As our attention is taken up by the election, other stories that would or should gain our attention are falling between the cracks. Here's one.
As Seymour Hersch described (in the New Yorker as PR for the surge was ramping up) the military was planning to drastically increase bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The perceived or projected advantages to this strategy were twofold: decrease the pressure on ground forces (that is, to decrease the manpower squeeze the military is suffering) and to achieve a PR objective of diminishing the constant bad news in the media of US soldiers being killed and injured by roadside bombs. Bombs that the US military drop get almost no press coverage here and that includes the consequences of civilian deaths and injuries from those bombs.
The "effectiveness" of the surge (and thus the justifications for staying in Iraq) would, they understood, be measured back home mainly by decreases in American casualties. Iraqi casualties are irrelevant because they are not measured nor much covered in the press here (though they are in the part of the world we wish to convince that we are there for their good).
The "effectiveness" of the surge - more correctly, perceptions of success/failure - also have a serious PR consequence for this administration and the Republican party as the election draws near.
This is, effectively, war made invisible to the American press and citizenry. The US military is well aware that
Quote:When Saddam Hussein fell, there were more than 1,000 western reporters in Iraq. Today, at any given time, there are about 50.
link A fundamental aspect in the execution of this war has been the US military's control of information back to the US media and citizens (and their government representatives) so that the military might procede unimpeded.
I invite you to read the linked article. Here are some portions...
Quote:The United States increased its use of aerial bombs in Iraq by more than 500 percent from 2006 to 2007 and dropped more than 20 times as many bombs on Afghanistan last year as it did just a few years ago.
Quote:In "Off Target," a 2003 report, Garlasco criticized the U.S. military for its last-minute targeting of officials in Iraq -- noting that it went zero-for-50 at hitting Iraqi leaders, while killing hundreds of civilians -- yet he has also praised U.S. forces for being careful.
Quote:Sitting in a secure vault deep inside the Pentagon, Marc Garlasco cheered when the laser-guided bombs he had helped target slammed to Earth, striking Iraqi soil. As a body flew like a rag doll across the video screen, framed in a bright flash and a cloud of dust, Garlasco and his fellow intelligence analysts thought they had taken out one of the U.S. military's top targets during the early days of the Iraq war.
But even as he reveled in the April 2003 airstrike, Garlasco was thinking ahead to his next job, which would take him to the edges of the very crater he had just helped create. Just two weeks after the failed attack targeting Iraq's notorious Ali Hassan Majeed, known as Chemical Ali, Garlasco left the Defense Intelligence Agency and traveled worldwide as a human rights activist seeking to determine the civilian toll of his previous work.
"I found myself standing at that crater, talking to a man about how his family was destroyed, how children were killed, and there was this bunny-rabbit toy covered in dust nearby, and it tore me in two," Garlasco said. "I had been a part of it, so it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It really dawned on me that these aren't just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time."
Garlasco is uniquely suited to understand both sides of the air war debate: He knows what the bombs can do, and he knows the price of errant attacks. In the five years since he moved from targeter to human rights advocate, he has lobbied for greater deliberation in the military's use of air power. He has made it his mission to prevent the use of cluster munitions and has argued for smaller bombs that have less impact on surrounding areas -- like the bombs that the Air Force now uses in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021202692.html?hpid=topnews
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