Above the valley of Ellah

Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq...will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

-- from Tom Engelhardt on Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour.

P.S. 31 Jan: Paul Rogers puts this in context (The Iraq Project):

The need to guarantee the security of a protectorate on the scale envisaged - and, more immediately, to avoid attacks on US ground-patrols - is already being met by a second and largely hidden military surge. . This one is airborne, and involves the expansion of US air-power in Iraq far beyond even the intensive pounding of insurgent-held areas around Baghdad.