By Kathleen Kern

I spend about four hours a day reading and listening to news. From most media outlets, my fellow information junkies and I have learned the following:

The United States was unprepared for an extended military occupation of Iraq.

U.S. soldiers are constantly under fire from insurgents’ mortars and improvised explosive devices.

Extended deployments have wreaked havoc on U.S. soldiers, especially those in the National Guard and Reserves.

Some of the wounded have received terrible medical care at home.

The recent “surge” of troops sent into Iraq may have, by some measures, begun to turn the situation around, but most Americans think we should withdraw from the Iraqi quagmire.

What I have not gleaned from all the news in my life is that U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq during the first six months of 2007.

These air strikes represent a fivefold increase over the 86 used in the first half of 2006, and three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data. In June, bombs were dropped at a rate of more than five a day.

I found that information from an Associated Press article that most media did not pick up. I learned of the AP article from a piece that a friend wrote for the Syracuse Peace Council’s monthly newsletter, “Beyond the Rhetoric of Withdrawal: Our Unknown Air War Over Iraq.”

Ed Kinane — a Peace Brigades volunteer who has crossed paths with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Haiti and Iraq — notes in his article that the Iraq air war may be the longest such war in history. For 16 years, beginning with the first Gulf War, it has been killing and maiming Iraqis as well as destroying life-supporting infrastructure, such as water treatment plants.

Air strikes between March 2003 and 2006 killed more than 78,000 Iraqis. They caused half of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under the age of 15.

To explain why the bombing runs in Iraq during 2007 have not received wider coverage, Kinane writes:

“Because most U.S. journalists in Iraq are embedded, they cover the war from the perspective of the U.S. soldiers they accompany. ‘Embeds’ seldom accompany chopper or fixed-wing pilots and never accompany unmanned Predator drones — those robot planes that spew death with no risk to those guiding them from afar. So embeds can tell us little about such operations and their consequences.”

Given the casualties piling up from these bombing runs, Kinane criticizes the antiwar movement’s use of the slogan, “Support Our Troops; Bring Them Home.”

“ ‘Bring them home’ must be accompanied by other messages that, among other things, expose the air war,” he writes. “Otherwise, when those soldiers seem out of harm’s way, people here may move on to other concerns — leaving the air war as robust and off the radar as ever.”

I have edited CPT releases coming out of Iraq and spoken with colleagues who have worked there, so I think I am better informed about the situation in Iraq than most. I am thus discouraged that I had to find out about these massive bombing raids from a central New York peace group’s newsletter.

I wonder what else I am missing.

For the complete text of Kinane’s article and his sources, see http://vcnv.org/beyond-the-rhetoric-of-withdrawal-our- unknown-air-war-over-iraq.