guernica II: Remote-Control Massacre

Dahr Jamail again comes through with this insightful, if devastating, report on what the U.S. bombing strategy really brought about in Iraq - and what kind of future our continued military effort there would bring. On January 10, U.S. bombers and F-16's attacked an area south of Baghdad.

The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in
Iraq," Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. "U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is
why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets
than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery."

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad
had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack
followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor
tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

"On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages," Ahmad Alwan
from a village near Juboor told IPS. "We took our families and fled. We have
never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody."

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at
least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span
of 10 minutes.

"The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area,"
Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. "Americans
are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and
surroundings of Sunnis."

But do Americans who pay for this war hear any of this news? Not if they listen to mainstream news. Note that Sunnis feel Americans are "supporting Iranian influence" while mainstream U.S. news reports the diametrical opposite. Note that the U.S. frequently shows hostility in word and deed towards Iran's Shi'a President Ahmedinejad, while maintaining a friendly attitude towards Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Yet Sunnis in Iraq are interpreting this bombing as an attack on them personally, using al-Qaeda as a ruse.

Now note how the bombing is played out in the media. Tom Englehardt analyzes various American news sources, showing how they buried the true story in lion's skin of terror-fighting.

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members
of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ...Twenty-six
paragraphs later, the story ended this way:
"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.
"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds
of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into
Baghdad."
And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:
"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the
[Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped
nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab
Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant
Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to
reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

How many civilian casualties were there? Who were the civilians? What strategic interests were the U.S. supposedly "protecting" by this attack? What intelligence, if any, led to this area as a strategic target? Who did they think they were killing vs. who did they actually kill? What was gained by this, if anything?

Since Americans pay for this war, as I said, they should know what the hell is going on. But that's not going to happen, apparently. Someone has an agenda, and it's either a very blood experiment in Chaos Theory, a horrific way to nab oil rights in an era when we're supposed to be going green, or just empire-lust run amok. But it's not, no not at all, to "defend freedom", "fight terrorism", or promote democracy. This can't by any stretch of any Republican fantasy, be for that purpose.

Mr. Englehardt then makes a correlation between the bombing of Guernica, Spain, of Picasso's famous painting fame, in which up to 10,000 civilians were killed by - and this is the connection - 100,000 lbs. of explosives. The same as the U.S. bombing on Abu Jaboor in Iraq - 100,000 lbs. of explosives. But back then in 1937,

The self-evident barbarism of the event -- the first massively publicized
bombing of a civilian population -- caused international horror. It was news
across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last
century, Picasso's Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

Fast-forward to Iraq 2008, and 100,000 lbs. of explosives dropped by American bombs on small farming villages south of Baghdad is barely worth a couple of yawns. More war stats. Can't cut it against Britney Spears celebrinsania.

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab
Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed
there -- in person or by satellite phone -- to check out the damage. In Iraq and
Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only
significant if it's of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the "bombs"
can be produced at approximately "the cost of a pizza" (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn't have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's success in creating a
dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral
damage" stands in for the civilian dead -- even though in much of modern war,
the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided" weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

"The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons."

You've got non-military verbs strategically placed with battlefield nouns. It creates that all-important bloodless "look". It's almost like selling insurance: "policy", "claim", "planning", etc. The purpose is to keep you, the taxpayer, slightly bored, yet reassured that this war was doing something good, serving some purpose, like "keeping America free."

As that phrase "take out known threats before our ground troops move in" made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

As Mr. Englehardt sums the math up succinctly:

Anyway, here's the simple calculus that goes with all this: Militarily,
overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the surge
for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq
in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won't be. Air
Force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In
Vietnam back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn,
air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every
reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

And air war means civilian deaths far outnumber the death of actual soldiers - or "militants", as they are now called. For there's not even parity in terms anymore. Our military are "heroes" or "soldiers"; theirs are "insurgents", "militants" or "terrorists". In fact, the name al-Qaeda has come to be used loosely to refer to any Sunni fighters/insurgents. Hence their perception that the U.S. wants to eliminate Sunnis per se.

So if anyone can articulate what we are fighting for, whom we are fighting, and why, in any logical or meaningful way, please let me know. All the reasons presented so far are about as relevant as a random page out of tax law. So bloodless. So mundane. So ordinary. So easy to forget. Almost like a video game. At least, that's what taxpayers are supposed to think. And never, ever even mention or think, don't dare to say, that it's a filthy, bloody, messy, sickening, mind-numbing, sanity-busting, nearly-pointless, remote-control massacre.