To revisit Bomber Harris’ description of use of airpower to supress rebellion: it describes an approach to war that might be called cowardly. Most surprising is his glee over
four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors
Of course war has long been about more than defeating the enemy: it is also about conquering the spirit. Caesar, thought to be mercificul, gives his own accounts of massacring civilians of Gallic towns that held out for a siege. Caesar was frustrated, but he also understood that his enemies would not be defeated unless they were “terrorized”. As Edward N. Luttwak points out, the United States cannot “win” in Iraq without terrorizing its enemies into submission, something it does not have the will to do.
But Americans were willing to believe with almost utopian naivete in the precision of airpower accompanied by a minimalist groundwar and a libertarian approach to security. We were to put ourselves in the abstract position of the airman, for whom the enemy and the landscape are difficult to distinguish. The inhabitants of the land remain an ineffable “they” (“they bombed us”), and merely by hovering at a distance we will unleash their innate love of freedom and democracy.
Of course, the idea of of the un-terrifying, precise use of airpower is a myth that has been disproved many times by the many accounts of the results of the reckless use of airpower by the United States. On recent video, however, is especially telling. It shows an attack by Americans on a British Convoy; it is disturbing in its own right, as a documentary of a mistake. But it is also a disturbing lesson about the nature of war: American pilots joke about the consequences of killing what they think are the enemy. There is the guy “hauling ass”, who could have been an Iraqi conscript is not a cause for concern; that it turns out to be a British soldier that is killed makes one pilot almost physically ill.
Of course, the thought of killing any human being should make us physically ill, unless we are psychopaths. It is not novel that war changes this condition dramatically; but air power multiplies this element of circumstantial psychopathy. Flying high, the pilot is in a position of abstraction in which indifference to human life and silly rationalizations about precision can be entertained at the same time.
When the American pilots decide to attack the British convoy when they are obviously unsure of its identity (and even rationalize the orange panels that identify friendlies as “orange rocket launchers”) they are doing what pilots have done over and over again in Iraq and what they do in every war: they kill indiscriminately, because at a distance they cannot make fine distinctions, and at a distance they have been disarmed of the natural reaction to killing, which is repulsion. If the British convoy had been feeling Iraqi conscripts or merely Iraqi civilians, we would never have heard about it — just as doubtless we have never heard about countless similar events.
The myth of benevolent precision is a masterful reversal of the true nature of air power, which is indiscriminate terror.
