Hearts And Minds At 30,000 Feet

If it feels like I've done this story before, it's because I have. We continue to try and wage a counterinsurgency campaign with massive bombing that defeats the entire purpose of counterinsurgency, which is to get the population on your side. The reason for the bombing is that it requires less personnel, and also airpower is the only thing keeping the country from a full-on sectarian civil war. You have this lie of "precision bombing" being perpetuated:

In Iraq, the temporary increase of 30,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Bush in January has led to the increase in bombing missions. The U.S. command has moved forces off large bases and into neighborhoods and has launched several large offensives aimed at al-Qaeda.

"You end up having that many more opportunities for close air support," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Doha, Qatar.

More precise targeting and smaller bombs have made it easier for the Air Force to support ground troops in counterinsurgencies, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We're hitting within 15 feet of where we're aiming," Mueller said. A typical 500-pound bomb is 50% explosives, but newer versions carry about 100 pounds of explosives.

Some bombs are "designed to take one building and not the whole block," Mueller said.

Which I guess means that the Air Force was targeting the children:

Bombs struck Shiite targets in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least seven people and wounding two dozen, and an adviser to a prominent Sunni politician was gunned down in a western section of the capital, police said.

The blasts occurred a day after the U.S. military said its forces killed an estimated 49 militants during a dawn raid to capture an Iranian-linked militia chief in Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite enclave, one of the highest tolls for a single operation since President Bush declared an end to active combat in 2003. The U.S. military said the militia chief was not captured or killed.

Iraqi police and hospital officials, who often overstate casualties, reported only 15 deaths including three children. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said all the dead were civilians.

The U.S. military said it was not aware of any civilian casualties, and the discrepancy in the death tolls and accounts of what happened could not be reconciled. American commanders reported no U.S. casualties.

Bombs are never going to be as precision-targeted as the US military claims. That's just ludicrous. And so expanding the air war five-fold increases by five-fold the chances of civilian casualties, which turns the population against the occupation, and sends them scurrying for anywhere the US isn't bombing. Some of them have made their way to Kurdistan where they may face another fresh hell. The Iraqi government has joined the Afghan government before them and strongly condemned these continued air attacks and begged for them to stop. We are literally bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age. It's the most underreported facet of the occupation.

There's a strain of thought that casualties are actually going up in Baghdad and down in the parts of the country we're US forces have left. I don't think it's that cut and dried, but clearly American airpower is really the only big stick we can wield to stop more civilian strife. Yet that will backfire as well.