"Terrorism from the air has been tried and found wanting"

A few generalizations about "air power"--bombing, strafing, and firing rockets--America's (and Israel's) preferred method of warfare:

1. It's murder.

2. It's barbarous.

3. It almost always achieves the opposite of its primary goal, the "breaking of the will" of an enemy—civilian—population.

(Japan's 1937 bombing of Chinese civilians moved a U.S. Army officer to observe in the Saturday Evening Post, "Terrorism from the air has been tried and found wanting"—but of course that was before Americans discovered how good they are at bombing.)

These three easily observable and verifiable facts are pretty much hiding in plain sight in the Air Power Nations (basically the U.S. and Israel, and to a lesser extent Russia and the UK), and it's to our collective shame that we don't try harder to look at the barbaric devastation caused by our air forces.

In "The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air," Tom Englehardt takes a hard look at the myths, blindnesses, and horrors lurking behind the banal phrase "air power." Englehardt, in his earlier essay "Icarus (armed with vipers) over Iraq opened my eyes to the writing of Sven Lindqvist, whose A History of Bombing is a book everyone should read, along with James Carroll's House of War—both heartbreakingly excellent on the weird psychology, lies, deceptions and flat-out evil behind bombing.

I love this parenthetical anecdote:

(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 [Picasso's "Guernica"] 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.)

Englehardt puts Israel's merciless pummelling of Lebanon into context, and how that fits into past aerial atrocities:

Now, with the fervent backing of the Bush administration, 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 press, 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.

Read the whole essay...