A HISTORY OF THE CAR BOMB (Part
2) Car bombs
with wings By Mike
Davis
(For Part 1, The poor man's air
force, click here)
"The CIA officers
that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon him
one rule: never use the terms sabotage or
assassination when speaking with visiting
congressmen." - Steve Coll, Ghost
Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,
and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to
September 10, 2001.
Gunboat diplomacy
had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the
Ronald Reagan administration and, above all,
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William
Casey were left thirsting for revenge against
Hezbollah.
"Finally in 1985", according to
the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil,
his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with
the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill
[Hezbollah leader] Sheikh [Muhammad Husayn]
Fadlallah who they determined was
one of
the people behind, not only the Marine [Corps]
barracks [suicide truck bomb], but was involved in
the taking of American hostages in Beirut ... It
was Casey on his own, saying, 'I'm going to solve
the big problem by essentially getting tougher or
as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon -
the car bomb'."
The CIA's own operatives,
however, proved incapable of carrying out the
bombing, so Casey sub-contracted the operation to
Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS
(Special Air Service) officer and financed by
Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin
Abdul Aziz. In March 1984, a large car bomb was
detonated about 45 meters (50 yards) from
Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded
Shi'ite neighborhood in southern Beirut.
The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80 innocent
neighbors and passersby were killed and 200
wounded. Fadlallah immediately had a huge "Made In
USA" banner hung across the shattered street,
while Hezbollah returned tit for tat in September
when a suicide truck driver managed to break
through the supposedly impregnable perimeter
defenses of the new US Embassy in eastern
(Christian) Beirut, killing 23 employees and
visitors.
Despite the Fadlallah fiasco,
Casey remained an enthusiast for using urban
terrorism to advance American goals, especially
against the Soviets and their allies in
Afghanistan. A year after the Bir El-Abed
massacre, Casey won Reagan's approval for NSDD-166
(national security decision directive), a secret
directive that, according to Steve Coll in
Ghost Wars, inaugurated a "new era of
direct infusions of advanced US military
technology into Afghanistan, intensified training
of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage
techniques and targeted attacks on Soviet military
officers".
US special forces experts would
now provide high-tech explosives and teach
state-of-the-art sabotage techniques, including
the fabrication of ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel
oil) car bombs, to Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence (or ISI) officers under the command
of Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. These officers, in
turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign
mujahideen, including the future cadre of
al-Qaeda, in scores of training camps financed by
the Saudis.
"Under ISI direction," Coll
wrote, "the mujahideen received training and
malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even
camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities,
usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and
commanders. Casey endorsed these despite the
qualms of some CIA career officers."
Mujahideen car bombers, working with teams
of snipers and assassins, not only terrorized
uniformed Soviet forces in a series of devastating
attacks in Afghanistan but also massacred
left-wing intelligentsia in Kabul, the country's
capital. "Yousaf and the Afghan car-bombing squads
he trained," wrote Coll, "regarded Kabul
University professors as fair game," as well as
movie theaters and cultural events.
Although some members of the US National
Security Council reportedly denounced the bombings
and assassinations as "outright terrorism", Casey
was delighted with the results. Meanwhile, "by the
late 1980s, the ISI had effectively eliminated all
the secular, leftist and royalist political
parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees
fled communist rule."
As a result, most of
the billions of dollars that the Saudis and
Washington pumped into Afghanistan ended up in the
hands of radical Islamist groups sponsored by the
ISI. They were also the chief recipients of huge
quantities of CIA-supplied plastic explosives as
well as thousands of advanced E-cell delay
detonators.
It was the greatest technology
transfer of terrorist technique in history. There
was no need for angry Islamists to take car-bomb
extension courses from Hezbollah when they could
matriculate in a CIA-supported urban-sabotage
graduate program in Pakistan's frontier provinces.
"Ten years later," Coll observed, "the
vast training infrastructure that Yousaf and his
colleagues built with the enormous budgets
endorsed by NSDD-166 - the specialized camps, the
sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb
detonators and so on - would be referred to
routinely in America as 'terrorist
infrastructure'." Moreover, the alumni of the ISI
training camps such as Ramzi Yousef, who plotted
the first 1993 World Trade Center attack, or his
uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly
designed the second, would soon be applying their
expertise on every continent.
Cities
under siege (the 1990s) "The hour of
dynamite, terror without limit, has arrived." -
Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorritti, 1992
Twenty-first century hindsight makes it
clear that the defeat of the US intervention in
Lebanon in 1983-84, followed by the CIA's dirty
war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent
geopolitical repercussions than the loss of Saigon
in 1975.
The Vietnam War was, of course,
an epic struggle whose imprint on domestic
American politics remains profound, but it
belonged to the era of the Cold War's bipolar
superpower rivalry. Hezbollah's war in Beirut and
south Lebanon, on the other hand, prefigured (and
even inspired) the "asymmetric" conflicts that
characterize the millennium.
Moreover,
unlike peoples' wars on the scale sustained by the
NLF (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam)
and the North Vietnamese for more than a
generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are
easily franchised and gruesomely applicable in a
variety of scenarios.
Although rural
guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts such as
Kashmir, the Khyber Pass and the Andes, the center
of gravity of global insurgency has moved from the
countryside back to the cities and their slum
peripheries. In this post-Cold-War urban context,
the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine Corps barracks
has become the gold standard of terrorism; the
September 11 attacks, it can be argued, were only
an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide truck bomb
to airliners.
Washington, however, was
loath to recognize the new military leverage that
powerful vehicle bombs offered its enemies or even
to acknowledge their surprising lethality. After
the 1983 Beirut bombings, the Sandia National
Laboratory in New Mexico began an intensive
investigation into the physics of truck bombs.
Researchers were shocked by what they discovered.
In addition to the deadly air blast, truck bombs
also produced unexpectedly huge ground waves.
"The lateral accelerations propagated
through the ground from a truck bomb far exceed
those produced during the peak magnitude of an
earthquake." Indeed, the scientists of Sandia came
to the conclusion that even an offsite detonation
near a nuclear power plant might "cause enough
damage to lead to a deadly release of radiation or
even a meltdown". Yet the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission in 1986 refused to authorize the
emplacement of vehicle barriers to protect
nuclear-power installations and made no move to
alter an obsolete security plan designed to thwart
a few terrorists infiltrating on foot.
Indeed, Washington seemed unwilling to
learn any of the obvious lessons of either its
Beirut defeat or its secret successes in
Afghanistan. The Reagan and Bush administrations
appeared to regard the Hezbollah bombings as
flukes, not as a powerful new threat that would
replicate rapidly in the "blowback" of imperial
misadventure and anti-Soviet escapades.
Although it was inevitable that other
insurgent groups would soon try to emulate
Hezbollah, American planners - although partially
responsible - largely failed to foresee the
extraordinary "globalization" of car bombing in
the 1990s or the rise of sophisticated new
strategies of urban destabilization that went with
it.
Yet by the mid-1990s, more cities were
under siege from bomb attacks than at any time
since the end of World War II, and urban
guerrillas were using car and truck bombs to score
direct hits on some of the world's most powerful
financial institutions. Each success, moreover,
emboldened groups to plan yet more attacks and
recruited more groups to launch their own "poor
man's air force".
Beginning in April 1992,
for example, the occult Maoists of Sendero
Luminoso came down from Peru's altiplano to
spread terror throughout the cities of Lima and
Callao with increasingly more powerful
coche-bombas. "Large supplies of
explosives", the magazine Caretas pointed out, are
"freely available in a mining nation", and the
senderistas were generous in their gifts of
dynamite: bombing television stations and various
foreign embassies as well as a dozen police
stations and military camps.
Their
campaign eerily recapitulated the car bomb's
phylogeny as it progressed from modest detonations
to a more powerful attack on the American Embassy,
then to Bloody-Friday-type public massacres using
16 vehicles at a time. The climax (and Sendero's
chief contribution to the genre) was an attempt to
blow up an entire neighborhood of "class enemies":
a huge ANFO explosion in the elite Miraflores
district on the evening of July 16 that killed 22,
wounded 120 and destroyed or damaged 183 homes,
400 businesses and 63 parked cars. The local press
described Miraflores as looking "as if an aerial
bombardment had flattened the area".
If
one of the virtues of an air force is the ability
to reach halfway around the world to surprise
enemies in their beds, the car bomb truly grew
wings during 1993 as Middle Eastern groups struck
at targets in the Western hemisphere for the first
time.
The World Trade Center attack on
February 26 was organized by master al-Qaeda
bomb-maker Yousef working with a Kuwaiti engineer
named Nidal Ayyad and immigrant members of the
Egyptian group, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, headed by
Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman (whose US visa had
reputedly been arranged by the CIA).
Their
extraordinary ambition was to kill tens of
thousands of New Yorkers with a powerful lateral
blast that would crack the foundations of one WTC
tower and topple it on its twin. Yousef's weapon
was a Ryder rental van packed with an ingenious
upgrade of the classic Irish Republican Army (IRA)
and Hezbollah ANFO explosive.
"The bomb
itself", wrote Peter Lange in his history of the
bombing, "consisted of four cardboard boxes filled
with a slurry of urea nitrate and fuel oil, with
waste paper as a binder. The boxes were surrounded
by four-foot tanks of compressed hydrogen. They
were connected by four 20-foot-long slow-burning
fuses of smokeless powder wrapped in fabric.
Yousef balanced on his lap four vials of
nitroglycerine."
The conspirators had no
difficulty parking the van next to the
load-bearing south wall of the north tower, but
the massive explosive proved too small -
excavating a four-story deep crater in the
basement, killing six and injuring 1,000, but
failing to bring the tower down. "Our calculations
were not very accurate this time," wrote Ayyad in
a letter. "However, we promise you that next it
would will [sic] be very precise and the Trade
Center will be one of our targets."
Two
weeks after the WTC attack, a car bomb almost as
powerful exploded in the underground parking
garage of the Bombay Stock Exchange, severely
damaging the 28-story skyscraper and killing 50
office workers. Twelve other car or motorcycle
bombs soon detonated at other prestige targets,
killing an additional 207 people and injuring
1,400.
The bombings were revenge for
sectarian riots a few months earlier in which
Indian Hindus had killed hundreds of Indian
Muslims. The attacks were reputedly organized from
Dubai by exiled Bombay underworld king Dawood
Ibrahim at the behest of Pakistani intelligence.
According to one account, he sent three boats from
Dubai to Karachi where they were loaded with
military explosives. Indian customs officials were
then bribed to look the other way while the "black
soup" was smuggled into Bombay.
Corrupt
officials were also rumored to have facilitated
the suicide car bombing of the Israeli Embassy in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 17, 1993, which
killed 30 and injured 242. The next year, a second
"martyr", later identified as a 29-year-old
Hezbollah militant from southern Lebanon, leveled
the seven-story Argentine-Israel Mutual
Association, slaughtering 85 and wounding more
than 300. Both bombers carefully followed the
Beirut template, as did the Islamist militant who
drove his car into the central police headquarters
in Algiers in January 1995, killing 42 and
injuring more than 280.
But the supreme
acolytes of Hezbollah were the Tamil Tigers of Sri
Lanka, the only non-Muslim group that has
practiced suicide car bombings on a large scale.
Indeed, their leader Prabhaakaran "made a
strategic decision to adopt the method of suicide
attack after observing its lethal effectiveness in
the 1983 suicide bombings of the US and French
barracks in Beirut".
Between their first
such operation in 1987 and 2000, they were
responsible for twice as many suicide attacks of
all kinds as Hezbollah and Hamas combined.
Although they have integrated car bombs into
regular military tactics (for example, using
kamikazes in trucks to open attacks on Sri Lankan
Army camps), their obsession and "most-prized
theater of operation" in their struggle for Tamil
independence has been the Sri Lankan capital,
Colombo, which they first car-bombed in 1987 in a
grisly attack on the main bus terminal, burning
scores of passengers to death inside crowded
buses.
In January 1996, a Black Tiger - as
the suicide elite are called - drove a truck
containing 440 pounds of military high explosives
into the front of the Central Bank Building,
resulting in nearly 1,400 casualties. Twenty
months later in October 1997 in a more complex
operation, the Tigers attacked the twin towers of
the Colombo World Trade Center. They managed to
maneuver through barricades and set off a car bomb
in front of the center, then battled the police
with automatic weapons and grenades.
The
following March, a suicide mini-bus with
shrapnel-filled bombs affixed to its sideboards
was detonated outside the main train station in
the midst of a huge traffic jam. The 38 dead
included a dozen children in a school bus.
The Tamil Tigers are a mass nationalist
movement with "liberated territory", a full-scale
army and even a tiny navy; moreover, 20,000 Tiger
cadres received secret paramilitary training in
the Indian state of Tamil Nadu from 1983 to 1987,
courtesy of prime minister Indira Gandhi and
India's CIA - the Research and Analysis Wing
(RAW).
But such sponsorship literally blew
up in the face of the Indian Congress Party
leadership when Indira's son and successor Rajiv
Gandhi was killed by a female Tiger suicide bomber
in 1993. Indeed, the all-too-frequent pattern of
surrogate terrorism, whether sponsored by the CIA,
RAW or the Soviet KGB, has been "return to sender"
- most notoriously in the cases of those former
CIA "assets", blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel
Rahman and Osama bin Laden.
The Oklahoma
City bombing in April 1995 was a different and
startling species of blowback, organized by two
angry US veterans of the Gulf War rather than by
Iraq or any Islamist group. Although conspiracy
theorists have made much of a strange coincidence
that put Terry Nichols and Yousef near each other
in Cebu City in the Philippines in November 1994,
the design of the attack seems to have been
inspired by Timothy McVeigh's obsession with that
devil's cookbook, The Turner Diaries.
Written in 1978, after Bloody Friday but
before Beirut, neo-Nazi William Pierce's novel
describes with pornographic relish how white
supremacists destroy the FBI headquarters in
Washington DC with an ANFO truck bomb, then crash
a plane carrying a hijacked nuke into the
Pentagon.
McVeigh carefully followed
Pierce's simple recipe in the novel (several tons
of ammonium nitrate in a parked truck) rather than
Yousef's more complicated WTC formula, although he
did substitute nitro racing fuel and diesel oil
for ordinary heating oil.
Nonetheless, the
explosion that slaughtered 168 people in the
Alfred Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995
was three times more powerful than any of the
truck-bomb detonations that the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms and other federal agencies
had been studying at their test range in New
Mexico.
Experts were amazed at the radius
of destruction: "Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of
dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked
glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80%
of its injuries on people outside the building up
to a half-mile away." Distant seismographs
recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter
scale.
But McVeigh's good-ole-boy bomb,
with its diabolical demonstration of heartland DIY
(a do-it-yourself TV network) ingenuity, was
scarcely the last word in destructive power;
indeed, it was probably inevitable that the dark
Olympics of urban carnage would be won by a home
team from the Middle East.
Although the
casualty list (20 dead, 372 wounded) wasn't as
long as Oklahoma City's, the huge truck bomb that,
in June 1996, alleged Hezbollah militants left
outside Dhahran's Khobar Towers - a highrise
dormitory used by US Air Force personnel in Saudi
Arabia - broke all records in explosive yield,
being the equivalent perhaps of 20 1,000-pound
(453 kilogram) bombs.
Moreover, the death
toll might have been as large as the Marine Corps
barracks in Lebanon in 1993 save for alert air
force sentries who began an evacuation shortly
before the explosion. Still, the blast
(military-grade plastic explosive) left an
incredible crater 85-feet wide and 35-feet deep.
Two years later, on August 7, 1998,
al-Qaeda claimed the championship in mass murder
when it crashed suicide truck bombs into the US
embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam,
Tanzania, in a replay of the simultaneous 1993
attacks on the marines and the French in Beirut.
Located near two of the busiest streets in
the city without adequate setback or protective
glacis, the Nairobi embassy was especially
vulnerable, as ambassador Prudence Bushnell had
fruitlessly warned the State Department. In the
event, ordinary Kenyans - burned alive in their
vehicles, lacerated by flying glass or buried in
smoldering debris - were the principal victims of
the huge explosion, which killed several hundred
and wounded more than 5,000. Another dozen people
died and almost 100 were injured in Dar-es-Salaam.
Sublime indifference to the collateral
carnage caused by its devices, including to
innocent Muslims, remains a hallmark of operations
organized by the al-Qaeda network. Like his
forerunners Hermann Goering and Curtis LeMay, bin
Laden seems to exult in the sheer statistics of
bomb damage - the competitive race to ever greater
explosive yields and killing ranges.
One
of the most lucrative of his recent franchises (in
addition to air travel, skyscrapers and public
transport) has been car-bomb attacks on Western
tourists in primarily Muslim countries, although
the October 2002 attack on a Bali nightclub (202
dead) and the July 2005 bombing of hotels in
Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh (88 dead) almost certainly
killed as many local workers as erstwhile
"crusaders".
Form follows fear (the
1990s) "The car bomb is the nuclear weapon
of guerrilla warfare." - Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer
A "billion-pound
explosion"? One meaning, of course, is the TNT
yield of three or four Hiroshima-size atomic
weapons (which is to say, only a smidgen of the
explosive power of a single H-bomb). Alternately,
one billion (British) pounds (US$1.45 billion) is
what the IRA cost the City of London in April 1993
when a blue dump-truck containing a ton of ANFO
exploded on Bishopsgate Road across from the
NatWest Tower in the heart of the world's second
major financial center.
Although one
bystander was killed and more than 30 injured by
the immense explosion, which also demolished a
medieval church and wrecked the Liverpool Street
station, the human toll was incidental to the
economic damage that was the true goal of the
attack.
Whereas the other truck bomb
campaigns of the 1990s - Lima, Bombay, Colombo and
so forth - had followed Hezbollah's playbook
almost to the letter, the Bishopsgate bomb, which
A Secret History of the IRA author Ed
Moloney describes as "the most successful military
tactic since the start of the troubles", was part
of a novel IRA campaign that waged war on
financial centers in order to extract British
concessions during the difficult peace
negotiations that lasted through most of the
1990s.
Bishopsgate, in fact, was the
second and most costly of three blockbuster
explosions carried out by the elite (and more or
less autonomous) South Armagh IRA under the
leadership of the legendary "Slab" Murphy. Almost
exactly a year earlier, they had set off a truck
bomb at the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe that
rained a million pounds of glass and debris on
surrounding streets, killing three and wounding
almost 100 people.
The damage, although
less than Bishopsgate, was still astonishing:
about 800 million pounds or more than the
approximately 600 million pounds in total damage
inflicted over 22 years of bombing in Northern
Ireland.
Then, in 1996, with peace talks
stalled and the IRA Army Council in revolt against
the latest cease-fire, the South Armagh Brigade
smuggled into England a third huge car bomb that
they set off in the underground garage of one of
the postmodern office buildings near Canary Wharf
Tower in the gentrified London Docklands, killing
two and causing nearly $150 million dollars in
damage. Total damage from the three explosions was
at least $3 billion.
As Jon Coaffee points
out in her book on the impact of the bombings, if
the IRA like the Tamil Tigers or al-Qaeda had
simply wanted to sow terror or bring life in
London to a halt, they would have set off the
explosions at rush hour on a business day -
instead, they "were detonated at a time when the
city was virtually deserted" - and/or attacked the
heart of the transport infrastructure, as did the
Islamist suicide bombers who blew up London buses
and subways in July.
Instead, Murphy and
his comrades concentrated on what they perceived
to be a financial weak link: the faltering British
and European insurance industry. To the horror of
their enemies, they were spectacularly successful.
"The huge payouts by insurance companies,"
commented the BBC shortly after Bishopsgate,
"contributed to a crisis in the industry,
including the near-collapse of the world's leading
[re]insurance market, Lloyds of London." German
and Japanese investors threatened to boycott the
city unless physical security was improved and the
government agreed to subsidize insurance costs.
Despite a long history of London bombings
by the Irish going back to the Fenians and Queen
Victoria, neither Downing Street, nor the City of
London police had foreseen this scale of
accurately targeted physical and financial damage.
(Indeed, Murphy might have been surprised; like
the original ANFO bombs, these super-bombs were
probably a wee bit of serendipity for the IRA.)
The city's response was a more
sophisticated version of the "ring of steel"
(concrete barriers, high iron fences and
impregnable gates) that had been built around
Belfast's city center after IRA's Bloody Friday.
Following Bishopsgate, the financial media
clamored for similar protection: "The City should
be turned into a medieval-style walled enclave to
prevent terrorist attacks."
What was
actually implemented in the city and later in the
Docklands was a technologically more advanced
network of traffic restrictions and cordons, CCTV
cameras, including "24-hour automated number plate
recording (ANPR) cameras, linked to police
databases", and intensified public and private
policing. "In the space of a decade", wrote
Coaffee, "the City of London was transformed into
the most surveilled space in the UK and perhaps
the world with over 1,500 surveillance cameras
operating, many of which are linked to the ANPR
system."
Since September 11, 2001, this
anti-terrorist surveillance system has been
extended throughout London's core in the benign
guise of Mayor Ken Livingstone's celebrated
"congestion pricing" scheme to liberate the city
from gridlock. According to one of Britain's major
Sunday papers:
The Observer has discovered that
MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police
began secretly developing the system in the wake
of the September 11 attacks. In effect, the
controversial charging scheme will create one of
the most daunting defense systems protecting a
major world city when it goes live a week
tomorrow.
It is understood that the
system also utilizes facial recognition software
which automatically identifies suspects or known
criminals who enter the eight-square-mile zone.
Their precise movements will be tracked by
camera from the point of entry ... However,
civil liberty campaigners yesterday claimed that
millions had been misled over the dual function
of the scheme, promoted primarily as a means of
reducing congestion in central
London.
The addition in 2003 of this
new panopticon traffic scan to London's already
extensive system of video surveillance ensures
that the average citizen is "caught on CCTV
cameras 300 times a day". It may make it easier
for the police to apprehend non-suicidal
terrorists, but it does little to protect the city
from well-planned and competently disguised
vehicle bomb attacks.
Prime Minister Tony
Blair's "third way" has been a fast lane for the
adoption of Orwellian surveillance and the
usurpation of civil liberties, but until some
miracle technology emerges (and none is in sight)
that allows authorities from a distance to "sniff"
a molecule or two of explosive in a stream of
rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will continue
to commute to work.
The 'king' of Iraq
(the 2000s) "Insurgents exploded 13 car
bombs across Iraq on Sunday, including eight in
Baghdad within a three-hour span." - Associated
Press news report, January 1
Car bombs -
some 1,293 between 2004 and 2005, according to
researchers at the Brookings Institution - have
devastated Iraq like no other land in history. The
most infamous, driven or left by sectarian
jihadis, have targeted Iraqi Shi'ites in front of
their homes, mosques, police stations and markets:
125 dead in Hilla (February 28, 2005); 98 in
Mussayib (July 16); 114 in Baghdad (September 14);
102 in Blad (September 29); 50 in Abu Sayda
(November 19); and so on.
Some of the
devices have been gigantic, like the stolen
fuel-truck bomb that devastated Mussayib, but what
is most extraordinary has been their sheer
frequency - in one 48-hour-period in July at least
15 suicide car bombs exploded in or around
Baghdad. The sinister figure supposedly behind the
worst of these massacres is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the Jordanian arch-terrorist who reportedly
criticized bin Laden for insufficient zeal in
attacking domestic enemies such as the "infidel
Shi'ites". Zarqawi, it is claimed, is pursuing an
essentially eschatological rather than political
goal: a cleansing of enemies without end until the
Earth is ruled by a single, righteous caliphate.
Toward this end, he - or those invoking
his name - seems to have access to an almost
limitless supply of bomb vehicles (some of them
apparently stolen in California and Texas, then
shipped to the Middle East) as well as Saudi and
other volunteers eager to martyr themselves in
flame and molten metal for the sake of taking a
few Shi'ite school kids, market venders or foreign
"crusaders" with them.
Indeed, the supply
of suicidal madrassa (Islamic school)
graduates seems to far exceed what the logic of
suicide bombing (as perfected by Hezbollah and the
Tamil Tigers) actually demands: many of the
explosions in Iraq could just as easily be
detonated by remote control. But the car bomb - at
least in Zarqawi's relentless vision - is
evidently a stairway to heaven as well as the
chosen weapon of genocide.
But Zarqawi did
not originate car bomb terrorism along the banks
of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; that dark
honor belongs to the CIA and its favorite son,
Iyad Allawi. As the New York Times revealed in
June 2004:
Iyad Allawi, now the designated
prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile
organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein
that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990s
to plant bombs and sabotage government
facilities under the direction of the CIA,
several former intelligence officials say.
Dr Allawi's group, the Iraqi National
Accord, used car bombs and other explosives
devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq
... One former Central Intelligence Agency
officer who was based in the region, Robert
Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period
"blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were
killed".
According to one of the
Times' informants, the bombing campaign, dead
school kids and all, "was a test more than
anything else, to demonstrate capability". It
allowed the CIA to portray the then-exiled Allawi
and his suspect group of ex-Ba'athists as a
serious opposition to Saddam and an alternative to
the coterie (so favored by Washington
neo-conservatives) around Ahmad Chalabi. "No one
had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back
then," another CIA veteran reflected. "I don't
think anyone could have known how things would
turn out today."
Today, of course, car
bombs rule Iraq. In a June article entitled, "Why
the car bomb is king in Iraq", James Dunnigan
warned that it was supplanting the roadside bomb
(which "are more frequently discovered, or
defeated with electronic devices") as the "most
effective weapon" of Sunni insurgents as well as
of Zarqawi, and thus "the terrorists are building
as many as they can." The recent "explosive
growth" in car ownership in Iraq, he added, had
made it "easier for the car bombs to just get lost
in traffic".
In this kingdom of the car
bomb, the occupiers have withdrawn almost
completely into their own forbidden city, the
"Green Zone", and their well-fortified and
protected military bases. This is not the
high-tech City of London with sensors taking the
place of snipers, but a totally medievalized
enclave surrounded by concrete walls and defended
by M1 Abrams tanks and helicopter gunships as well
as an exotic corps of corporate mercenaries
(including Gurkhas, ex-Rhodesian commandos, former
British SAS and amnestied Colombian
paramilitaries). Once the Xanadu of the Ba'athist
ruling class, the 10-square-kilometer Green Zone,
as described by journalist Scott Johnson, is now a
surreal theme park of the American way of life:
Women in shorts and T-shirts jog
down broad avenues and the Pizza Inn does a
brisk business from the parking lot of the
heavily fortified US Embassy. Near the Green
Zone Bazaar, Iraqi kids hawk pornographic DVDs
to soldiers. Sheikh Fuad Rashid, the
US-appointed imam of the local mosque, dresses
like a nun, dyes his hair platinum blond and
claims that Mary Mother of Jesus appeared to him
in a vision [hence the getup]. On any given
night, residents can listen to karaoke, play
badminton or frequent one of several rowdy bars,
including an invitation-only speakeasy run by
the CIA.
Outside the Green Zone, of
course, is the "Red Zone", where ordinary Iraqis
can be randomly and unexpectedly blown to bits by
car bombers or strafed by American helicopters.
Not surprisingly, wealthy Iraqis and members of
the new government are clamoring for admission to
the security of the Green Zone, but US officials
told Newsweek last year that "plans to move the
Americans out are 'fantasy'."
Billions
have been invested in the Green Zone and a dozen
other American enclaves officially known for a
period as "enduring camps", and even prominent
Iraqis have been left to forage for their own
security outside the blast walls of these
exclusive bubble Americas.
A population
that has endured Saddam's secret police, United
Nations sanctions and American cruise missiles,
now steels itself to survive the car bombers who
prowl poor neighborhoods looking for grisly
martyrdom. For the most selfish reasons, let us
hope that Baghdad is not a metaphor for our
collective future.
Mike Davis is
the author most recently of The Monster at Our
Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New
Press) and Planet of Slums (Verso). He
lives in San Diego.
