COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE
INDEPENDENT
“There's no such thing
as precise air strikes in modern warfare"
Absolutely, and saying otherwise is American propaganda from
the time of the Gulf War.
Remember General "Stormin' Norman" giving press
briefings with an impressive video of a smart munition going down a smokestack?
At the time he did that stunt, only 1% of the bombs America
was using were "smart" bombs.
The rest were the same kind of stuff used in the carpet
bombings of Vietnam and North Korea.
Indeed. the poor Iraqi recruits in the desert behind
sandhill forts were carpet-bombed by B-52s. Untold tens of thousands were
pulverized into the sand, the US refusing to reveal how many were killed, but
the number was horrific.
B-52 carpet-bombing was used again extensively in
Afghanistan.
In Iraq, American used many dumb bombs, a fair amount of
white phosphorus (its substitute for napalm after all the furor over Vietnam),
and, worst of all, cluster bombs.
Independent and Al-Jazeera photographers captured many
sickening pictures of lacerated children or women smashed into pulp.
The fact is that whatever kind of bomb you use, there is the
greatest need for good intelligence and bomb-spotting. This is a risky and
expensive business to carry out with special forces gathering information about
planned targets.
The US proved very poor at doing this in Raqqa and other
places. It likely killed more people than ISIS.
Still, the vast majority of bombs dropped in many cases are
old "dumb" bombs. "Smart" bombs cost a whole lot more
money, and they very much need ground-based intelligence to be at all effective.
The fact is that war is horrible, that all of it is a vast
atrocity. It should be only the last resort, but an imperial power like the US
makes it pretty well the first choice.
And it doesn't care about leaving behind a lot of mangled
people and a lot of hideous stuff like tons of depleted uranium dust (or, in
Vietnam, millions of pounds of poisonous Agent Orange) and the shrapnel-loaded
mini-canisters of cluster bombs – all of which keep killing for many years after.
