American Way of War (11 page)

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 masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and cold war campaigns that substituted 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, godlike 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.

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 Japanese cities subjected to “strategic bombing”—the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan 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 hell 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.

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, post–
Star Wars
, in the fantasy realm of outer space, 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 Picasso’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 mass destruction, UN officials 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). 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 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 airpower. As Sherry writes,

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:

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.

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.

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.