American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  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 cluster 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 Hassan 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 circumstances 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 massive 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 massively 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 Japan. (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 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 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 Hellfire-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, godlike 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 assaults 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, entitled “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 Afghani
stan, 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 pass 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.

  As the Israelis rediscovered—though, by now, you’d think that military planners with half a brain wouldn’t have to destroy a country to do so—it is impossible to “surgically” separate a movement and its supporters from the air. When you try, you invariably do the opposite, fusing them ever more closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in any case, never literal geography, never simply a set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken and destroyed.

  As air wars go, the one in Lebanon in 2006 was strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it was 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. 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,” tends to lead, as with the Israelis in 2006, 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.

  Lebanon’s prime minister may have described Israel’s actions as “barbaric destruction,” but, in our world, airpower has long been robbed of its barbarism. For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but somehow is not barbaric. For that, you need to personally cut off a head.

  An Anatomy of Collateral Damage

  In a little noted passage in her book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offered us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reported Mayer, went underground. He literally bunkered himself in “a secure, undisclosed location,” which she described as “one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock.” That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, “The Commander in Chief’s Suite.”

  Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, “he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers.” In the backseat of his car (just in case), added Mayer, “rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit.” And lest danger rear its head, “Rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow.”

  When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime president—forget the vice president—including Abraham Lincoln when Southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation’s capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?

  On the other hand, the well-armored vice president and his aide David Addington played a leading role, as Mayer documented in grim detail, in loosing a Global War on Terror that was also a global war of terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war, “the gloves came off,” “the shackles were removed”—images much beloved within the administration and, in the case of those “shackles,” by George Tenet’s CIA. In the process, no price in human abasement or human life proved too high to pay—as long as it was paid by someone else.

  The Value of None

  If no level of protection was too much for Dick Cheney, then no protection at all is what Washington offers civilians who happen to live in the ever expanding “war zones” of the planet. In the Middle East, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, the war—in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles or drones—is, in crucial ways, aimed at civilians (though this could never be admitted).

  Civilians have few doctors on hand, much less full chemical body suits or gas masks, when disaster strikes. Often they are asleep, or going about their daily business, when death makes its appearance unannounced.

  We have no idea just how many civilians have been blown away by the U.S. military (and allies) in recent years, only that the “collateral damage” has been widespread and far more central than anyone here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral damage has come in myriad ways—from artillery fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated shootings of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints; from troops (or even private mercenaries) blasting away from convoys; during raids on private homes; in village operations; and, significantly, from the air.

  In Afghanistan, air strikes increased tenfold from 2004 to 2007 alone. From 2006 to 2007, civilian deaths from those air strikes nearly tripled. According to Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and military analyst at Human Rights Watch, 317,000 pounds of bombs were dropped in June and 270,000 in July 2008, equaling “the total tonnage dropped in 2006.”

  As with all figures relating to casualties, the actual counts you get on Afghan civilian dead are approximations and probably undercounts, especially since the war against the Taliban has been taking place largely in the backlands of one (or, if you count Pakistan, two) of the poorest, most remote regions on the planet. And yet we do know something. For instance, although the media have seldom attended to the subject, we know that one subset of innocent civilians has been slaughtered repeatedly. While Americans spent days in October 2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of five Amish girls by a madman in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and weeks following the mass slaughter of thirty-two college students by a mad boy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, a number of Afghan wedding parties and at least one Iraqi wedding party were largely wiped out from the air by American planes to hardly any news coverage at all.

  The message of these slaughters is that if you live in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now much of Afghanistan, you’d better not gather.

  Each of these events was marked by something else—the uniformity of the U.S. response: initial claims that U.S. forces had been fired on first and that those killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the slaughters as the unavoidable “collateral damage” of wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to genuinely apologize for, or take real responsibility for, having wiped out groups of celebrating locals.

  And keep in mind that such disasters are just subsets of a far larger, barely covered story. In July 2008
alone, for example, the U.S. military and NATO officials launched investigations into three air strikes in Afghanistan (including one on a wedding party) in which seventy-eight Afghan civilians were killed.

  Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such “incidents” have occurred again and again. The Global War on Terror is premised on an unspoken belief that the lives of others—civilians going about their business in distant lands—are essentially of no importance when placed against American needs and desires. That, you might say, is the value of none.

  Incident in Azizabad

  To take one example: on the night of August 21, 2008, a memorial service was held in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand District of Afghanistan’s Herat Province, for a tribal leader killed the previous year, who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban. Hundreds had attended, including “extended families from two tribes.”

  That night, a combined party of U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army troops attacked the village. They claimed they were “ambushed” and came under “intense fire.” What we know is that they called in repeated air strikes. According to several investigations and the on-the-spot reporting of New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children, died that night. As many as seventy-six members of a single extended family were killed, along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound seems to have been specially targeted.