by Ian Mosley

For the past thee generations, US military supremacy has rested on one factor: air power. From the last years of World War Two right up until the latest time we flattened Fallujah, America has always dropped bombs or fired missiles from the sky to decide a serious battle. The quality and quantity of American ground troops have steadily declined over the last few decades. A large percentage of US soldiers are Latinos or Asians, who don’t even have US citizenship (and sometimes barely speak English). Over the past three years in Iraq the biggest army in the Western world has been resisted by a ragtag Muslim guerrilla force who pose a sufficient threat to keep US soldiers out of most Iraqi cities and inside fortified desert compounds. This is why we have to keep re-taking various parts of Iraq because we aren’t really occupying all the cities all the time.

The Pentagon is now falling back on their last resort, a return to massive aerial bombing. On March 15th “U.S. and Iraqi forces” (read U. S. forces and a few bedraggled and bewildered token Iraqi kids stuffed into uniforms) launched what was termed “the largest air assault since the U.S.-led invasion, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital.” Uh, guys, you’ve been there for three years now. WHY are there still “insurgent strongholds north of the capital?” And why exactly can’t our soldiers get rid of all those “insurgent strongholds” with blazing machine guns in best Hollywood style like we expect back home? Why do you have to drop bombs indiscriminately on thousands of people, most of whom don’t have a damned thing to do with the Iraqi rebellion?

“More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation,” the military statement said of the attack designed to “clear a suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra,” which is sixty miles north of Baghdad. Ah yes, Samarra. That place seems to get “pacified” every couple of months now. I remember one big offensive in 2004 when some Marine general was bragging about how no rebel head would ever dare to pop up in Samarra again, and the city was now ready for McDonald’s and the Brady Bunch. All that pacifying just never quite seems to take, does it guys?

Near the end of the first day of the operation, the military said, “a number of enemy weapons caches have been captured, containing artillery shells, explosives, IED-making materials, and military uniforms.” You know, these briefings are getting just as repetitive as the ones they used to hold in Saigon, and just as meaningless. Even though no one in the Bush administration or Fox News would ever admit this, we’ll be “pacifying” Samarra again next year, then the year after that, and on and on as long as we’re occupying Iraq.