Recently, the U.S. Air Force loosed 100,000 pounds of explosives in about 10 days on Arab Jabour, a small Sunni farming region just south of Baghdad. In The New York Times, this figure was buried in a single sentence deep inside a piece that led with an account of an IED explosion in the same region that killed an American soldier; in the Los Angeles Times, it made it into the last paragraphs of a piece that led off with a suicide bombing in al-Anbar Province. As Tom Engelhardt points out, “When it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it’s of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the ‘bombs’ can be produced at approximately the cost of a pizza (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn’t have the ring of something that matters.”As it happens, according to some accounts, in April 1937, the German Condor Legion dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the Spanish town of Guernica, destroying the place, causing many civilian casualties, and sparking international outrage over the self-evident barbarism of the event. From international headlines to the last two paragraphs of a piece in 71 years — that, in a way, is the modern tale of the normalization of our attitudes toward air power.

It’s in this context that Engelhardt discusses the 130,000 or more total pounds of explosives dropped in Iraq recently (according to Air Force spokesmen), reviews the ABCs of American air power in the region, considers the intensifying air campaign of the last year — the much ignored “air surge” — and finally gives some thought as to why reporters in Iraq have largely refused to look up.

Nowhere else will you find a piece that brings this set of information together. Thinking about Picasso’s Guernica, perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Engelhardt concludes this way:

“Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) 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.

“In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the way.”