Although it's John McCain that's gained notoriety for crooning "bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," the fly-boy mentality is alive and well in today's Air Force. But, there's a new twist. The traditional insensitivity of people who fly way up in the sky and get a thrill out of dropping their deadly load, has been passed on to some really pedestrian, ground-based fellows, manning computer terminals in the vicinity of Las Vegas, Nevada to control predatory drones that dispatch individual with 500 pound bombs and missiles. Talk about over-kill.

Tom Engelhardt and a few others have taken the trouble to bring us up to date on the evolution (devolution?) of the air war from Guernica to Arab Jabour, courtesy of the United States Air Force.

Actually, the summary provided by Engelhardt is remiss in leaving out Charles J. Hanley who's done some ground-breaking reporting on the air war in Iraq which Sy Hersh only alluded to from afar. But, his point of view is right on target:

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000-pound barrage has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni fighters who resist them as "al Qaeda," so in situations like this it's hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer's first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined "The Tragedy of Guernica" and called the assault "unparalleled in military history." (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

"essentially a terror bombing" Isn't that descriptive of the entire Iraq adventure--an attack on an innocent population which is unlikely to be able to defend itself, in order to send a message to more powerful players in the region?

In those seven decades, the death toll and damage caused by war -- on the ground and from the air -- has increasingly been delivered to civilian populations, while the United States has come to rely on its Air Force to impose its will in war.

One hundred thousand pounds of explosives delivered from the air is now, historically speaking, a relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a figure that, as again last week, the military was proud to publicize without fear of international outrage or the possibility that "barbarism" might come to mind:

"From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of ordnance, said Lt. Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public affairs officer."

Isn't that just the neatest thing? No. Neater still is hunting individual "insurgents" with drones.

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that "the military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq." The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first ten months of 2007 -- with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The Army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same.

Excuse me if this whole agenda strikes me as cowardly in the extreme.

American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian populations -- in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for making civilians into "shields." And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in our press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against "anti-Iraqi forces" or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:

"I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq… It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, 'I'm not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren't important anymore.'"

"continuous bombardment," as those who recollect my diary on the Helsinki Agreement will recall, is a matter of critical concern to Iraqi leaders. They want it to stop. Unfortunately, that's unlikely. The air war is a central component of the surge, of the effort to pacify the Iraqi population.

As Paul Rogers reports:

At least 100 people (most of them members of the council) were killed in the period of late December and early January; the core area affected is around Baghdad and Baquba, but it also extends to Anbar province where US military leaders had claimed particular success in getting Sunni militias to oppose al-Qaida elements.

In response, there has been a further intensification of the US' use of airpower to target insurgent units and districts; in one 10-day period in January, fifty tons of bombs were dropped in an insurgent-held area near Baghdad. This tactic, as in Afghanistan, carries the constant possibility of creating new enemies even as it destroys old.

The continuing military challenge has led the Bush administration to make a further request for substantial additional expenditure to fund the war. Congress will be asked on 4 February to consider a US$70 billion request to meet war costs (Afghanistan as well as Iraq) in the first four months of the 2009 fiscal year; this is in addition to the US$196 billion sought for the current financial year.

The goal? Establishing a protectorate from which the region can be ruled.

The need to guarantee the security of a protectorate on the scale envisaged - and, more immediately, to avoid attacks on US ground-patrols - is already being met by a second and largely hidden military surge. This one is airborne, and involves the expansion of US air-power in Iraq far beyond even the intensive pounding of insurgent-held areas around Baghdad. Among its features is the assignment of a squadron of A-10 ground-attack aircraft to al-Asad airbase and an additional squadron of F-16C strike aircraft to Balad air-base (see Tom Engelhardt, Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?, Asia Times, 31 January 2008).

In an echo of the Baghdad embassy, Balad has grown to become the largest US air-base anywhere in the world: a fifteen-square-mile mini-city with its own bus routes, fast-food outlets, two supermarkets and accommodation for 40,000 military personnel and contractors. The base - from which up to 550 air operations each day are conducted - is a permanent construction site; the latest addition is a US$30-million command-and-control system that will integrate air-traffic management across the country as a whole.

In sum, the US plan for Iraq is to establish a series of tight political mechanisms of control deriving from the original CPA-era agreements; a huge embassy-based structure in Baghdad to oversee and maintain these; immunity for over 300,000 foreign personnel; and continuing, direct authority over and access to Iraqi detainees. The entire operation is to be secured by the US military and its private contractors, increasingly protected by the use of air power.

If this whole things seems a bit grandiose, it shouldn't take much for the people residing in fly-over country, the heartland of the United States, to recognize that the disregard with which their interests have been met by the people who jet from place to place has simply been extrapolated to another place on the surface of the globe, a place whose people are worth even less than they and are being dispatched at an alarming rate to demonstrate that things could be worse at home. Which, when you come to think of it, is just what George W. Bush meant when he boasted about fighting "them" there, so he doesn't have to fight "them" here at home--"them" being all those no-count people he can do without.

Isn't it grand that there are so many of "them" that it's unlikely he'll ever get around to "us?" Which is probably exactly what the good Germans said to console themselves as their Jewish neighbors were being carted off.

How ironic that a bunch of Arab terrorists settled on airplanes with which to terrorize the United States. Wonder where they got the idea? Surely it had nothing to do with the air wars the U.S. had been waging for decades.