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The story of Iraq is usually told at ground level: roadside bombs, U.S. raids
on insurgent hideouts, and pipeline explosions. But well after the big blasts
of the war's first nights two years ago, the U.S. bombing of Iraq has gone on
with relatively little attention from the media.
From last May through February, U.S. warplanes flew 13,000 missions and dropped
about 490 bombs and missiles weighing a combined 265,800 pounds. That's not much
compared to the 41,000 coalition missions flown during the first month of the
war in March and April 2003, but in those early days there was an organized Iraqi
military with air defense installations and regime headquarters. Those are gone,
but the number of bombings rose sharply twice last year, jumping from 13 in May
to 127 in August, and from 50 bombings a month in September and October to more
than 100 in November, according to numbers obtained from military officials by
the Voice. The bombing has since decreased substantially.
The press often noted warplanes in action, from the November '04 Falluja assault
to the warplane that hit the wrong target near Mosul in January, killing at
least five innocents. But press descriptions of big days of bombing—like
November 10, when 12,000 pounds of ordnance rained down—weren't very elaborate.
And while the military reported its bombing runs, the details went only so far:
Of an August 25 operation that involved 22 bombs weighing 500 pounds apiece,
Centcom said merely that the bombardment was for "close air support."
We don't know what all this hardware is hitting, partly because journalists
in hot spots like Falluja were busy avoiding death and reporting on the fighting
they saw, not what warplanes were doing. And when the press did report on bombing
day-to-day, it was hard to detect the overall increase in bombing that occurred
last fall—a trend that, like the growing total of U.S. dead, says something
about the state of the war.
One reason for this gap in reporting is there are apparently no embedded reporters
with air force units or on navy aircraft carriers to notice trends in bombing.
That is not a matter of policy, a Centcom officer tells the Voice: The media
show little interest in working with those units. For cash-constrained news
operations covering the massive story of the Iraq war, air combat is admittedly
a tiny piece of the picture. But the bombs are still falling.
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