Reflections on Targeting People by Aerial Bombing
by Barton Wong

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it.

— George Orwell, The Lion and The Unicorn, 1941

As I write, American and British armed forces are launching air and cruise missile strikes at various cities in Afghanistan. The quote from Orwell above sums up the issues involved in our deliberate targeting of urban areas. On the psychology of what it is to be bombed from the air, Orwell gives us a perfect summary as well:

Every weapon seems unfair until you have adopted it yourself. But I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words, you are hoping that it will fall on somebody else.

Orwell, who endured the Blitz and the V-1 attacks, knows what he is talking about. We should keep this in mind when we think of what the Afghan people are going through right now.

Of course, there will be those who protest that there is a huge difference between the destruction of London and the destruction of Kabul. We (that is, the West) are not the Nazis, after all. We were attacked first, our cause is just, our enemy is evil, we are trying to keep civilian casualties to a minimal, etc. That may be, but in the end, the psychological torture America is inflicting from the air on the Afghans in 2001 is not quantifiably different than the psychological torture that the Nazis inflicted on the British in 1940.

The reasons are various, the effects are not. Terror remains terror. Human beings are being killed by our elected governments right now and their deaths are not any different from the deaths of any other human beings which occurred for reasons of state. A dead person is a dead person, whatever their politics.

But as Orwell noted sixty years ago, there is a particular horror to being bombed from the air. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West has had a reliance of enforcing its brand of "justice" using aerial assault on countries which transgress our standards. Perhaps it was the disastrous American experience in Somalia, which prompted this. In Iraq, in Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, we have conducted bombing campaigns to keep obdurate governments in line and have them meet our demands.

Of course, in some places this has failed spectacularly. We have apparently given up on overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Our infrequent bombings of his air defenses are expensive and occasionally, bloody exercises in hollow "gunboat diplomacy," designed to keep our casualties in this theatre at a minimal, no more. During the Rwanda genocide, the most catastrophic event in a generation, the West refused to risk its troops on the ground, having accustomed itself to solve things at an arm's length. Half a million people died because of this passivity. And now we have Afghanistan.

In Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, our aircraft met with practically no resistance. All three nations relied on anti-aircraft fire and all three failed to stop our bombs. Iraq and Yugoslavia had modern air forces, but refused to have them massacred by their enemies' overwhelming air superiority. Afghanistan has no modern armed forces whatsoever. In all three places, our air forces are free to bomb where they please, when they please, and as much they please. At most, we will lose two or three jets and a few unmanned scouts. This air campaign will be practically bloodless, for us at least. By using our air power in such a way and on such a scale, we are sending a message to the Taliban and to all those who would stand up to us.

We are proclaiming our power, our technological domination, our invincibility to all that they might throw at us. We are mocking their primitiveness, their helplessness. We are destroying their notions of our decadence and our weakness. We are reasserting the fundamental superiority of our way of life. We are saying that it is us who have won the race. We are on the side of history and they are not. We are saying, "THIS is what happens when you dare to attack us."

Is it fair? A silly question for some, but it is it actually fair to use our technology to ensure that in this conflict, we will suffer nearly no casualties and that they, whoever they might be now and from now on, will suffer thousands and tens of thousands, if they resist? Does this not alter the fundamental nature of war, turning it from battle to massacre? The glib answer is that "Life isn't fair," and that war isn't either and that we should use every advantage we can get and that it's better they die than us. True enough perhaps. War has never been for the morally pure or the philosophically subtle. It is a brutal, simple affair, which despite all the drill, the uniforms, the camaraderie, the glamour, boils down to this simple formula: kill or be killed. And neither is this war free of hypocrisy either.

We believe that we have right on our side. We were attacked, without warning, and thousands of innocent civilians who wanted no part of any fight, died in a most hideous manner. Except, we were warned. We have been warned for years, either through smaller bombings or threats, that this would occur. We simply did not take these warnings seriously. We were arrogant in our sense of invulnerability. We too have warned the other side, that if they did not meet our demands, which by our standards, we judged to be quite reasonable, they in turn would be attacked by us. This threat has been hanging over their heads for weeks. After what we felt was a sufficient amount of time, with our demands still not met, we attacked. We felt we had a perfect right to.

But we in the West cannot take our warfare straight. It has to be sanitized, homogenized, purified of all its troubling and ambiguous aspects before we are willing to kill. President Bush' speech to the nation announcing the air strikes exemplifies this squeamish hypocrisy, this habit of proclaiming our moral superiority over our helpless enemies, while we terrorize them from the air. This is not specifically the President's fault. It is something that Western culture now does by force of habit, when it comes to facing the bloody brutalities of warfare. Bush said:

...the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith.

This "friend to the Afghan people" would bomb and kill them one hour and give them food the next. Is this not just a cynical ploy to salve our consciences, to reassure ourselves of our moral superiority, that if the positions were reversed, they would not do the same for us? Is this not just an half-hearted attempt to not face up to the plain fact that innocent civilians will die and that it is us, our government, our armed forces, and our society that is doing the killing, and that most of us, in the end, will approve of it? The President continued:

The name of today's military operation is Enduring Freedom. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear...Peace and freedom will prevail.

Noble words, no doubt. But don't these same words ask us to judge our enemies by our standards? They are our inferiors merely because they will not abide by our standard of peace. They are our enemies and must be eliminated as they are necessarily a threat to "our precious freedoms." In the end, we are not trying to help them, despite anything the President might say, we are helping ourselves. Not that we don't try and pretend. We view ourselves as Orwell's "highly civilized human beings...who would never dream of committing murder in private life," the "kind-hearted law-abiding" patriots who "are only doing their duty" while they murder innocent civilians whose faces they never see from the safety of aircraft several thousand feet up in the air.

But is some other solution possible? The Village Voice asked a group of "novelists and essayists" the question, "Is there an alternative to a military response to the events of September 11?" The answers were not encouraging:

THICH NHAT HANH, Buddhist monk and author of "Anger":

Face what you think is the cause of your suffering and say: I know you must have suffered a lot in order to have done such a thing to us. Have we contributed to your suffering? If you say this sincerely, it is not a lack of courage but a courageous act.

SUHEIR HAMMAD, poet:

Before any military action is ever taken anywhere, all citizens of the world will recite the pledge below:

"Me, I pledge my allegiance /
to the love of all of humanity /
and to the aspirations we all share /
one species /
one blood /
one love /
one destiny /
one love /
one destiny /
under all manifestations of god /
indivisible /
with liberty and /
medicine and shelter and /
food and self-determination and freedom of religion and freedom of expression and freedom of movement and love and justice /
for all."

VIVIAN GORNICK, author of "The Situation and the Story":

A military strike? Where? What? When? Above all, against whom? If you hit them in Iraq, they'll re-group in Libya. If you squash them in Libya, they'll rise up in Afghanistan. They have struck us, and in their strike announced: We'd rather die — and take you with us — than go on living in the world you have forced us to occupy. Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not retribution.

In the end, the leadership of America and the West have no choice but military strikes and the destruction of the Taliban, for the simple reason that to not respond in this way, would be a sign of weakness, an encouragement to others that we were no longer the dominating force of the world. We do have a position and a prosperous way of life to maintain after all. It is about time that we in the West faced up to this simple fact, instead of trying to blur everything with humanitarian rhetoric, that all war is selfish, and that this war, like all others, is waged for the security and benefit of ourselves and not others. And finally, that war is a brutal affair, in which we ask others to kill our "enemies," people much like ourselves, so that we may prosper and sleep in our beds safe at night.

It has been said that further terrorist attacks on America are now inevitable, now that bombing has begun. If this is so, our enemies are fighting back in the only way they can against our long-distance attacks. They too are fighting for their own way of life. It is a duel to the death of two diametrically opposed worldviews. Which one is "right?" The one that wins in the end, of course.

E-mail Barton Wong at bartonwong at hotmail dot com.