Page 5 of 5 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Death from
above By Tom Engelhardt
unforgettable way. In the
post-World War II years, the wars of the
superpowers migrated to the "peripheries" where
they could be fought with less fear of a nuclear
holocaust, of, as US first-strike plans had it,
the deaths of hundreds of millions of
noncombatants across what was known as the
"Communist Bloc". Those wars began to be fought
largely against low-tech forces, propelled by
powerful allegiances often to national entities
that did not yet
exist.
In those guerrilla wars of "national liberation",
the enemy combatants were invariably mixed in with
civilian populations, which provided both support
and a kind of protection. Air war against such
forces, then, had to be a war against noncombatant
populations. "Mistakes" would be constant.
Of course, even in World War II, the
deaths of civilians in London in the Blitz were no
mistake; nor were the later deaths of the citizens
of Hamburg or Dresden; or the inhabitants of Tokyo
and 59 other fire-bombed Japanese cities, as well
as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were atomized.
The deaths of city dwellers in Pyongyang in the
early 1950s were not a mistake; nor were the mass
killings of peasants in South Vietnam; nor Laotian
villagers on the Plain of Jars; nor the citizens
of Hanoi over Christmas 1972.
When, in
1970, after a conversation with Nixon, Henry
Kissinger passed on to White House chief of staff
Alexander Haig by phone the president's orders for
"a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia", using
"anything that flies on anything that moves", it
was not a mistake (nor, undoubtedly, was the
"unintelligible comment" on the transcript that
"sounded like Haig laughing").
Here's the
simplest truth of air power, then or now. No
matter how technologically "smart" our bombs or
missiles, they will always be ordered into action
by us dumb humans; and if, in addition, they are
released into villages filled with civilians going
about their lives, or heavily populated urban
neighborhoods where insurgents mix with city
dwellers (who may or may not support them), these
weapons will, by the nature of things, by policy
decision, kill noncombatants. If an AC-130 or an
Apache helicopter strafes an urban block or a
village street where people below are running,
some carrying weapons and believed to be
"suspected insurgents", it will kill civilians.
The disadvantage of "distant war" is that you
normally have no way of knowing why someone is
running, or why they are carrying a weapon, or
usually who they really are.
Once
Americans find themselves engaged in a guerrilla
war, the urge is naturally to bring to bear
military strengths and limit casualties - and the
fear is always of sending US troops into an "urban
jungle", or simply a jungle, where the
surroundings will serve to equalize a
disproportionate US advantage in the weaponry of
high-tech destruction. In distant war,
particularly wars where Americans alone control
the skies and can fly in them with relative
impunity, the trade-off is clear indeed: our
soldiers for their civilian dead "including women
and children".
This is not an aberrant
side-effect of air war but its heart and soul. The
airplane is a weapon of war, but it is also a
weapon of terror - and it is meant to be. From the
beginning, it was used not to "win over" enemy
populations - after all, how could that be done
from the distant skies? - but to crush or
terrorize them into submission. (It has seldom
worked that way.)
Then there's another
factor that has to be added in. What if you don't
really care - not all that much, anyway - who is
running in the street below you?
Since
1945, US air power has regularly been used to
police the imperial borders of the planet. It has,
that is, been released against people of color,
against what used to be called the Third World.
(Serbia in 1999 was the sole exception to this
rule.) As Afghan President Karzai put the matter
in response to recent reports of civilian
casualties in his country: "We want to cooperate
with the international community. We are thankful
for their help to Afghanistan, but that does not
mean that Afghan lives have no value. Afghan life
is not cheap and it should not be treated as
such." (His bitter comment eerily reflects another
from the Vietnam era, more than 30 years gone.
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on
life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life
is cheap in the Orient," said former commander of
US forces in Vietnam, General William
Westmoreland, in 1974.)
It may be that US
administrations would have been no less willing to
release their bombs and missiles on white
noncombatant populations (as was the case with
Germany in World War II); but it can at least be
said that, for the past half-century-plus, air
power has functionally acted as an armed form of
racism, that the sense of "their lives" as
cheaper, even if seldom spoken aloud, has made it
easier to use the helicopter, the bomber, the
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone. The fact is
that air war always cheapens human life. After
all, from the heights, if seen at all, people must
have something of the appearance of scurrying
insects. It is the nature of such war, and an
ingrained racism, seldom mentioned anymore, only
adds to it.
Not so long from now, by the
way, we may not even be able to use the term "air
power" without qualification. We may instead be
talking about "distant war" via the air, for the
nature of air power itself is beginning to blur.
Artillery always represented a form of distant
war, but the latest version of artillery, a new
weapons system evidently in operation in
Afghanistan, the High Mobility Artillery Rockets
(HIMARs), brings into play an artillery man's
version of air war. This truck-mounted rocket
system fires its weapons into the atmosphere,
where they are "guided to the target by either GPS
[Global Positioning System] or lasers". According
to the Washington Post's William Arkin, HIMARs
"can be configured to shoot a wide array of
rockets and missiles, from cluster bombs to a
single missile system with a range up to 300
kilometers". One or more of these rockets may have
been used in the Paktika attack that killed seven
children and seems to have been used in the
killing of Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah in
mid-May.
Beyond all else, there is the US
attitude toward air power itself - and, beyond
that, toward modern war when fought on the
planetary "peripheries" (even if those peripheries
turn out to be the oil heartlands of our world).
From World War II, through Korea and Vietnam to
Afghanistan and Iraq, America's air wars have
always visited death and destruction on civilians.
In a future in which it is highly unlikely that US
troops will ever fight Russians or Chinese or the
soldiers of any other major power in set-piece
battles, imperial war is likely to continue to
take place in heavily populated civilian areas
against guerrillas and insurgents of various
sorts. Don't take my word for it. The Pentagon
thinks so too and is engaged in extensive planning
for such future wars - involving weapons that
leave its soldiers "at a distance" in the
burgeoning urban slums of our planet.
So
perhaps a modicum of honesty is in order. Iraq and
Afghanistan are already charnel houses, zones of
butchery for the innocent. In both lands, it's
possible to make a simple prediction: as bad as
things already are, if present trends continue, if
the "Korea model" becomes the model, it's going to
get worse. We have yet to see anything like the
full release of US air power in Afghanistan, no
less in Iraq, but don't count it out.
We
in the US recognize butchery when we see it - the
atrocity of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck
bomb, the beheading. These acts are obviously
barbaric in nature. But our favored way of war -
war from a distance - has, for us, been
pre-cleansed of barbarism. Or rather its essential
barbarism has been turned into a set of "errant
incidents", of "accidents", of "mistakes"
repeatedly made over more than six decades. Air
power is, in the military itself, little short of
a religion of force, impermeable to reason, to
history, to examples of what it does (and what it
is incapable of doing). It is in our interest not
to see air war as a - possibly the - modern form
of barbarism.
Ours is, of course, a
callous and dishonest way of thinking about war
from the air (undoubtedly because it is the form
of barbarism, unlike the car bomb or the
beheading, that benefits us). It is time to be
more honest. It is time for reporters to take the
words "incident", "mistake", "accident",
"inadvertent", "errant", and "collateral damage"
out of their reportorial vocabularies when it
comes to air power. At the level of policy,
civilian deaths from the air should be seen as
"advertent". They are not mistakes or they
wouldn't happen so repeatedly. They are the very
givens of this kind of warfare.
This is,
or should be, obvious. If we want to "withdraw"
from Iraq (or Afghanistan) via the Gates Plan, we
should at least be clear about what that is likely
to mean - the slaughter of large numbers of
civilians "including women and children". And it
will not be due to a series of mistakes or
incidents; it will not be errant or inadvertent.
It will be policy itself. It will be the
Washington - and in the end the US - consensus.
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. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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