On December 10, Seymour Hersh wrote for the New Yorker:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Of course, all of this harks back to Nixon’s so-called “Vietnamization” policy, not only a disaster for the people of Vietnam and surrounding countries but also the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s criminal war in Southeast Asia. “We have a foul-mouthed Texan in the White House, facing a domestically unpopular war that he never expected to have to fight,” former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski told Tomdispatch. “In order to stop a persistent anti-American insurgency in a faraway country, this president will now escalate the use of air power, striking deep into the heart of insurgency strongholds and destroying the will of those that support the insurgency.”

This sounds like a replay of Rolling Thunder, March 1965. The Pentagon, led by the last remnant of those who were supposed to have directly experienced the danger of politicized wars managed out of the White House and the sheer uselessness of air power to win hearts and minds, must indeed be out of its collective mind to support a strategic shift like this.

Either out of their minds or suffering from amnesia. As usual, history serves—while suffering greatly under the punishment of Rolling Thunder, the Vietnamese responded to Johnson and McNamara’s sustained bombing campaign by dispersing their supplies and developing the means to repair and rebuild the supply network during lulls in the bombing raids. Even though the Pentagon had dropped 900,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam—more than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War—McNamara eventually conceded that airpower could not win the war.

In Iraq, under the direction of the Straussian neocons, there are major differences—however, the neocon-Likudite plan remains front and center. “The tempo looks set to increase this year as the Americans pull back from urban combat, leaving street fighting increasingly to Iraqi forces supported by US air power,” opines the Times Online. In other words, these cobbled together Iraqi forces will be calling in air strikes. Seymour Hersh adds:

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that “American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.” But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. “We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores.”

In fact, these “old scores” are crucial to the neocon-Zionist plan for the Muslim Middle East, for the plan is not to win the “war” and usher in a pie-in-the-sky version of democracy for benighted Arabs, but rather to break up the region into manageable chunks based along tribal and ethnic lines. “The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking,” Israel Shahak wrote in the forward to Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the ‘best’ that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: ‘The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part’ (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.”

Indeed, it is a cornerstone of Zionist thought and lies at the heart of the neocon strategy, not only in regard to Iraq but Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as well. As for the latter, Max Singer, former president of the neocon Hudson Institute and the World Institute in Jerusalem, presented a paper to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment urging the dismemberment of Saudi Arabia. British MP George Galloway comments: “Saudi Arabia could easily be two if not three countries, which would have the helpful bonus of avoiding foreign forces having to occupy the holiest places in Islam, when they’re only interested really in oil wells in the eastern part of the country.”

Capturing the oil wells is part of the scenario, especially for the transnational neolibs in collusion with the Zionist neocons. But for the Straussian neocons ensconced around the cardboard cut-out of a president Bush and burrowed deeply in the Pentagon, oil wells are secondary to the “very old” plan to slice and dice the Muslim Middle East into micromanageable chunks ruled by malleable proxies.

As noted above, more pragmatic minds in the Pentagon (those not enthralled or captured by the neocons) realize Bush’s version of Rolling Thunder in Iraq will ultimately result in “settling old scores” and eventually facilitate the fragmentation and balkanization of Iraq. In the process, Bush may be able to declare, as mid-term elections roll around this year, he is drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq. Of course, at the same time, the neocons in league with the Jabotinsky Zionists in Israel will be allowed a free hand to put forward their long-standing plan to eviscerate Muslim and Arab societies and crush Arab pan-nationalism, a basic tenet at the heart of Zionism.

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US forces step up Iraq airstrikes
Sarah Baxter, Washington, Ali Rifat, Baghdad and Peter Almond
The Times Online

AMERICAN forces are dramatically stepping up air attacks on insurgents in Iraq as they prepare to start the withdrawal of ground troops in the spring.

The number of airstrikes in 2005, running at a monthly average of 25 until August, surged to 120 in November and an expected 150 in December, according to official military figures.

The tempo looks set to increase this year as the Americans pull back from urban combat, leaving street fighting increasingly to Iraqi forces supported by US air power.

“The bottom line will be that as the Iraqi army and police gain in competence, they will be able to take on more and more of the territory,” said General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, announcing a cut in troop numbers from 160,000 to fewer than 138,000 by March.

The intensification in the air war comes as Iraqi politicians struggle in the aftermath of last month’s elections to put together a coalition government that will satisfy the disaffected Sunni minority, which ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

“We are insisting on a national unity government,” said Adel Abdel Mahdi, a leading member of the Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance, the likely election winner.

The Sunni bloc, allied to the secular party of Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, has been secretly discussing the terms of a possible political deal with insurgent groups. But those groups’ leaders have a long list of demands, chief of which is a timetable for American withdrawal as well as the release of prisoners, an effective rehabilitation of Saddam’s former ruling Ba’ath party and the disbanding of Shi’ite and Kurdish militias.

Insurgent sources said that they are also including Al-Qaeda in Iraq in their talks as its involvement was vital if a deal was to work.

President George W Bush promised in a pre-Chistmas speech that America will leave Iraq only when “victory” has been achieved, but the term is being quietly redefined.

Dov Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official during Bush’s first term in office, said: “The goal is not democracy, it is a united Iraq that doesn’t bother its neighbours. There is no law that says American troops have to be in the most hostile areas.”

The shift to air power is part of that policy. Determined to reduce “collateral damage”, the American military is relying on laser or satellite-guided bombs that can strike rooms or buildings without killing large numbers of civilians.

The bombs are also getting smaller: 500lb devices are becoming the norm, rather than those of 1,000lb or 2,000lb common in recent conflicts, and 3,000 new 7in 250lb devices are on order. Allen Peck, a US air force general, said that in some cases the 100lb Hellfire missile is used: “It won’t knock down a house, but it can be effective in taking out a car.”

In an example of the strategy, two US F16 fighters last week dropped two 500lb laser-guided bombs on three men planting roadside explosives in Kirkuk province, killing them and seven others.

However, some experts insist that even the smallest, most precise bombs cannot replace boots on the ground.

“It’s transitory. You hit it, even occupy it, but then the insurgents return when you’ve gone, like Falluja last year,” said Wing Commander Andrew Brookes of the International Insititute for Strategic Studies.

“Even a 400lb bomb has a wide area of blast and you are quite likely to kill some civilians. Kill a wife, children, mother or uncle and people become so angry the terrorist cycle starts all over again.”

There is also concern that Iraqi forces could abuse US air power. In a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, a senior Pentagon military planner wondered aloud to Seymour Hersh, the writer: “Will the Iraqis call in airstrikes in order to snuff rivals, other warlords or members of their own sect and blame somebody else? Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al-Qaeda, the insurgency or the Iranians?”

The Americans insist, however, they will keep control of targeting by “embedding” more US troops in Iraqi police and army units. At the same time they are making no effort to build an Iraqi air force — a sign that they have no intention of ceding control of the skies to a new Iraqi government.

If the use of planes proves effective, US troop levels should fall below 100,000 by next autumn in time for the American mid-term congressional elections. The US death toll in Iraq last year was 841 — just five short of the 2004 total.

“The biggest problem we have is that our strategy has to include winning the war at home,” said Zakheim. “We have a different electoral timetable to the Iraqis.”