But let"s start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s, when the United States was hailed-or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself-not just as the planet"s "sole superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington, D.C., promptly began dropping police stations- also known as military bases-in or near the energy centers of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.
As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however, what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.
Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant mega-war against j.a.pan and Germany, and the stalemated "police action" in South Korea (1950-1953), vast structures that added up to something like an all-military American version of the old British Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in j.a.pan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major bases in the Philippines in 1992.) But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than planet Earth. Naturally, with a whole pa.s.sel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations...well, they were often something to behold-and they still are.
Let"s start with the basics: Almost seventy years after World War II, the sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases"-in Chalmers Johnson"s phrase-which at this moment stretches from Australia to Italy, j.a.pan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Romania to Djibouti. And new bases of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more to come).
There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 are home to U.S. "facilities." But those are only the bases the Pentagon publicly acknowledges. Others simply aren"t counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; or, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani. Bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don"t count either, including the approximately three hundred the United States built in Iraq, ranging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named Camp Victory, that house tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, Defense Department civilians, and have bus routes, traffic lights, PXes, big-name fast-food franchises, and so on.
Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Airfield, located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has a hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent of troops). You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America"s version of imperial control. But here"s the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are-not to put too fine a point on it-unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn"t know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn"t have to know it.
In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There"s no discussion, no debate at all. And yet there may be no foreign-policy subject more deserving of coverage. It has always been obvious-to me, at least-that any discussion of Iraq policy, of timelines or "time horizons," drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on the ground weren"t taken into account. And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over Iraq policy.
Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well-kept secrets on the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit strange. In the United States, military bases really only matter, and so make headlines, when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.
In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the ma.s.sive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad. In the meantime, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn"t news. Americans may pay no attention-and yet, of course, they do pay an enormous price.
THREE.
Air War, Barbarity, and Collateral Damage.
Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq.
The human imagination is quicker off the mark than any six-gun, bomb, or missile. Long before humans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being destroyed from the air-in an avalanche of popular fiction. By the late nineteenth century, London had gone down in flames more than once and New York soon would follow. Genocidal wars from the air were repeatedly imagined and described in which whole nations, whole races, were wiped out. In 1914, more than three decades before the first atomic bomb was dropped, H. G. Wells had already imagined and named "atomic weapons" in The World Set Free, his novel about a future atomic air war.
When it came to fantasies and fears of destruction, we knew no bounds. As the scholar Spencer Weart has written in Nuclear Fear: A History of Images:Right from the start [the] new idea of atomic weapons was linked to an even more impressive idea: the end of the world. When [scientist Frederick] Soddy first told the public about atomic energy, in May 1903, he said that our planet is "a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos." This was an entirely new idea: that it might be technically possible for someone to destroy the world deliberately. Yet the idea slipped into the public mind with suspicious ease.... For example, in 1903 the irrepressible Gustave Le Bon got into newspaper Sunday supplements in various countries by imagining a radioactive device that could "blow up the whole earth" at the touch of a b.u.t.ton.
In fact, for almost half a century before 1945, such weapons were the property only of science fiction. In his magisterial The Rise of American Air Power, Michael Sherry offers this comment on the machine that delivered the first of those atomic devices of our imagination to a real city: "More than any other modern weapon, the bomber was imagined before it was invented." Should we be amazed or horrified, proud or ashamed to have so actively imagined a century or more of future horrors of our own making? The imagination worked so quickly, but at least as miraculous was how quickly the inventors and the scientists followed.
I doubt that any invention other than the airplane has so combined the wonder of creation, of defiance of obvious human limits, and of destruction so intimately and for so long. Now, it seems, the wonder and even the horror of airpower is largely gone, but the inventions, the destruction, and the carnage remain.
The odd thing is this: No sooner had we human beings risen above the earth in powered flight-think Icarus-than we expressed the wonder of that event by dropping bombs from the planes that took us into the heavens. After that, it was just a straight line up (or down?) for the next near century.
Look at it this way: The Wright Brothers" "whopper flying machine" leaves the beach at Kitty Hawk for the first time on December 17, 1903. That initial flight lasts all of 12 seconds before the plane hits the sand 120 feet away. Later the same day, the plane flies 859 feet in 59 seconds before, on a final flight, it totals itself and is no more. Only five years later, the Wright Brothers are demonstrating their new invention in the skies over Washington for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. By 1911, the plane is wedded to the bomb. 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." On the "natives" in the colonies, naturally enough. What better place to test a new weapon? And that first attack, as perhaps befits our temperaments, was, Lindqvist tells us, for revenge, a kind of collective punishment called down upon Arabs who had successfully resisted the advanced rationality (and occupying spirit) of the Italian army. Given where we"ve ended up, it would be perfectly reasonable to consider this moment the beginning of modern history, even of modernism itself.
A generation, no more, from Kitty Hawk to thousand-bomber raids over Germany. Another from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to "shock and awe" in Iraq. No more than a blink of history"s unseeing eye. Between 1911 and the end of the last b.l.o.o.d.y century, villages, towns, and cities across the earth were destroyed in copious numbers in part or in full by bombs. Their names could make up a modern chant: Chechaouen, Guernica, Shanghai, London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Damascus, Pyongyang, Haiphong, Grozny, Baghdad, and now Falluja among too many other places to name (including the colonial countryside of our planet from Kenya to Malaya). Millions and millions of tons of bombs dropped; millions and millions of dead, mostly, of course, civilians.
And from the j.a.panese and German cities of World War II to the devastated Korean peninsula of the early 1950s, from the ravaged southern Vietnamese countryside of the late 1960s to the "highway of death" on which much of a fleeing Iraqi army was destroyed in the First Gulf War of 1991, airpower has been America"s signature way of war.
Think of the history of the development of the plane and of bombing as a giant, extremely top-heavy diamond. In 1903, one fragile plane flies 120 feet. In 1911, another only slightly less fragile plane drops a bomb. In 1945, vast air armadas take off to devastate chosen German and j.a.panese cities. On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas is compacted into the belly of the Enola Gay, a lone B-29, which drops its single bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city and so many of its inhabitants. Remarkably, the man who commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces, both the armadas and the Enola Gay, General Henry "Hap" Arnold (according to Robin Neillands in The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against n.a.z.i Germany), "had been taught to fly by none other than Orville Wright, one of the two men credited with inventing the first viable airplane." Barely more than a generation took us from those 120 feet at Kitty Hawk to the Enola Gay and the destruction of one city from the air by one bomb.
Since 1945, both civilian plane flight and the killing of enormous numbers of civilians from the air (now subsumed in the term "collateral damage") have become completely normal parts of our lives. Too normal, it seems, to spend a lot of time thinking about or even writing fiction about. When we get on a plane now, we close the window shade and watch a movie on a tiny TV screen or, on certain flights, TV itself in real time, as if we were still in our living rooms. So much for either shock or awe. Today, American planes regularly bomb distant lands and no one even seems to notice. No one, not even reporters on the spot, bothers to comment. No one writes a significant word about it. Should we be amazed or horrified, proud or ashamed?
This is not to say the press does not write about the air war at all. Anodyne press reports on our ongoing air wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond appear almost daily. Normally, only a few lines are devoted to the air war against urban or rural areas, which is, by the nature of the situation, a war of terror. We almost never see any c.u.mulative figures on air strikes in Iraq or Afghanistan per day, week, or month, maps of the reach of the air war, or more than a few photos of its results-let alone what it"s been like for people in major cities and rural villages to experience such periodic attacks, or what kinds of casualties result (or who the casualties actually are), or what, if any, may be the limitations on the use of airpower.
To the extent that we know anything about the loosing of airpower on heavily populated urban areas, we only know what an uninquisitive press has been told by the military and stenographically recorded, which means we know remarkably little. During the war in Iraq, American reporters could be found embedded with tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle units: "Captain Paul Fowler sat on the curb next to a deserted gas station," wrote Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe.
Behind him, smoke rose over Fallujah. His company of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles had roamed the eastern third of the city for 13 days, shooting holes in every building that might pose a threat, leaving behind a landscape of half-collapsed houses and factories singed with soot.
"I really hate that it had to be destroyed. But that was the only way to root these guys out," said Fowler, 33, the son of a Baptist preacher in North Carolina. "The only way to root them out is to destroy everything in your path."
American reporters could climb aboard SURCs (Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech Swift Boat equivalents, as John Burns of the New York Times once did, to "[roar] up the Euphrates on a dawn raid." They could follow U.S. patrols as they busted down Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. The only thing they evidently couldn"t do in Iraq was look up, even though the air s.p.a.ce was populated with all kinds of jets, fearsome AC- 130 Spectre gunships, h.e.l.lfire-missile-armed Predator drones, and ubiquitous Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma helicopters.
On Not Looking Up.
Given the history of twentieth-century war, which is, in many ways, simply the history of bombing cities, should our "war reporters" not have been prepared? Shouldn"t anyone have been thinking about the destruction of cities when it"s been such a commonplace? Shouldn"t major papers have insisted on embedding reporters in Air Force units (if not on the planes themselves)? Shouldn"t reporters have visited our air bases and talked to pilots? Does no one remember the magnitude of the air war in Vietnam (or Laos or Cambodia), no less any other major war experience of our lifetimes?
A glance at the history of American war tells us airpower is as American as apple pie and that Americans were dreaming of cities destroyed from the air long before anyone had the ability to do so. As H. Bruce Franklin tells us in his book War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, as early as 1881, former naval officer Park Benjamin wrote a short story called "The End of New York" that caused a sensation. In it the city was left in ruins by a Spanish naval bombardment. By 1921, air-power visionary Billy Mitch.e.l.l was already flying mock sorties over New York and other East Coast cities, "pulverizing" them in "raids" sensationalized in the press, to publicize the need for an independent air force. ("The sun rose today on a city whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits," began a New York Herald article after Mitch.e.l.l"s "raid" on New York City, a line that should still send small shudders through us all and remind us how much the sensational of the previous century has become the accepted of our world.) It would seem hard to forget that the "invasion" of Iraq began from the air-as much a demonstration of power meant for viewers around the world as for Saddam Hussein and his followers. Who could forget those cameras strategically placed on the balconies of Baghdad hotels for the shock-and-awe son-et-lumiere show-dramatic explosions in the night (only lacking a score to go with it). Does no one remember air force claims that airpower alone could win wars?
Is there some secret I"m missing here? Doesn"t anyone find it strange that, back in 1995, our papers-from their front pages to their editorial and op-ed pages-were convulsed by a single contested air-war exhibit being mounted at the Smithsonian National Air and s.p.a.ce Museum on the bombing of Hiroshima? A historical argument about the use of air power half a century ago merited such treatment, but the actual-and potentially hardly less controversial-use of airpower today doesn"t merit a peep?
Near the end of 2004, I could find but a single press example of an American reporter in the air in Iraq. On November 17, 2003, the New York Times" Dexter Filkins wrote an article focusing on the dangers to American pilots in the Iraqi skies ("It is not a good time to be a helicopter pilot in the skies over Iraq"). That, as far as I can tell, is it. Now, it"s true that any air war is harder to report on than a ground war, especially if reporters aren"t allowed in planes or on helicopters (as they are on the river boats and in the Bradleys, for instance). But hardly impossible. Most reporters in Baghdad, after all, have at least been witnesses to air attacks in the capital itself. In one case, an American helicopter even fired a missile into a crowd in a Baghdad street only a few hundred yards from the heavily fortified American heartland, the capital"s Green Zone, killing a reporter for al Arabiya satellite network in footage seen only briefly on American TV but repeatedly around the world.
Life under the helicopters is a story that might be written. At the very least, the subject could be investigated. Pilots could be interviewed on the ground. Victims could be found. The literature could be read because, as it happens, air force people are thinking carefully about the uses of airpower in a counterinsurgency war, even if reporters aren"t. Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas F. Searle"s article "Making Air Power Effective Against Guerrillas." (If I can find it, they can.) Searle, a military defense a.n.a.lyst with the Airpower Research Inst.i.tute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, concludes:Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical advantage the United States has over its foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major combat and ignoring counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have marginalized ourselves in the global war on terrorism. To make airpower truly effective against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the joint force commander or the ground component commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must aggressively develop and employ airpower"s counterguerrilla capabilities.
Journalists could report on the new airborne weaponry being deployed and tested by U.S. forces. After all, like other recent American battlefields, Iraq has doubled as a laboratory for the corporate development and testing of ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for instance, could be done on the armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in Iraq. (The people who name these things have certainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in Defense Daily, a "trade" publication, we read, for example:The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) armed with a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman"s [NOC] Viper Strike munition, a service official said.... The Army is arming the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)-Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV, under an approximately $4 million Quick Reaction Capability contract with Northrop Grumman that will be completed in December, John Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike, told Defense Daily.... The Hunter can carry two Viper Strike missiles.
The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq "since day one," [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program manager of Medium Alt.i.tude Endurance] said. The precise Viper Strike munition is important because, "it has very low collateral damage, so it"s going to be able to be employed in places where you might not use 500-pound bombs or might not use a h.e.l.lfire munition, [but] you"ll be able to use the Viper Strike munition."
Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up in a plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq, for example, as Jonathan Sch.e.l.l did from the back seat of a small forward air controller"s plane during the Vietnam War. (From this he wrote a report for the New Yorker magazine, "The Military Half," which remains unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and which can be found collected in his book The Real War.) But that"s a lot to hope for these days. The complete absence of coverage, however, is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent military base facilities the United States has been building in Iraq, the expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story of the post- 9/11 era. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event, after the last century of destruction and threatened destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother?
The Barbarism of War from the Air.
Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. 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 word medieval comes to mind immediately, and to the ma.s.s mind of our media even faster.
To jump a little closer to modernity, they strap on 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 Shiite 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, 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 pa.s.sengers 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 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 less civilized times when people did especially cruel things to each other face to face.
The Religion of Airpower.
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 Israeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric. I"m talking, of course, about airpower, 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 airpower 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 airpower advocates even before modern air war had been tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these convictions into practice have never really shaken 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 will, though it has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.
Even during the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli military strategists were saying things that could have been put in the mouths of their airpower-loving predecessors decades ago. The New York Times" Steven Erlanger, for instance, quoted an unnamed senior Israeli commander this way: "He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now.... "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 a.s.sessment 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 that 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 ma.s.se, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was a.s.sembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and cold war campaigns that subst.i.tuted the devastation of airpower in the third world for a war between the two superpowers that 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. 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, G.o.dlike 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.
We have come far from that first bomb dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. 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, writes historian Michael Sherry, "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 recounts it in his 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 fifteen 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 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 three hundred B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities-as well as Dresden and other German and j.a.panese cities subjected to "strategic bombing"-the dead (perhaps 900,000 in j.a.pan 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 h.e.l.l 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 airpower 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 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 yards.
The image of chivalric knights in planes jousting in the skies slowly disappeared from American screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large, airpower itself, even as the war film went on (and on). It can last be found perhaps in the film Top Gun; in old Peanuts comics in which Snoopy imagines himself as the Red Baron; and, of course, postStar Wars, in the fantasy realm of outer s.p.a.ce, 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 started hitting the screen from the late 1970s on.
In the real, off-screen world, that courtly medieval image of airpower disappeared fast indeed. As World War II came ever closer, and it became more apparent what airpower 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 like Iraq, the act was 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 Pica.s.so"s famous painting of protest done almost immediately in response. (When 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 ma.s.s destruction, UN officials covered over a tapestry of the painting that happened to be positioned where Powell would have to pa.s.s on his way to deliver his speech and where press comments would be offered afterwards.) Later in 1937, as the j.a.panese 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). Airpower was then seen as nothing but a new kind of barbarism. According to Sherry, "In 1937 and 1938, [President Roosevelt] had the State Department condemn j.a.panese 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 airpower. As Sherry writes,In the Sat.u.r.day 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."
Today, however, terms like "barbarism" and "terrorism" are unlikely to be applied to Israel"s war from the heavens over Lebanon, or ours over Iraq and Afghanistan. New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise, for instance, reported the following from the site of an apartment building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in the bomb-shocked southern Lebanese port of Tyre in July 2006:Whatever the target, the result was an emotional outpouring in support of Hezbollah. Standing near a cl.u.s.ter 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 Ha.s.san 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, President Roosevelt "beseeched the war leaders on both sides to "under no circ.u.mstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or 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.
British civilians 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. No wills were broken there, nor would they be in Russia (where, in 1942, perhaps forty thousand were killed in German air attacks on the city of Stalingrad alone), any more than they would be in Germany by the far more ma.s.sive 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 firepower than any country on the planet and then wield airpower far more ma.s.sively and brutally than anyone had previously been capable of doing. That was before the United States and Britain decided to fight fire with fire by blitz- and terror-bombing Germany and j.a.pan. (The U.S. military moved more slowly and awkwardly than the British from "precision bombing" against targets like 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 Plain of Jars 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 First President Bush ended the First Gulf War with a "turkey shoot" on the "highway of death" as Saddam Hussein"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 "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, airpower-as it was being applied-essentially became entertainment, a Disney-style spectacular over Baghdad to be watched in real time on television by a population of noncombatants 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 a.s.sessments. 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 did with their footage of "precision" attacks in Lebanon). What you didn"t see, of course, was the "collateral damage."
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 knowing that the dangers to them were usually minimal-or 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 h.e.l.lfire-missile-armed unmanned Predator drones over Iraq, the "warrior" suddenly found himself seven thousand miles away, delivering "precision" strikes that almost always, somehow, manage 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 fewer casualties on one end in return for ever more on the other. It must also instill a feeling of bloodless, G.o.dlike 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...
In fact, the process of removing airpower 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 airpower 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 a.s.saults on the Old City of Najaf and on the city of Falluja) 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.
Until, in December 2005, Seymour Hersh wrote a piece from Washington for the New Yorker, ent.i.tled "Up in the Air," our reporters had, with rare exceptions, simply refused to look up. Yet here is an air force summary of just a single, nondescript day of operations in Iraq in July 2006, 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 began to worsen militarily and politically, the old Vietnam-era B-52s, the carpet-bombers of that war, were called back into action, again without significant attention here.
In summer 2006, using the highest-tech American precision-guided and bunker-busting bombs, Israel launched air strike after strike, thousands of them into Lebanon. They 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 (claiming that they housed or supported the enemy), branches of banks (because they might facilitate Hezbollah finances), the telecommunications system (because of the messages that might pa.s.s along it), highways (because they might transport weapons to the enemy), bridges (because they might be crossed by those transporting weapons), a light-house 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 turned at least 20 percent of all Lebanese into refugees while creating a "landscape of death" (in the phrase of the superb reporter Anthony Shadid) in the southern part of that country. In this process, civilian casualties were widespread.