[lit-ideas] Air war, barbarity and the Middle East
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:51:09 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HH01Aa02.html
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.
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