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Bombing Civilians in Iraq

Comment by Larry Ross, December 19, 2005

The great increase in U.S. bombing in Iraq does not help the U.S. win their illegal war.

It does make many more Iraqi casualties and many more opponents of the U.S. occupation and war making. The U.S. then calls them "terrorists", thereby attempting to justify even more bombing.

U.S. strategy is to create a state of chaos and civil war in Iraq, that can be used to justify continued U.S. occupation and their continued huge military bases there. These will be important in the coming U.S. war on Iran and growing U.S. domination of Middle East oil resources.

As Dahr Jamail points out, the U.S. media treats the U.S. air war as a dirty secret it keeps from the public. The American public would never approve U.S. military tactics or the real reasons the Bush Administration made up a series of lies to con the American public into approving of the war.

It is not a war on terrorism in Iraq. The U.S. makes terrorists where there were none before.

It is a war on civilians.

The U.S. mass media today is little more than the propaganda arm of the Whitehouse - faithfully repeating government lies and not revealing to the people what the real purposes and tactics are.

Every bomb that is dropped, every shot that is fired, every weapon used, means a profit for U.S. arms makers.

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Ignoring the Air War

By Dahr Jamail, Tomdispatch.com, Alternet, December 14, 2005

The American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance -- and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing.

When the air war shows up at all in our press, it is never as a campaign, but as scattered bare-bones reports of individual attacks on specific targets, almost invariably based on military announcements. A typical example was reported by Reuters on December 4th: "Two U.S. Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided bombs" which, according to a military spokesperson, killed two "insurgents" after they attacked an army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad. On the same day, Reuters reported that "a woman and two children" were "wounded when U.S. forces conducted an air strike, bombing two houses in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad."

And even this minimalist version of the American air war rarely makes it into large media outlets in the U.S.

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