This Week: Update on the Secret Air Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

"Quote" of the Week

The Invisible Killing of Remote-Control War

UAVs in Pakistan, One Story

Further Reading about the Secret Air Wars

 

Greetings,

This week marks the second "double issue" in a row. Regular readers know that each issue of the Notes is usually about 2,000 words. That's four pages, for you paper subscribers. What I call a "double issue" is about 3,500 words, which comes to six paper pages.

The reason these issues have been longer than usual is that there is so much to say about the secret air wars and what I call their "ominous offspring," which are the expanding "remote-control" wars being conducted by "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles," or UAVs. These remote-control wars are related to the secret air wars in the sense that they are both attempts to act on what I have called the "real lesson of Vietnam," which is Reduce the Troops, Increase the Bombs. The key to maintaining an empire in a formal democracy is to conceal as much of the "dirty work" as possible from the voters. That's what this issue and the last are all about.

I notice that my previous issues about the secret air wars (in March of 2006 and March of 2007) were also double issues. I think I'm trying to make up for the lack of coverage elsewhere in the public sphere in this country.

I apologize for the longer-than-usual gaps between issues lately. Part of the reason is that this issue required a large amount of research, and it was harder than I expected to condense it down to a Notes-sized article. In addition, I took on another "day job" recently, which has been taking more time than expected. (I'll say more about that job before long, as it may be of interest to some of you.) In the meantime, my apologies for the tardiness of the past couple of issues. Things should pick up once May gets here.

OK, enough of my apologies and explanations. Let's get on with the Notes!

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

This week I offer three related "Quotes" on the subject of killing from the air by U.S. forces:

"Quote" #1: "Excessive Civilian Casualties"

This is from "The Best and Worst of 2007: Middle East Developments," found on the website of The Century Foundation, and published on January 4, 2008

"The increased reliance on airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in excessive civilian casualties and undermined the political objectives of military planners. In Afghanistan in particular, the heavy toll of aerial bombardment exacerbated tensions between the United States and its NATO allies, contributed to the Taliban's highly effective propaganda efforts, fueled local resentments against multinational forces, and eroded confidence in the Karzai government. The resort to airpower also highlights the distorting effects of the Iraq war on the continuing military efforts in Afghanistan. Perhaps most importantly, the reliance on airpower is a further reminder of the disastrous ramifications of the flawed strategic calculus that justified the U.S. invasion and occupation of a major Arab state."

"Quote" #2: "Killing Fields"

The German news service Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported on March 25th that the leader of the second-largest party in the Pakistani parliament, Nawaz Sharif "criticized attacks by NATO forces on militant hideouts inside Pakistani territory. Eighteen people, mostly suspected al- Qaeda linked terrorists, were killed in the tribal district of South Waziristan in an alleged missile attack carried out from Afghanistan last week." Said Sharif:

"We want peace in America. We want peace in Europe. We want peace in every part of the world, but we also want peace in Pakistan. To get peace for others we cannot turn our land into a killing field. Just as the Americans want to protect themselves against terrorism, we want our villages and towns not to be bombed."

"Quote" #3: "The Obvious Conclusions"

Finally, some words from a piece by Tom Engelhardt on the TomDispatch website. The article, from April 11th, was called "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror." Engelhardt was talking about U.S. airstrikes that kill innocent people in Iraq or Afghanistan, and he said this:

"Usually, when such events recur, there aren't even names to put with the dead bodies and the reports themselves drop almost instantaneously beneath the waves (of news) without ever really catching our attention. Even if you believe that ours is the only world that really matters, that we are the only people whose lives have real value, that doesn't mean such deaths won't matter to you in the long run.

"After all, what we don't know, or don't care to know, others care greatly about. Who forgets when a loved one is suddenly killed in such a manner? Even if we aren't counting bodies in the air-war subsection of the President's Global War on Terror, others are. Those whom we think of, if at all, as ‘collateral damage' know just what's happened to them and to their neighbors. And they have undoubtedly drawn the obvious conclusions.

"Let's remember that, after 9/11, Americans, from the President on down, spent months, if not years in mourning, performing rites of remembrance, and swearing revenge against those who had done this to us. Do we not imagine that others, even when the spotlight isn't on them, react similarly? Do we not think that they, too, are capable of swearing revenge and acting accordingly?"

The Invisible Killing of Remote-Control War

Much has been said in the media (and by Democrats) about a comment that John McCain made back in January to the effect that he wouldn't mind seeing U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years or more. As the Washington Post summarized it in their "Fact Checker" column ("McCain's ‘100-Year War'"), "The charge that John McCain wants to wage a ‘100-year war' in Iraq has become a recurring theme of the Obama campaign."

This comes from an exchange between McCain and an audience member at a speech he was giving. The questioner began by saying, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years..." and McCain cut him off, saying "Maybe a hundred. We've been in South Korea, we've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so."

That's where the Democrats usually stop the quotation, but Republicans point out that McCain added something that they think is praiseworthy (and newsworthy). They remind us that, after McCain suggested the hundred-year figure, he added, "That'd be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it's fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day."

This idea—that it "should be fine with us" to maintain a U.S. military presence as long as "Americans are not being injured"—is worth noting, as I think it reflects a belief by U.S. planners that resistance to U.S. killing can be minimized if only we can minimize U.S. dying. That belief is likely true—in fact, I think it's a big part of the reason why more U.S.ers are not out in the streets. And that leads us back to a discussion of the secret air wars and their ominous offspring: Remote-Control War.

"Unmanned Aerial Vehicles"

On New Year's Day 2008 an important story by the Associated Press (AP) ran on the national newswires under the headline "Military's Use of Unmanned Drones Soars in Iraq." The 1,000-word story was picked up by none of the major newspapers in this country, so it's not likely that many in this country are aware of this particular approach to managing the military aspect of the U.S. Empire.

The story reported 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..." Added the AP, "Pentagon officials said that even as troops begin to slowly come home [from Iraq] this year, the use of Predators, Global Hawks, Shadows and Ravens [varieties of drones] will not likely slow."

"And in the first 10 months of 2007, [unmanned aircraft] flew more than 300,000 hours," which was up from "nearly 165,000 flight hours in the 2006 fiscal year.... A majority of the flights are in Iraq...but they are also used extensively in Afghanistan."

What stimulated the AP story was a report from the Department of "Defense" that outlines plans to develop an "increasingly sophisticated force of unmanned systems" over the next 25 years. Part of the plan involves "increasing the precision of the guided weapons that are on some of the unmanned aircraft," which is "considered critical because it enables the military to hunt down and kill militants without putting troops at risk."

I'm not sure why this report went unnoticed in the media when it came out in August of 2005, but kudos to the AP for finally covering it. The 212-page report, called "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2005-2030," is a major document (an earlier version was released in 2002) and deserves some attention, so here we go.

The 25-year plan talks about the development of "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles," or UAVs. A UAV is defined in the "Defense" Department's dictionary as "A powered, aerial vehicle that does not carry a human operator, uses aerodynamic forces to provide vehicle lift, can fly autonomously or be piloted remotely, can be expendable or recoverable, and can carry a lethal or non-lethal payload." It's the lethal ones that concern us at the moment. As the Roadmap tells us, one "operations goal" in the coming years is to "Acquire more multi-mission ... [unmanned aircraft], each capable of employing a greater number and variety of weapons."

In other words, the plan is to increasingly wage war by remote control. And, as the AP reported in February, "The U.S. military is seeking at least $3.4 billion for unmanned aircraft to meet increasing demands in Afghanistan and Iraq." Why is the "demand" increasing? As the Roadmap puts it, "One of the primary purposes for the employment of [UAVs] is risk reduction to loss of human life in high threat environments." Or, as the Army's deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, Thomas Killion, told a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in a March 2006 story, "We want unmanned systems to go where we don't want to risk our precious soldiers." As always, it is understood that the only "human lives" that are "precious" are the lives of people from the United States and those who are "with us" in the Global War On Terrorism.

Screening War From The Public Gaze

Recall, if you will, some words I first published back on the eve of the most recent U.S. invasion of Iraq, in December of 2002. The article was called "‘The Satanic Is The Guilty': The Roots of Modern War Propaganda," and in it I quoted the famous social scientist Harold Lasswell, from his classic 1927 book "Propaganda Technique in the World War." One of Lasswell's propaganda principles went like this: "The justification of war can proceed more smoothly if the hideous aspects of the war business are screened from public gaze."

I think the blogger Richard Blair put it well on his blog "All Spin Zone" when, speaking of UAVs, he said, "By waging a killing operation from thousands of miles away, the human element of the horror of war has been totally removed (except for those killed by the missiles remotely fired from Nevada)." Or, he might have added, from Washington, California, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and half-a-dozen other states.

And here is where we return to the recent remarks of Senator McCain. Recall that he said it would "be fine with me" for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." This is the reason why an increasing share of the attacks in what the Pentagon calls the GWOT—the Global War On Terrorism—are being conducted from the air: Less risk to U.S. troops. In addition, recall how important it is that "the hideous aspects of the war business are screened from public gaze." U.S. military propagandists know that, when the triggers are pulled from battleships far away or from cockpits far above the ground, it's far easier to keep the "hideous aspects" of their work off TV screens in the home country than it is when there are boots on the ground.

The only thing better than a secret air war is a remote-control war, where "unmanned aerial vehicles" are piloted by people "thousands of miles away."

The Fall 2005 issue of Air & Space Power Journal noted that "At least 40 countries have produced more than 600 different types of UAVs, many with ranges in excess of 300 km." That's 180 miles. For comparison, consider the U.S.-produced UAV called the Predator, which is known in military circles as a "Hunter-Killer." That UAV is piloted by a person just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, which is 7,451 miles from Baghdad. The article goes on to note approvingly that "UAVs enhance the ability of the United States to intervene militarily anywhere in the world whenever its interests are threatened ... without putting its forces in harm's way." That is, the time is nearly here, if it's not here already, when the United States can attack anywhere in the world by remote control.

And thus does The World's Only Superpower plan to maintain its Empire—it's "interests"—while keeping the bloody reality "screened from public gaze."

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

We shouldn't think that such power will be used only against nameless "bad guys" who are always "thousands of miles away." The Congressional Research Service, in a November 2005 report, noted that "one of the most commonly discussed new mission areas for UAVs is homeland defense and homeland security. The Coast Guard and U.S. Border Patrol already have plans to deploy UAVs such as the Eagle Eye to watch coastal waters, patrol the nation's borders, and protect major oil and gas pipelines. Congressional support exists for using UAVs like the Predator for border security." A "Hunter-Killer" coming soon to a border near you!

Finally, there is the issue of the political effects of using such unaccountable killing capacity.
A front-page story in the New York Times of March 22nd was headlined "Pakistan to Talk with Militants, New Leaders Say." In it, the Times reported that "the leaders of Pakistan's new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and will use military force only as a last resort. That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it reflects a softening stance toward the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at militants using pilotless Predator drones."

The Times then noted that "Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced that the surge in suicide bombings—17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008—is retaliation for three Predator strikes since the beginning of the year." Three that we know of, the reporter might have added.

We cannot expect that the violence required to maintain the U.S. empire will always go in only one direction. It's possible that our high-tech killing machines will be turned against us by our own leaders, as in the case of Predators on our borders. Or perhaps our callous disregard for the "collateral damage" caused by our militarized Global War On Terrorism will breed ever more hatred for the United States that will manifest in more violence like that seen on September 11th, 2001. In either case, the way to keep these violent chickens from coming home to roost is to do whatever we can to interrupt the cycle of violence our government is perpetuating in our name. The only thing, after all, that can stop the violence perpetrated by a nation as powerful as the United States is its own population.

UAVs in Pakistan, One Story

The page 7 headline in the New York Times of March 26, 2008 read "Pakistanis Signal Shift In Relationship With U.S." The article started out like this: "The top State Department officials responsible for the alliance with Pakistan met leaders of the new government on Tuesday, and received what amounted to a public dressing-down from one of them..." One of the "officials" receiving the scolding was the infamous John Negroponte, veteran executor of some of the worst of the Reagan administration's crimes against humanity in the 1980s.

The Times went on, "The leader of the second biggest party in the new Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, said after meeting the two American diplomats that it was unacceptable that Pakistan had become a ‘killing field.'" Sharif continued, saying, "If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed."

"[The fight against ‘militants within Pakistan's borders'], which has recently included American airstrikes in the lawless tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made sanctuaries, has become widely unpopular [in Pakistan], particularly in the last few months as a surge in suicide bombings here has been viewed as retaliation for the American attacks."

In all, the reception given to the State Department officials, according to the Times, is "just part of the sea change in Pakistan's domestic politics that is likely to impose new limits on how Washington fights militants within Pakistan's borders."

And how DO they fight those "militants"? Well, a little over a month before the Negroponte visit, the Washington Post reported on an airstrike by a Predator unmanned aircraft that was "piloted" by someone in Nevada. This attack was described by the Post as follows:

"The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center. The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan."

All of that is from the first two paragraphs of the story, which was headlined "Unilateral Strike Called a Model For U.S. Operations in Pakistan." Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, told the Post that maintaining the "autonomy" to attack at will anywhere the U.S. wants (that's the "unilateral" part) "requires constant pressure on the Pakistani government."

One has to read down as far as the 23rd paragraph in this lengthy article to find the following details about this "model" of success:

"The missiles tore into the compound's main building and an adjoining guesthouse where the al-Qaeda officers were believed to be staying." That is, maybe they were staying there, and maybe not. The Post continues, "Even when viewed from computer monitors thousands of miles away, the missiles' impact was stunning. The buildings were destroyed, and as many as 13 inhabitants were killed, U.S. officials said. The pictures captured after the attack were ‘not pretty,' said one knowledgeable source."

The Post notes that "Some Pakistani government spokesmen have even questioned whether the terrorist leader [al-Libi] was killed." But who, then, were these "13 inhabitants"? Anyone with a conscience might wish to know, although The Post doesn't waste any ink on such questions about what they called "an awkward, albeit successful, unilateral U.S. military operation."

An anonymous "senior U.S. official" told the Post, "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. But overall, we're in worse shape than we were 18 months ago." Of course, some of the things that are "found" by the blind squirrel that is the U.S. air war—the ones that are not "nuts" in this metaphor—are innocent civilians. How many? No one knows. And that ignorance is not an accident, but instead is a large part of the point of conducting a war by remote control.

Read More About the Secret Air Wars

In this issue of Nygaard Notes and the last I have listed numerous hints and tidbits of information about the ongoing air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that I have gleaned from the pages of the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media. That's not the best place to get information, by any means. Although there has been shockingly little coverage of this relentless barrage of destruction, here are a few good sources for those who wish to know more (and who wish to pressure their local and non-local media to get on the story):

For the "official" news from the U.S. Air Force, visit the "Air Force Link" on the web. They publish a daily "airpower summary" which, although incomplete and sanitized (I've NEVER seen the word "kill" in their reports, for example), it's still a starting point for getting a sense of the scale and ferocity of the carnage.

In the semi-official realm, the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies published on December 13th 2007 a study by Anthony Cordesman called "US Airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan: 2004-2007." I don't really trust his numbers ("It is clear ... that considerable restraint was used in both wars actually dropping air munitions."), but there's a handy chart that, again, gives a rough idea of the scope of the firepower.

For my money, the best single recent report was published on the website TomDispatch on April 11. Written by Tom Engelhardt, who has done some of the best work on this subject anywhere, the title is "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the US Air War for Terror" I quote from it extensively in this week's "Quote" of the Week. The whole article can be read here.

Another one by Tom, this one from January 30, 2008, was called "Looking Up: Normalizing Air War From Guernica to Arab Jabour." Also excellent.

The Foreign Policy think tank "Foreign Policy in Focus" published a piece last August called "Death at a Distance: The U.S. Air War," by Conn Hallinan.

FPIF also published a piece on Afghanistan—also by Hallinan—that includes a bit about the air war underway in that country—even more "secret" than the one in Iraq. That piece is called "A River Runs Backward."