U.S. steps up its aerial bombing campaign

| Wed Mar. 15, 2006 8:22 AM GMT

Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter confirms that, as predicted, the US has stepped up its air war in Iraq.



In addition to the obvious and extremely serious moral downside here--air strikes obliterate civilians in large numbers--the piece notes some practical drawbacks to relying on aerial bombings at the expense of combat patrols.


(Not that the combat patrols were working out that great.) And then there's the hearts-and-minds dimension.


"They (the Americans) think: `As long as there are resistance fighters operating in this spot, we will wipe it out entirely,'" Abu Tahseen said, using the term for insurgents favored by Iraqis sympathetic to their cause. "As you know, our nature is a tribal one, and so if one from us is killed, we kill three or four in return."

Good for Knight Ridder for taking the elementary trouble to compile the statistics from press releases provided by the U.S. Central Command. Though the U.S. air war in Iraq has gained a bit more media attention since Seymour Hersh took it up in the New Yorker last December, the topic is generally little covered--except by the likes of Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt.
