DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Air war, barbarity and the Middle
East By Tom Engelhardt
Editor's note: This report was
written before Israeli aircraft on Sunday bombed
the village of Qana in southern Lebanon, killing
as least 56 people, including some 20
children.
Barbarism seems an obvious
enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the
barbarians are them, not us. They act in ways that
seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For
instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American
or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn't that
the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore?
The 8th century, or maybe the word "medieval" -
anyway, some brutal past time - comes to mind
immediately, and to the mass mind of our media
even faster.
Similarly, to jump a little
closer to modernity, they strap grenades, plastic
explosives, bombs of various ingenious sorts
fashioned in home labs, with
nails or other bits of sharp metal added in to
create instant shrapnel meant to rend human flesh,
to maim and kill. Then they approach a target - an
Israeli bus filled with civilians and perhaps some
soldiers, a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, a gathering
of Shi'ite or Sunni worshippers at or near a
mosque in Iraq or Pakistan, or of unemployed
potential police or army recruits in Ramadi or
Baghdad, or of shoppers in an Iraqi market
somewhere in that country, or perhaps a foreigner
on the streets of Kabul - and they blow themselves
up. Or they arm backpacks or bags and step onto
trains in London, Madrid, Mumbai and set them off.
Or, to up the technology and modernity a
bit, they wire a car to explode, put a jihadist in
the driver's seat, and drive it into - well, this
is now common enough that you can pick your
target. Or perhaps they audaciously hijack four
just-fueled jets filled with passengers and run
two of them into the World Trade Center, one into
the Pentagon and another into a field in
Pennsylvania. This is, of course, the very
definition of barbaric.
Now, let's jump a
step further into our age of technological
destruction, becoming less face-to-face, more
impersonal, without, in the end, changing things
that much. They send rockets from southern Lebanon
(or even cruder ones from the Gaza Strip) against
Israeli towns and cities. These rockets can only
vaguely be aimed. Some can be brought into the
general vicinity of an inhabited area; others,
more advanced, into specific urban neighborhoods
many tens of miles away - and then they detonate,
killing whoever is in the vicinity, which normally
means civilians just living their lives, even, in
one recent Hezbollah volley aimed at Nazareth, two
Israeli Arab children. In this process, thousands
of Israelis have been temporarily driven from
their homes.
In the case of rockets by the
hundreds lofted into Israel by an armed, organized
militia, meant to terrorize and harm civilian
populations, these are undoubtedly war crimes.
Above all, they represent a kind of barbarism that
- with the possible exception of some of those
advanced Hezbollah rockets - feels primitive to
us. Despite the explosives, cars, planes, all so
basic to our modern way of life, such acts still
seem redolent of ancient, less-civilized times
when people did especially cruel things to each
other face-to-face.
The religion of air
power That's them. But what about us? On
our we/they planet, most groups don't consider
themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have
largely achieved non-barbaric status in an
interesting way - by removing the most essential
aspect of the American (and, right now, Israeli)
way of war from the category of the barbaric. I'm
talking, of course, about air power, about raining
destruction down on the earth from the skies, and
about the belief - so common, so long-lasting, so
deep-seated - that bombing others, including
civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to
do; that air power can, in relatively swift
measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy,
but of that enemy's society; and that such a way
of war is the royal path to victory.
This
set of beliefs was common to air-power advocates
even before modern air war had been tested, and
repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these
convictions into practice have never really shaken
- not for long anyway - what is essentially a
war-making religion. The result has been the
development of the most barbaric style of warfare
imaginable, one that has seldom succeeded in
breaking any societal will, though it has
destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of
countryside, villages, towns and cities.
Even today, we find Israeli military
strategists saying things that could have been put
in the mouths of their air-power-loving
predecessors endless decades ago. The New York
Times' Steven Erlanger, for instance, recently
quoted an unnamed "senior Israeli commander" this
way: "He predicted that Israel would stick largely
to air power for now ... 'A ground maneuver won't
solve the problem of the long-range missiles,' he
said. 'The problem is the will to launch. We have
to break the will of Hezbollah' ... "
Don't hold your breath is the first lesson
history teaches on this particular assessment of
the powers of air war; the second is that, a
decade from now, some other "senior commander" in
some other country will be saying the same thing,
word for word.
When it comes to brutality,
the fact is ancient times have gotten a bad rap.
Nothing in history was more brutal than the last
century's style of war-making - than those two
world wars with their air armadas, backed by the
most advanced industrial systems on the planet.
Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every
brain, to support the destruction of other human
beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust
(which was assembly-line warfare in another form),
and the various colonial and Cold War campaigns
that went on in the Third World from the 1940s on;
which, in places like Korea and Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, substituted the devastation of air power
locally for a war between the two superpowers,
which might have employed the mightiest air
weaponry of all to scour the Earth.
It may
be that the human capacity for brutality, for
barbarism, hasn't changed much since the eighth
century, but the industrial revolution - and in
particular the rise of the airplane - opened up
new landscapes to brutality; while the view from
behind the gun-sight, then the bomb-sight and
finally the missile-sight slowly widened until all
of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, god-like
vantage point of the strategic as well as the
literal heavens, the military and the civilian
began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and
citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became
nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of
ants, or nothing at all but the structures that
housed them, or even just concepts,
indistinguishable one from the other.
One plane, one bomb As far as
anyone knows, the first bomb was dropped by hand
over the Italian colony of Libya. According to
Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing: one
Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out of his
delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb - a Danish
Haasen hand grenade - on the North African oasis
Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he
attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total,
each weighing two kilos, were dropped during this
first air attack."
That was 1911 and the
damage was minimal. Only 34 years later, vast
armadas of B-17s and B-29s were taking off, up to
a thousand planes at a time, to bomb Germany and
Japan. In the case of Tokyo - then constructed
almost totally out of highly flammable materials -
a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm
that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945,
proved capable of incinerating or killing at least
90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a
height that the dead could not be seen (though the
stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes).
The first American planes to arrive over the city,
wrote historian Michael Sherry in his book, The
Rise of American Air Power, "carved out an X
of flames across one of the world's most densely
packed residential districts; followers fed and
broadened it for some three hours thereafter."
What descended from the skies, as James
Carroll puts it in his new book, House of
War, was "1,665 tons of pure fire ... the most
efficient and deliberate act of arson in history.
The consequent firestorm obliterated 15 square
miles, which included both residential and
industrial areas. Fires raged for four days." It
was the bonfire of bonfires and not a single
American plane was shot down.
On August 6,
1945, all the power of that vast air armada was
again reduced to a single plane, the Enola Gay,
and a single bomb, "Little Boy", dropped near a
single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which
in a single moment of a sort never before
experienced on the planet did what it had taken
300 B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those
two cities - as well as Dresden and other German
and Japanese cities subjected to "strategic
bombing" - the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and
600,000 in Germany) were invariably preponderantly
civilian and far too distant to be seen by plane
crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark
of night, giving the scene below the look of Hell
on Earth.
So 1911: one plane, one bomb.
1945: one plane, one bomb - but this time at least
120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks
less than four decades apart on the first chapter
of a history of the invention of a new kind of
warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is
the way we expect war to be made, a way that no
longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This wasn't
always the case.
The shock of the
new When military air power was in its
infancy and silent films still ruled the movie
theaters, the first air-war films presented pilots
as knights of the heavens, engaging in courageous,
chivalric, one-on-one combat in the skies. As that
image reflects, in the wake of the meat grinder of
trench warfare in World War I, the medieval
actually seemed far less brutal, a time much
preferable to those years in which young men had
died by their hundreds of thousands, anonymously,
from machine guns, artillery, poison gas, all the
lovely inventions of industrial civilization,
ground into the mud of no-man's land, often
without managing to move their lines or the
enemy's more than a few hundred meters.
The
image of chivalric knights in planes jousting in
the skies slowly disappeared from American
screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large,
air power itself even as the war film went on (and
on and on). It can last be found perhaps in the
film Top Gun; in old Peanuts
comics in
which Snoopy remains forever the Red Baron; and,
of course, post-Star Wars, in the fantasy realm of
outer space where Jedi Knights took up lethal
sky-jousting in the late 1970s, X-wing fighter to
X-wing fighter, and in zillions of video games to
follow. In the meantime, the one-way air slaughter
in South Vietnam would be largely left out of the
burst of Vietnam films that would start hitting
the screen from the late 1970s on.
In the
real, off-screen world, that courtly medieval
image of air power disappeared fast indeed. As
World War II came ever closer and it became more
apparent what air power was best at - what would
now be called "collateral damage" - the shock set
in. When civilians were first purposely targeted
and bombed in the industrializing world rather
than in colonies such as Iraq, the act was
initially widely condemned as inhuman by a
startled world.
People were horrified
when, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937,
Hitler's Condor Legion and planes from fascist
Italy repeatedly bombed the Basque town of
Guernica, engulfing most of its buildings in a
firestorm that killed hundreds, if not thousands,
of civilians. If you want to get a sense of the
power of that act to shock then, view Picasso's
famous painting of protest done almost immediately
in response. (When then secretary of state Colin
Powell went to the United Nations in February 2003
to deliver his now infamous speech explaining what
we supposedly knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction, UN officials - possibly at
the request of the Bush administration - covered
over a tapestry of the painting that happened to
be positioned where Powell would have to pass on
his way to deliver his speech and where media
comments would be offered afterwards.)
Later in 1937, as the Japanese began their
campaign to conquer China, they bombed a number of
Chinese cities. A single shot of a Chinese baby
wailing amid the ruins, published in Life
magazine, was enough to horrify Americans (even
though the actual photo may have been doctored).
Air power was then seen as nothing but a new kind
of barbarism. According to historian Sherry, "In
1937 and 1938, [president Franklin D Roosevelt]
had the State Department condemn Japanese bombing
of civilians in China as 'barbarous' violations of
the 'elementary principles' of modern morality."
Meanwhile, observers checking out what
effect the bombing of civilians had on the "will"
of society offered nothing but bad news to the
strategists of air power. As Sherry writes:
In the Saturday Evening Post, an
American army officer observed that bombing had
proven "disappointing to the theorists of
peacetime". When [General Francisco] Franco's
rebels bombed Madrid, did the Madrilenos sue for
peace? No, they shook futile fists at the
murderers in the sky and muttered, "Swine." His
conclusion: "Terrorism from the air has been
tried and found wanting. Bombing, far from
softening the civil will, hardens it."
Already similar things are being
written about the Lebanese, though, in our media,
terms like "barbarism" and "terrorism" are
unlikely to be applied to Israel's war from the
heavens. New York Times correspondent Sabrina
Tavernise, for instance, reported the following
from the site of a destroyed apartment building in
the bomb-shocked southern Lebanese port of Tyre:
Whatever the target, the result was
an emotional outpouring in support of Hezbollah.
Standing near a cluster of dangling electrical
wires, a group of men began to chant. "By our
blood and our soul, we'll fight for you,
Nasrallah!" they said, referring to Hezbollah's
leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. In a foggy
double image, another small group chanted the
same thing, as if answering, on the other side
of the smoke.
World War II began with the
German bombing of Warsaw. On September 9, 1939,
according to Carroll, Roosevelt "beseeched the
war leaders on both sides to 'under no circumstances
undertake the bombardment from the air
of civilian populations of unfortified cities'."
Then came the terror-bombing of Rotterdam
and Adolf Hitler's Blitz against England in
which tens of thousands of British civilians died
and many more were displaced, each event proving
but another systemic shock to what was left of
global opinion, another unimaginable act by the
planet's reigning barbarians.
British
civilians, of course, still retain a deserved
reputation for the stiff-upper-lip-style bravery
with which they comported themselves in the face
of a merciless German air offensive against their
cities that knew no bounds. No wills were broken
there, nor would they be in Russia (where, in
1942, perhaps 40,000 were killed in German air
attacks on the city of Stalingrad alone) - any
more than they would be in Germany by the far more
massive Allied air offensive against the German
population.
All
of this, of course, came before it was clear that
the United States could design and churn out
planes faster, in greater numbers, and with more
fire power than any country on the planet and then
wield air power far more massively and brutally
than anyone had previously been capable of doing.
That was before the US and Britain decided to
fight fire with fire by blitz - and terror-bombing
Germany and Japan.
(The US moved more
slowly and awkwardly than the British from
"precision bombing" against targets such as
factories producing military equipment or
oil-storage depots - campaigns that largely failed
- to "area bombing" that was simply meant to
annihilate vast numbers of civilians and destroy
cities. But move American strategists did.)
That
was before Dresden and Hiroshima; before
Pyongyang, along with much of the Korean
peninsula, was reduced to rubble from the air in
the Korean War; before the Plaine des Jarres was
bombed back to the Stone Age in Laos in the late
1960s and early 1970s, before the B-52s were sent
against the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in the
terror-bombing of Christmas 1972 to wring
concessions out of the North Vietnamese at the
peace table in Paris; before the president George
H W Bush ended the first Gulf War with a "turkey
shoot" on the "highway of death" as Saddam's
largely conscript military fled Kuwait City in
whatever vehicles were at hand; before we bombed
the rubble in Afghanistan into further rubble in
2001, and before we shock-and awed Baghdad in
2003.
Taking the sting out of air war
Somewhere in this process, a new language
to describe air war began to develop - after, in
the Vietnam era, the first "smart bombs" and
"precision-guided weapons" came on line. From then
on, air attacks would, for instance, be termed
"surgical" and civilian casualties dismissed as
but "collateral damage". All of this helped remove
the sting of barbarity from the form of war we had
chosen to make our own (unless, of course, you
happened to be one of those "collateral" people
under those "surgical" strikes). Just consider,
for a moment, that, with the advent of the first
Gulf War, air power - as it was being applied -
essentially became entertainment, a Disney-style,
son-et-lumiere spectacular over Baghdad to
be watched in real time on television by a
population of non-combatants from thousands of
kilometers away.
With that same war, the
Pentagon started calling media briefings and
screening nose-cone photography, essentially
little Iraqi snuff films, in which you actually
looked through the precision-guided bomb or
missile-sights yourself, found your target, and
followed that missile or smart bomb right down to
its explosive impact. If you were lucky, the
Pentagon even let you check out the after-mission
damage assessments. These films were so nifty, so
like the high-tech video-game experience just then
coming into being, that they were used by the
Pentagon as reputation enhancers. From then on,
Pentagon officials not only described their air
weaponry as "surgical" in its abilities, but
showed you the "surgery" (just as the Israelis
have been doing with their footage of "precision"
attacks in Lebanon). What you didn't see, of
course, was the "collateral damage" which, when
the Iraqis put it on-screen, was promptly
dismissed as so much propaganda.
And yet
this new form of air war had managed to move far
indeed from the image of the knightly joust, from
the sense, in fact, of battle at all. In those
years, except over the far north of Korea during
the Korean War or over North Vietnam and some
parts of South Vietnam, American pilots, unless in
helicopters, went into action (as Israeli ones do
today) knowing that the dangers to them were
usually minimal - or, as over that Iraqi highway
of death nonexistent. War from the air was in the
process of becoming a one-way street of
destruction.
At an extreme, with the
arrival of fleets of Hellfire-missile-armed
unmanned Predator drones over Iraq, the "warrior"
would suddenly find himself more than 10,000
kilometers away at Nellis Air Force Base near Las
Vegas, delivering "precision" strikes that almost
always, somehow, managed to kill collaterally. In
such cases, war and screen war have indeed merged.
This kind of war has the allure, from a
military point of view, of ever less casualties on
one end in return for ever more on the other. It
must also instill a feeling of bloodless, god-like
control over those enemy "ants" (until, of course,
things begin to go wrong, as they always do) as
well as a sense that the world can truly be
"remade" from the air, by remote control, and at a
great remove. This has to be a powerful, even a
transporting fantasy for strategists, however
regularly it may be denied by history.
Despite the cleansed language of air war,
and no matter how good the targeting intelligence
or smart the bomb (neither of which can be counted
on), civilians who make the mistake of simply
being alive and going about their daily business
die in profusion whenever war descends from the
heavens. This is the deepest reality of war today.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon ... (fill in
the blank) In fact, the process of
removing air power from the ranks of the barbaric,
of making it, if not glorious (as in those
visually startling moments when Baghdad was
shock-and-awed), then completely humdrum, and so
of no note whatsoever, has been remarkably
successful in our world. In fact, we have loosed
our air power regularly on the countryside of
Afghanistan, and especially on rebellious urban
areas of Iraq in "targeted" and "precise" attacks
on insurgent concentrations and "al-Qaeda safe
houses" (as well as in more wholesale assaults on
the old city of Najaf and on the city of Fallujah)
largely without comment or criticism. In the
process, significant parts of two cities in a
country we occupied and supposedly "liberated",
were reduced to rubble and everywhere, civilians,
not to speak of whole wedding parties, were blown
away without our media paying much attention at
all.
Our various air campaigns - our
signature way of war - have hardly been noticed,
and almost never focused on, by the large numbers
of journalists embedded with US forces or in one
way or another on-the-ground in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Remember, we're talking here about
the dropping of up to 2,000 pound bombs regularly,
over years, often in urban areas. Just imagine, if
you live in a reasonably densely populated area,
what it might mean collaterally to have such bombs
or missiles hit your block or neighborhood, no
matter how "accurate" their aim.
Until
Seymour Hersh wrote a piece from Washington last
November for the New Yorker, entitled "Up in the
Air", our reporters had, with rare exceptions,
simply refused to look up; and despite a flurry of
attention then, to this day, our continuing air
campaigns are largely ignored. Yet here is a US
Air Force summary of just a single, nondescript
day of operations in Iraq, one of hundreds and
hundreds of such days, some far more intense,
since we invaded that country: "In total,
coalition aircraft flew 46 close-air support
missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These
missions included support to coalition troops,
infrastructure protection, reconstruction
activities and operations to deter and disrupt
terrorist activities."
And here's the
summary of the same day in Afghanistan: "In total,
coalition aircraft flew 32 close-air support
missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
These missions included support to coalition and
Afghan troops, reconstruction activities and route
patrols." Note that, in Afghanistan, as the
situation has worsened militarily and politically,
the old Vietnam-era B-52s, the carpet-bombers of
that war, have been called back into action, again
without significant attention here.
Now, with the
fervent backing of the administration of President George W
Bush, another country is being "remade"
from the air - in this case, Lebanon. With the
highest-tech American precision-guided and
bunker-busting bombs, the Israelis have been
launching air strike after strike, thousands of
them, in that country. They have hit an
international airport, the nation's largest milk
factories; a major food factory; aid convoys; Red
Cross ambulances; a UN observer post; a power
plant; apartment complexes; villages because they
house or support the enemy; branches of banks
because they might facilitate Hezbollah finances;
the telecommunications system because of the
messages that might pass along it; highways
because they might transport weapons to the enemy;
bridges because they might be crossed by those
transporting weapons; a lighthouse in Beirut
harbor for reasons unknown; trucks because they
might be transporting those weapons (though they
might also be transporting vegetables); families
who just happen to be jammed into cars or minivans
fleeing at the urging of the attackers who have
turned at least 20% of all Lebanese (and probably
many more) into refugees, while creating a
"landscape of death" (in the phrase of the superb
Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid) in the
southern part of the country. In this process,
civilian casualties have mounted steadily -
assumedly far beyond the figure of just over 400
now regularly being cited in our media, because
Lebanon has no way to search the rubble of its
bombed buildings for the dead; nor, right now, the
time and ability to do an accurate count of those
who died more or less in the open.
And
yet, of course, the "will" of the enemy is not
broken and, among Israel's leaders and its
citizens, frustration mounts; so threats of more
and worse are made and worse weapons are brought
into play; and wider targeting fields are opened
up; and what might faintly pass for "precision
bombing" is increasingly abandoned for the
equivalent of "area bombing". And the full support
system - which is simply society - for the
movement in question becomes the "will" that must
be broken; and in this process, what we call
"collateral damage" is moved, by the essential
barbaric logic of air power, front and center,
directly into the crosshairs.
Already
Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is "vowing" to use
the "most severe measures" to end Hezbollah rocket
attacks - and in the context of the present air
assault that is a frightening threat. All this
because, as in Iraq, as elsewhere, air power has
once again run up against another kind of power, a
fierce people power (quite capable of its own
barbarities) that, over the decades, the bomb and
missile has proved frustratingly incapable of
dismantling or wiping out. Already, as the
Guardian's Ian Black points out, "The original
objective of 'breaking Hezbollah' has been quietly
watered down to 'weakening Hezbollah'."
In
such a war, with such an enemy, the normal
statistics of military victory may add up only to
defeat, a further frustration that only tends to
ratchet the destruction higher over time. Adam
Shatz put this well recently in The Nation when he
wrote:
[Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah is
under no illusions that his small guerrilla
movement can defeat the Israeli army. But he can
lose militarily and still score a political
victory, particularly if the Israelis continue
visiting suffering on Lebanon, whose government,
as they well know, is powerless to control
Hezbollah. Nasrallah, whom the Israelis
attempted to assassinate on July 19 with a
23-ton bomb attack on an alleged Hezbollah
bunker, is doubtless aware that he may share the
fate of his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, who
was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship
attack in 1992. But Hezbollah outlived Musawi
and grew exponentially, thanks in part to its
followers' passion for martyrdom. To some,
Nasrallah's raid may look like a death wish. But
it is almost impossible to defeat someone who
has no fear of death.
As the Israelis
are rediscovering - though, by now, you'd think
that military planners with half a brain wouldn't
have to destroy a country to do so - that it is
impossible to "surgically" separate a movement and
its supporters from the air. When you try, you
invariably do the opposite; fusing them ever more
closely, while creating an even larger, ever
angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in
any case, never literal geography, never simply a
set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to
be taken and destroyed.
Degrading
behavior Someday someone will take up the
grim study of the cleansing language of air power.
Every air war, it seems, now has its new words
meant to take the sting out of its essential
barbarism. In the case of the Israeli air assault
on Lebanon, the term - old in the military world
but never before so widely adopted in such a
commonplace way - is "degrading", not as at Abu
Ghraib, but as in "to impair in physical structure
or function". It was once a technical military
term; in this round of air war, however, it is
being used to cover a range of sins.
Try
Googling the term. It turns out to be almost
literally everywhere. It can be found in just
about any article on Israel's air war, used in
this fashion: "CBS News senior White House
correspondent Bill Plante reports that around the
world the US' opposition to a ceasefire is viewed
as the US giving Israel a 'green-light' to degrade
the military capability of Hezbollah." Or in a
lead in a New York Times piece this way: "The
outlines of an American-Israeli consensus began to
emerge Tuesday in which Israel would continue to
bombard Lebanon for about another week to degrade
Hezbollah's capabilities, officials of the two
countries said." Or more generally, as in a
Washington Post piece, in this fashion: "In the
administration's view, the new conflict is not
just a crisis to be managed. It is also an
opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in
the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in
Iraq." Or as Henry A Crumpton, the State
Department's coordinator for counterterrorism,
wielded it: "It's not just about the missiles and
launchers ... It's about the roads and transport,
the ability to command and control. All that is
being degraded. But it's going to take a long
time. I don't believe this is going to be over in
the next couple of days." Or as an Israeli general
at a Washington think tank told the Washington
Times: "Israel has taken it upon itself to degrade
Hezbollah's military capabilities."
Sometimes
degradation of this sort can be quantified: "A
senior Israeli official said Friday that the
attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah's military
strength by roughly half, but that the campaign
could go on for two more weeks or longer." More
often, it's a useful term exactly because it's
wonderfully vague, quite resistant to
quantification, the very opposite of "precision"
in its ambiguity, and capable of taking some of
the sting out of what is actually happening. It
turns the barbarity of air war into something
close to a natural process - of, perhaps, erosion,
of wearing down over time.
As air wars go,
the one in Lebanon may seem strikingly directed
against the civilian infrastructure and against
society; in that, however, it is historically
anything but unique. It might even be said war
from the air, since first launched in Europe's
colonies early in the last century, has always
been essentially directed against civilians. As in
World War II, air power - no matter its stated
targets - almost invariably turns out to be worst
for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at
society itself. In that way, its damage is
anything but "collateral", never truly "surgical",
and never in its overall effect "precise". Even
when it doesn't start that way, the frustration of
not working as planned, of not breaking the
"will", invariably leads, as with the Israelis, to
ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same,
which, if allowed to proceed to their logical
conclusion, will bring down not society's will,
but society itself.
For the Lebanese prime
minister what Israel has been doing to his country
may be "barbaric destruction"; but, in our world,
air power has long been robbed of its barbarism
(suicide air missions excepted). For us, air war
involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral
damage, and surgery that may do in the patient,
but it's not barbaric. For that you need to
personally cut off a head.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor
of Tomdispatch
and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. (Copyright
2006 Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)
