Iraq: Call an air strike

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"There might be less violence in Baghdad, but that's because sectarian clashes have died down as there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed. And US engagements are declining, but only because troops are spending more time in the bases. Now, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad, it inevitably means an air strike......

When Fil says the Iraqi forces are "much, much more effective", what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi'ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards - Shi'ites themselves - roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are "worse than the Americans".......

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's "surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004......

The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.

But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus' "by his book" approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki "sovereign" Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the "fish" - who support the "sea" of the resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite - feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway - and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land......

The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not - he's just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master's voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it "victory"."