Divine Bombs

Divine Bombs
April 8, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, April 8 (UPI) -- As weapons of war become more sophisticated, more powerful, more deadly, there's a tendency not to use them.

We're like Dr. Jekyll, so afraid of what we might do when we turn into Mr. Hyde, that we try to restrain ourselves in advance. Even though the weapon is designed to cause the maximum amount of death, and even though we created the weapon, and even though we trained for years to use the weapon, we don't pull the trigger. Why?

We are, after all, the only nation that's ever chosen to use the nuclear bomb. We used it twice, on civilian populations. And even though I've read various justifications for why we had to use the H-bomb at that particular time, I've never heard a convincing one, and I've always been struck by how little has been written about it over the years. It seems like a shot from the hip. For a long time it wasn't talked about even in Japan. There was something unsettling about it both to the bombers and the bombed, and it became a taboo almost as soon as it happened.

Of all the various weapons that have been used in warfare since the beginning of time, it's the bomb dropped from an airplane (and, increasingly, the missile fired from a plane, copter or ship) that makes us modern. Before the invention of the airplane, every weapon seemed fair. You fire, the enemy fires. The enemy charges, you charge back. But there's something about the falling bomb that is so overwhelming--partly it's the suddenness, and partly it's the indiscriminate devastation--that makes the victim feel utterly vulnerable, stripped of meaning, tricked by fate, even if he survives.

No one who has been bombed, or seen the aftermath of his city being bombed, ever forgets it. In W.G. Sebald's book on the bombing of Germany, Alexander Kluge tells the story of the Halberstadt woman who worked at the local cinema. On the morning after her city was totally destroyed in an air raid, she found a shovel and went to work, hoping "to clear the rubble away before the two o'clock matinee." Similar things happened in Dresden and in Hamburg. People looked out at the piles of shriveled incinerated bodies and tried to dress for work and continue with life, as though the whole city had become deranged.

Bombs went awry this week. Journalists were killed. Homes were destroyed. An Iraqi boy lost both arms and his entire family, then said he didn't want to go on living. And yet I thought it was heartening to listen to Donald Rumsfeld's daily news conferences, during which he repeats, over and over again, "no targeting of civilians."

I believe him. I believe there was no targeting of civilians in this war. I believe there was no deliberate targeting of Al- Jazeera, even though it starts to look suspicious after you wipe out their headquarters in two wars in a row, first Kabul, now Baghdad. If nothing else, constantly bombing Al-Jazeera is horrible p.r.

What I don't understand, though, is just how it's decided as to when civilians are expendable and when they're not. Obviously in the second World War, the air forces of both America and Britain were guilty of terror. There's no other way to explain the 600,000 civilian dead, most of them incinerated in their homes, far from the front. And now something similar--much more precise, but still destined to kill civilians--seems to be going on in Tikrit.

Are there certain cities that are deemed beyond the pale? (Obviously there are. The RAF designation for the bombing of Hamburg was "Operation Gomorrah.") Are there political decisions that can result in an entire populace being deemed guilty of the actions of their leader? Tikrit is Saddam Hussein's home city, his stronghold. Does that make it less innocent than Baghdad or Basra?

I'm sure the official explanation would go something like this: There are no distinctions made among cities. However, when hostile enemy forces are gathered in large numbers in a particular place, the target zone becomes larger, and the acceptable collateral damage becomes greater.

By the logic of a general, it makes perfect sense. It's less clear, of course, to the grandmother or child cowering in a target area.

Thanks to the global positioning system, we have smart bombs now. Precision bombs. Bombs that go exactly where you tell them to go. Of course, if "shock and awe" are your goals, then you've made a decision to revert to the ways of Dresden. Rumsfeld denies we're doing that, and that's a very good thing for the future of civilization.

So when we go to war, we don't use nukes anymore. We don't use mustard gas or chemicals. We don't use dirty bombs except on a troop formation. We don't use Tomahawk missiles except on large infrastructure targets. We don't target specific cities for terror bombing. We regard war now as something that can be waged with the most infinitely precise calibrations of death. Just enough death to get what we want.

We become, in other words, God-like, determining who lives and who dies at precise times and precise places. It's an awful burden, I would imagine. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks in the office of high priests, portioning out the sacrifice.

It's a good thing for civilization. It's progress. I'm sure of that. It's good.

Right?

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