This is one of the least-reported on aspects of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this is one of the most significant.
These assaults are part of what may be the best kept secret of the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts: an enormous intensification of US bombardments in these and other countries in the region, the increasing number of civilian casualties such a strategy entails, and the growing role of pilot-less killers in the conflict.
According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.
This is also one of the reasons why Bush's phony offensive, in which he hid behind the serial propagandist General Petraeus, has been shown to be a complete and spectacular failure. The fact of the matter is that air strikes, far from pacifying a country, tend to rally a country around its leaders. For instance, the massive air strikes that the Nazis used against the UK in World War II or the similar strikes that we used against Germany and Japan, far from pacifying those countries, did not break their will, but they served to stiffen the resolve of those countries to fight. And this is what is happening here as well.
When Bush's father launched the massive air strikes against Iraq's civilian population in the first Gulf War, the US forfeited any opportunity they had to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, no matter how they felt about the dictatorship of Saddam. And now, the air strikes that have been stepped up this year in the name of "fighting terrorism" are stiffening the resolve of the Iraqi people to throw out our forces from Iraq through breaking our will. It has come to the point where Balad, the chief air base in Iraq for the US, is now conducting 10,000 air operations a week.
The air strikes alone have been responsible for the deaths of 76,000 people in Iraq; half of the children who are killed in this illegal occupation were killed by bombs from air strikes.
And there is another reason that our air strikes are ineffective -- they are undermining our ability to work with our allies, especially in Afghanistan. Both NATO and the UK government have protested the use of air strikes in Afghanistan, where our air strikes have killed more civilians than the Taliban have. So, these air strikes have undermined the respect that other nations have for us.
The air strikes have also placed the US into legal difficulties and made Bush adminstration officials and military officers who order the air strikes vulnerable to war crimes charges. Specifically:
It has also opened up the allies to the charge of war crimes. In a recent air attack in southern Afghanistan that killed 25 civilians, NATO spokesman Lt. Col Mike Smith said the Taliban were responsible because they were hiding among the civilian population.
But Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions clearly states: "The Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants." Article 50 dictates that "The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilian does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
The increase in air strikes shows that the occupation is coming apart; this is similar to how the occupation of Vietnam came apart as well. As the occupation of Vietnam started to unravel, Nixon relied more and more on air strikes as a desperate way of trying to prolong the inevitable. But just like Nixon's air strikes in Vietnam guaranteed failure, and Bush I's air strikes guaranteed failure of this occupation, Bush II's increased use of air strikes will guarantee the failure of any attempt to make his occupation of the country formerly known as Iraq permanent.
In the meantime, David Cole and Jules Lobel explain why the so-called "war on terror" is a complete failure. After all, the occupations of the nation formerly known as Iraq as well as Afghanistan were justified in the name of "stopping terrorism." The whole concept of "going on offense" that was devised by John Ashcroft has also been shown to be a complete shambles.
"Going on offense," or the "paradigm of prevention," as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft dubbed it, has touched all of us. Some, like Canadian Maher Arar, have been rendered to third countries (in his case, Syria) to be interrogated by security services known for torture. Others have been subjected to months of virtually nonstop questioning, sexual abuse, waterboarding and injections with intravenous fluids until they urinate on themselves. Still others, like KindHearts, an American charity in Toledo, Ohio, have had their assets frozen under the USA Patriot Act and all their records seized without so much as a charge, much less a finding, of wrongdoing.
In the name of the "preventive paradigm," thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants have been singled out, essentially on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, for special treatment, including mandatory registration, FBI interviews and preventive detention. Businesses have been served with more than 100,000 "national security letters," which permit the FBI to demand records on customers without a court order or individualized basis for suspicion.
And as Cole and Lobel point out, despite all that, terrorist groups have been growing in number. Bin Laden's groups have reconstituted and are plotting acts of terrorism all the time. And given the fact, stated above, that Bush's air strikes will only increase the resolve of those fighting against us, it stands to reason that the current increase in air strikes by the Bush administration will only increase Bin Laden's activity even more.
We all agree on the need to prevent terrorism in the first place -- Bush had the chance to prevent the 9/11 attacks, but failed to act. For all the bravado, tortures, waterboardings, renditions, and all of the other illegal acts of this adminstration, none of this can cover up the fact that Bush is soft on terrorism and totally clueless and criminally negligent in stopping it. We have convicted exactly one person -- Richard Reid -- of actually trying to engage in terrorism.
Cole and Lobel continue:
These bedrock legal requirements are a hindrance to "going on offense." Accordingly, the Administration has asserted sweeping executive discretion, eschewed questions of guilt or innocence and substituted secrecy and speculation for accountability and verifiable fact. Where the rule of law demands fair and open procedures, the preventive paradigm employs truncated processes often conducted in secret, denying the accused a meaningful opportunity to respond. The need for pre-emptive action is said to justify secrecy and shortcuts, whatever the cost to innocents.
But once again, Bush has failed by the standards that he set out for himself. Bush himself stated that the terrorists hated us for our freedoms. Therefore, the fact that he has undermined our freedoms means that the terrorists have won, by his own standards. Nothing that he does or that he tries can scrub the record books of that fact.
And when Bush siphoned off key resources from catching Bin Laden to the destruction of Iraq as a nation, he has turned it into a prime training ground for the next generation of terrorists. This is a pattern that will only accelerate with the increase in air strikes and the corresponding increase in anger and rage by the Iraqi people at our forces. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop our air strikes; therefore, our ground troops will be the ones who will be in danger from retaliation. I suggest that the increase in the deaths of our troops this year -- another indication of the failure of the phony offensive -- is directly related to the increase in air strikes that Bush has ordered this year.
For all of his impeachable offenses and war crimes that he has committed, there is not one terrorist that Bush has caught through any of the illegal activities that are described above. For instance, only 8% of the Guantanamo Detainees, from Lobel and Cole, were Al-Qaeda fighters; over half have been released. This totally debunked the Bush administration's assertion that these were the worst of the worst. For all of their manufactured hysteria about terrorism, Bush has not identified one sleeper cell within this country. And for all their claims on their websites about catching over 400 terrorists, all of these alleged "terrorists" were convicted of items that were completely unrelated to terrorism such as immigration violations or lying to an FBI agent.
And when they do have legitimate cases against people who are supposedly "terrorists," the government has bungled their cases completely. Consider:
Many of the Administration's most highly touted "terrorism" cases have disintegrated after the Justice Department's initial self-congratulatory press conference announcing the indictment, most notably those against Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo initially accused of being a spy; Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor acquitted on charges of conspiracy to kill Americans; Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, acquitted in Chicago of aiding Hamas; Sami al-Hussayen, a Saudi student acquitted by an Idaho jury of charges that he had aided terrorism by posting links on his website to other sites containing "jihadist" rhetoric; and Yaser Hamdi, the U.S. citizen held for years as an enemy combatant but released from military custody when the government faced the prospect of having to prove that he was an enemy combatant.
All of these cases were highly touted in the news as successes, and all of them were built on insufficient evidence.
It could be argued at this point that we are therefore safe after all. But that misses the point. The Boy who Cried Wolf did the exact same thing that the Bush administration did. For a long time, the village was in no danger from wolves. But when the boy cried wolf one too many times, then, there was real danger from the wolf where there was none before.
And who has benefitted most from this? We will leave the last word to Tariq Ali, prominent Pakistani intellectual:
Undoubtedly Iran. But then the Americans could not have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and without Iran’s support. This is what no one likes talking about. Had the Iranians said, if you take Iraq we will fight you, the occupation probably would not have taken place. But the Iranians, who regarded the Taliban and Saddam Hussain as enemies, kept silent. The Americans thought, because the Iranians supported them before they went in, things would be fine. But the Iranians were opportunists. They had their own agenda and defended their own state interests -- just like the U.S. defends its state interests. These state interests are now clashing and so the U.S. is threatening Iran.
We have enough difficulty fighting a two-front war in the former Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting a three-front war would be worse.
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