TomDispatch: The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air

[Ms. Clio]

The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air
By Tom Engelhardt

(snip)

When civilians were first purposely targeted and bombed in the industrializing world rather than in colonies like 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 Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN 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 press 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, 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 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.'"

(snip)

World War II began with the German bombing of Warsaw. On September 9, 1939, according to Carroll, President 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 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.



It's a bit lengthy, but the entire piece is well worth your time.

[Chico Man]

1. Picasso's Guernica

[Ms. Clio]

2. the horse, the broken sword. . . .

the images truly resonate after reading Engelhardt's piece.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ms. Clio]

4. absolutely true -- please read the article

DU rules allow me to quote only 4 paragraphs.

[enough]

5. I hope people will take the time to read this article. Thanks for posting.

snip>

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 U.S.' opposition to a cease-fire is viewed as the U.S. 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… t'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 that 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.

snip>

on edit: I don't know why part of this snip has been turned into italitcs. The original text is all in normal text.

[Ms. Clio]

6. you're very welcome, and thanks for taking the time to read it

and for posting some more snips from it.

[americanstranger]

7. You probably inadvertently turned on the italics tag...

Did you put one of these

[

before the 'I' in 'It's?'

If so... instant italics!

FYI.

- as

[Bear down under]

8. Thank you for that.

It should be compulsory reading for everyone.

[Ms. Clio]

9. thanks for reading

and a belated welcome to DU.

[bigtree]

10. good stuff

history

[Ms. Clio]

11. yes

I learned a lot from this piece.

[bemildred]

12. Barbaric, very expensive, and ineffective.

Nice piece.
:thumbsup:

[Ms. Clio]

14. thanks

especially appreciated from you. :)

[never cry wolf]

13. Dresden, 1945

Until Horoshima and Nagasake, the most horrific of nightmares...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

edited to add: The firebombing consisted of by-then standard methods; dropping large amounts of high-explosive to blow off the roofs to expose the timbers within buildings, followed by incendiary devices (fire-sticks) to ignite them and then more high-explosives to hamper the efforts of the fire services. This eventually created a self-sustaining firestorm with temperatures peaking at over 1500°C. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area became extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.[/i}

[Ms. Clio]

15. and Tokyo

I read a similiar dreadful account of the firebombing of Tokyo, in which at least 90,000 people perished.


More from Englehardt's piece:

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 removed 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-lumière spectacular over Baghdad to be watched in real time on television by a population of non-combatants from thousands of miles away.

With that same war, the Pentagon started calling press 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.

[enough]

16. World, read this.