WHY DOES THE NEW YORK TIMES HATE THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCES?

(The plural was intentional there, by the way. I suppose I could have written "United States air power" but in this instance I prefer my formulation.)

In any event, I've been asking myself that question for some time. Because the simple truth is this: for more than ten years now, in every conflict the United States has fought, the use of airpower has gotten more and more precise (if not more and more effective -- those are two different questions) which has permitted it to be employed and deployed with greater lethality against who and what we target with less and less danger to civilians each time. Yet just the same, civilian casualties in each bombing campaign has been a comparably egregious issue in the Times' eyes.

By the simple rhetorical move of never contextualizing these bombing campaigns historically, never mentioning how the campaign the Times' reporters are writing about compares to those before it, the Times is able to make each one seem almost criminal, rather than the historic achievement it actually is. But further neglecting to mention such issues as what the alternatives to a bombing campaign might be, the issue is similarly decontextualized so that civilian casualties from a bombing campaign also cannot be compared to what casualties would have been under different scenarios.

To take just one example, you no doubt remember that Desert Storm began with a forty day air campaign, meant to disconnect the Iraqi army in the field from its logistics chain in Iraq, and to further destroy Iraq's C3, the command, control, and communications, leaving the army blind, deaf, and dumb. This meant there was not just bombing of the army in the field, but also bombing of Iraq proper, taking out the electrical grid, the telephone system, anything that could have been used to support the way the government controlled the army.

Best estimates are that civilian casualties from that campaign -- not of soldiers in the field, and not indirect casualties from, say, loss of electricity leading to disease down the road when water purification failed -- are somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000. It's impossible to get a better estimate due to the lack of Western observers on the ground at the time, and the regime's eagerness to lie for propaganda purposes.

When you look at a possible 2 million dead in Vietnam, that was historically low, but that was what we were talking about at the time.

Bombing in Iraq proper this time around was limited for the most part to strikes on leadership targets with real time intelligence. In other words, we had reason to believe that a very bad man was in a particular place at a particular time.

Today there's a front page article on this campaign in the Sunday Times, their favorate post 9/11 location for maximum visibility for revelations about civilians being killed in American wars. Not a word in this article about prior bombing campaigns, not even prior campaigns in Iraq, only that it now turns out that there were more of these strikes than had been previously acknoweldged. (Gee, I can't imagine why the military is now reluctant to produce numbers on these strikes.)

The strikes failed, in the sense that the leaders we attempted to kill with these attacks were still breathing at the end of the day. They did not fail in the sense that the bombs went where they were supposed to go -- the failures were either of intelligence (the leaders were not where they were supposed to be) or they were somehow able to walk away.

But, because these were not military targets, the people near them were killed.

The four case studies examined by the organization included the failed March 19, 2003, strike on Mr. Hussein and his sons at Dora Farms, which it said killed a civilian. According to Human Rights Watch, a failed April 5 strike that singled out General Majid in a residential area of Basra killed 17 civilians; a failed April 8 strike that was aimed at Mr. Hussein's half brother Watban Ibrahim Barzan in Baghdad killed 6 civilians; and the second raid on Mr. Hussein and one or both of his sons, on April 7 in the Mansur district of Baghdad, killed an estimated 18 civilians.

I don't mean to be flip -- but that ain't 5,000 people. It surely ain't 15,000. This effort at reconceptualizing how one uses airpower didn't work, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying, and it certainly doesn't mean it wasn't a better way to use airpower from the perspective of the civilian population.

What, by the way, if it had worked? The men we tried to kill, according to the article, in several cases went on to organize and lead the insurgency. How many Iraqi civilians have died in the attacks and bombings organized by those we tried to kill? If we tried and succeeded, would the Times now be publishing an article singing the praises of air planners for stopping the violence before it started? Would it have been worth it then? How many American lives would that effort have saved?

It is hard to argue that this was not the most cautious air war in history:

General Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war who is now the Air Force vice chief of staff, said in the interview last summer that commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved, General Moseley said.

But raids considered time-sensitive, which included all of those on the high-value targets, were not subject to that constraint, according to current and former military officials. In part for that reason, the report by Human Rights Watch concluded, "attacks on leadership likely resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths from the air war."

We just finished celebrating the landings at Normandy. Do you have any idea how inaccurate the bombers of they day were back then, how many civilians would have to be bombed before they could be liberated?

If casualty figures these low produce media repercussions, what future is there for airpower? There's no such thing as a "perfect" bombing campaign for the simple reason that war is a human enterprise and no human enterprise is perfect -- but that doesn't mean that we are done with wars that could benefit from a strategic bombing component, or where a strategic bombing component might save lives in the long run. If the media persist in treating war itself as war crime, they succeed only in forcing the military, and the government's the military serves to examine each component of a strategy individually, rather than explore ways to produce a warfighting strategy that is overall the most humane.

It is another way the media's lack of understanding -- in this case, a willful one -- of things military -- ill serves us all. Ever since Afghanistan they have all but represented the use of bombing not as a historic accomplishment by the United States, permitting us to go after legitimate military targets in the field with an absolute minimum of harm to civilians, where "absolute minimum" keeps getting lower and lower, but as all but criminal. That may well be the way the Times views the use of strategic bombing, but that's a view for the editorial pages. Otherwise we will be manipulated into unilaterially renouncing a key advantage we hold over almost every enemy and potential enemy on earth.

Update: I've been studying this question of media coverage of civilian casualty numbers for so long I missed something big here, and as usual I'd of done better if I'd checked in first with Jason van Steenwyk first, who asks, "who says those strikes were a failure?"

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

One thing a lefty won't like is the dynamics, namely if air strikes to accomplish X kill fewer civilians, the result will be somewhere between ``more X with the same civilian casualties'' and ``same X with fewer civilian casualties,'' the midpoint position being chosen by policy in response to what's now possible. The lefty assumes it means chiefly ``more X'' and not ``fewer civilian casualties.'' In fact it seems to have come out more toward the other end, but that's a separate fact from the new technological possibilities.

They don't like anything that implies ``more X.''

[Walter Wallis]

And of course diplomats are all too happy to substitute "Technical means of verification" for the messy dealings of humint. The money saved is called "The Peace dividend."
Wait a minute. How come we don't hear any more crowing about "The Peace Dividend"?

[Jos Bleau]

The story makes no mention os the 1999 Kosovo War, which featured the bombing of civilian infratrsucture targets in Serbia, with attendant civilian casulties.

Also, I'm wondering how much value the times reporter actually added to the Human Rights Watch report.

For example "An unclassified analysis prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency and obtained by The New York Times describes Mr. Ibrahim ..." Was this obtained via HRW? Some other advocay group? Or through direct contact by the Times with the Pentagon sources?

There's far to many "senior defense official and two former intelligence officials" type quotes that DON'T have 'said to the Times' anywhere near them, also leaving me to wonder if the Times reporter spoke to them directly or if the quotes came via advocay groups.

That wouldn't negate the truth or seriousness of the article, but given the Times' recent problems I think that readers should be given the ability to know just how much actual repportage went into the story, and how much is just low-valued-added advocacy group re-writing.

[Joe MacKay]

I wonder what the NY Times would've written about the bombing of Dresden with modern reporting capabilities? Or how about Tokyo?

[Insufficiently Sensitive]

"we will be manipulated into unilaterially renouncing a key advantage we hold over almost every enemy and potential enemy on earth."

Precisely what the NYT wants. That paper thinks it's a member of the 'international community', and that the U.S. isn't.

The paper is so full of frustrated old Marxists that it has constituted itself as the Fifth International, for which its code words are the 'international community'.

May camels devour its subscription lists.

[Glenmore]

Air strikes are getting more and more accurate, but they still kill people. One innocent death is clearly unacceptable, but I suspect it would still be unacceptable if the ONLY death was the bad guy they were aiming for. No fair trial, for starters. Then, death penalty would be unacceptable.
Replace air strikes with ground attack and you have the same problems. If the bad guys hide behind women and children (and they do!) and one of those kids gets killed, then you committed a crime.
It all comes down to this - war and killing are bad things. Period. And the US must not do them.
This mindset results from generations of easy life and unchallenged idealism. It is rare in human history. It is rare because in the real, Darwinian, world this mindset eliminates itself from the gene pool. If you want your gene line to continue you are going to have to kill at some point, like it or not.

[dauber]

Glenmore, you're dead on the money -- the only way to eliminate the death of innocents in war is to eliminate war as a tool of statecraft. The problem for some of us, of course, is that we believe that war also saves many, many innocents when the enemy cannot be stopped except through force.

As to the idea that we've forgotten something, I suggest Lee Harris' latest book, Civilization and its Enemies, where he argues the problem is that some people have simply forgotten how to even think about the category "enemy" and insist on thinking of people who want to kill us as people with whom we just have a misunderstanding -- we haven't sat down and had a good chat yet.

[athena]

This is sorta long, but I posted something the other day about not being able to look at people as enemies, excerpt:

The real enemy is staring us down while we reach outstretched hands. When will we realize that not everyone in this world wants peace? We have to wake up from our slumber where our dreams teach us “love conquers all." Love is not a conqueror, the human spirit is. Loving our neighbors means giving them to means to love one another.

How can we sit idly by when enemies of the human spirit seek to enslave the minds of others through fear, intimidation and death? We can no longer be so self-serving and indignant that we ignore reality when it does not fit into our “comfort zone.”

Self-sacrifice for higher ideals means accepting that the road to these goals is often dangerous and uncertain. Bringing peace to the world is not an easy task. We must accept that there are those who oppose peace, and that no amount of cultural relativism makes that right.

I believe Frederick Douglas said it best with, “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

[Media Hound]

Cori, FYI, TimesWatch has linked to your
analysis of this story:

http://www.timeswatch.com/articles/2004/0614.asp

[LVC III]

I also read that NYTimes article, and I think your criticism about how we aren't given the history of air power in armed conflict is good and true (see the last paragraph of this email for an ironic twist on this). I think it's even more remarkable that we aren't given the context of the projected casualties in Iraq that were made, as with this example:
http://shorterlink.com/?ROR5QK
long form of this link: http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/e837174ca3856d1cc1256c70003e48d2?OpenDocument
When I read the NYTimes article, I was a little bit puzzled. What was the impetus, or pretext, for this article at this time? There doesn't seem to be any actual "news" in this news. That there were some 50 airstrikes on leadership targets isn't really news; I recall hearing this on a PBS Frontline (or Nova, whatever) a month or two ago. It can't have been the Human Rights Watch report because that was published six months ago. I'm still puzzled by this.
The article says that leadership targets that weren't killed in these strikes are now in leadership roles in the insurgency. I wonder what their point is? If the insurgency was planned before the war, then the failure of the airstrikes could hardly be attributed as the motivation for these Iraqi leaders to lead the insurgency; if we hadn't used airstrikes to try to kill them, then there were no plausible alternatives to use instead (what, we should have parachuted in Special Forces Ninjas?). I think the more salient point is that we've captured or killed 45 of the 55 Iraqi leadership targets; some of the ones that are left are, naturally, leading the insurgency because they haven't yet surrendered, or been captured or killed.
I also noted that the NYTimes quoted the HRW report as saying that the leadership airstrikes "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions." The report says that the the Battle Damage Assessment by the Pentagon didn't work very well in these cases because the pace of operations exceeded the time it takes to make an effective assessment; HRW then concludes that had this rapid assessment capability been in place, the Pentagon would have realized that the leadership strikes were ineffective and would have probably stopped using them before they'd conducted all fifty. And that is how HRW comes to the conclusion that the civilian deaths were "preventable" - by having a capability to do Battle Damage Assessment faster than was possible at the time. (Next up from HRW: Why the next war should wait until we've either tagged our targets with radio transmitter collars, or issued personal force field generators to everyone except the people we are trying to kill...)
Back to the HRW report - I also found this gem, which, mysteriously, the NYTimes failed to note: "For the most part, the collateral damage assessment process for the air war in Iraq worked well, especially with respect to preplanned targets. Human Rights Watch’s month-long investigation in Iraq found that, in most cases, aerial bombardment resulted in minimal adverse effects to the civilian population."

[dauber]

Really excellent pt -- where was the news hook for this front page article? It is the case that all their big "there have been civilian casualties!" pieces have been Sunday front page pieces (biggest circ.) this is the one with the least claim to real news.