Missing Half the Story

A widely-quoted December 13 Times of London article which states that "Britain and America are planning a phased withdrawal of their forces from Iraq as soon as a permanent government is installed" has given new hope to anti-war forces in the U.S. and muted criticism of the Bush and Blair administrations.

However, the Times article and the many others which have spun off from it miss half the story: departing American and British troops will be replaced by American air power as detailed in Seymour Hersh's December 5 article in the New Yorker, "Up in the Air".

Even though the numbers of allied ground troops will drop sharply in 2006, and American and British readers will not encounter the same level of daily killed-in-action reports in their newspapers, the violence in Iraq and its impact on Iraqi civilians will not lessen, and might worsen.

The Times of London has completely missed this aspect of the developing story, as have all the major U.S. media. Author and media critic Norman Solomon, in a December 5 piece entitled "Hidden in Plane Sight" which appeared at Common Dreams website, noted that the phrase "air war" has not appeared a single time in either the New York Times or the Washington Post in 2005, and is also AWOL from the pages of Time Magazine.

"At least implicitly, news coverage has viewed the number of boots on the ground as the measure of the U.S. war effort in Iraq," Solomon observes. "And as a consequence, public discussion assumes -- incorrectly -- that a reduction of American troop levels there will mean a drop in the Pentagon's participation in the carnage."

In fact, the tempo of American bombing in Iraq has already increased "in recent months," according to Hersh's New Yorker piece which adds that "Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border."

Given its performance during the runup to the war, there is no guarantee the American mainstream media will pick up the significant details of the new developments until it is too late. "Mainstream news outlets in the United States haven't yet acknowledged a possibility that is both counterintuitive and probable: The U.S. military could end up killing more Iraqi people when there are fewer Americans in Iraq," Norman Solomon concludes.

He also quotes Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee: "This would in effect be 'changing the color of the corpses' in order to make the continuing war more palatable to the U.S. public."

Those who note parallels between the Iraq and Vietnam wars now have plenty to work with. The Bush administration's emphasis on creating an Iraqi government "able to stand on its own," and Iraqi fighting forces sufficient to protect it, mirror President Nixon's "Vietnamization" program of the early 70's. Likewise, the replacement of ground troops with air power precisely replicates the failed Nixon-Kisinger policy of that earlier war.

The end result -- Iraqi collaborators being lifted off the rooves of the Green Zone by departing American helicopters -- can be foreseen by predictors less prescient than Jeanne Dixon. History may not repeat itself, but most certainly, as Mark Twain once said, "It rhymes."

Now more than ever, an informed citizenry needs to take action to forestall the continuation of a criminal and unpopular war under stealth conditions. We need to email our Congressional representatives and senators, write letters to the editors of our local newspapers, and spread the word.