It was a month or two ago that I started noticing the mentions, buried deep in newspaper accounts, of airstrikes in the no-go zones in Iraq. Maybe we’ve been using such airstrikes all along, and I’ve just become more sensitive to their being mentioned, but it sure seems to me that their incidence has increased.

Blowing up people with cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs is popular with the civilian leadership, of course. It reduces the US bodycount, thereby helping Bush maintain the fiction that things are going great for our side. And even if going in with ground troops to clean up those areas turns out to be necessary, Bush wants very much to postpone that carnage until after the election, as this item in the LA Times the other day makes clear: Major assaults on hold until after US vote (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk should work for the login).

So in the meantime, we blow things up from on high. A video of a crowd in Fallujah being treated thus is available from The Memory Hole: Video of Fallujah bombing massacre. It’s worth watching, especially for the accompanying radio chatter. You may or may not enjoy it (past items of a similar nature on this site have provoked widely varying reactions), but it’s important, I think, to realize what’s being done in our name, regardless of how you feel about it.

As Jeanne points out at Body and Soul (Falluja), there’s no way to tell who those people are (er, were; now they’re bloody bits); maybe they were all insurgents, maybe they weren’t. But it’s certain that detonating bombs in the middle of a densely populated city is not the kind of thing that’s going to win a lot of hearts and minds.

Jeanne links to an interesting article in the New York Times (Terror command in Falluja is half destroyed, US says). (Side issue: This might be a good time to brush up on al-Zarqawi, since he’s the guy whose network the article talks about. See this nice rundown from Foreign Policy in Focus if recent statements by people like Dick Cheney have left you kind of fuzzy on the subject: House Republicans and Democrats unite in linking Iraq with 9/11. Scroll down to the section headed, “The Saddam–al-Zarqawi–bin Laden Connection.”)

So, it’s all very Vietnam-esque, isn’t it? Having recently watched Going Upriver, the similarity to the Vietnam war’s free-fire zones is chilling. No, we’re not that far down the slippery slope yet. But we’re definitely sliding.

Random factoid: Having watched Going Upriver, I now know where Kubrick got the line in Full Metal Jacket where the helicopter door gunner shouts, “Anyone who runs is V.C. Anyone who stands still is well-disciplined V.C.” It was from a statement by one of those testifying at the Winter Soldier Investigation. I wonder: Will we need to have a similar event a few years hence, so that young men like the one who voiced the appreciative, “Whoa, dude,” when that Fallujah street exploded will have a chance to tell their stories?

Some lessons it’s better to learn just once, I think.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 at 6:11 pm and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.