> Michael, I don't think this is at all right. The main strategic goal of
> strategic bombing was enemy morale, and their main targets were not
> civilian infrastructure but civilians themselves: Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo,
> Hiroshima.
Absolutely right.
> The American talked about economic chokepoints for much of the war, but
> after that didn't work and once they had air control they acted exactly
> like the RAF. The Allies dropped 2,700,000 tons of bombs on Germany; 72
> percent were dropped between July 1, 1944 and the collapse of Germany. And
> the major weapon during that period was the incendary bomb. We were
> intentionally slaughtering civilians to make them give up, pure and
> simple. The conclusion drawn after the war was that it didn't work. Any
> more than it V-2's made Londoners want to give up.
>
> Well, okay, Hiroshima and Nagasaki worked. But they're the exception that
> proves the rule.
This last depends entirely on what we think the objective of these two bombings were, of course ...
Strategic bombing, which we must be careful to distinguish from tactical bombing, comes up against some peculiar human traits (if the enemy population identifies to the slightest degree with its elite, it can infuriate and solidify more than it intimidates or demoralises). It also kills many many times more civilians than it does military personel. And it kills a lot more in the longer term, too - as for every ball-bearing plant that is hit so are x hospitals, and electricity generators, x-to-the-nth houses etc.
On its own terms, tactical bombing worked in Iraq and Afghanistan - as soldier- killing, communication-cutting and arms-destroying in Iraq, and tactical support of ground troops in Afghanistan (else there's no way the NA could've regained and held the cities). To my mind, Yugoslavia proved that good enemy communications confounds tactical bombing (whilst proving also how disgusting 'strategic' bombing is), and Afghanistan proves nothing but that air support is wonderful if you have a significant ground presence, without which one might very occasionally depopulate an enemy stronghold, but never hold it.
All much too simple, of course, but just making the point that we haven't as conclusively replaced the old universal wisdom on bombing with the new as some are making out. And whether a particular war was a war-well-fought or not is more to do with who controls the media and the history than anything else. In this instance, we were denied thousands of satellite shots, live TV from on location, and, in this case, even a Peter Arnett under the bombs. So this one still has a chance of going down as a good little war. Clean, quick and righteous.
Wars are never like that, of course. They're always dirty, always going on long after the media have closed the book on 'em, and always the purported ends are irredeemably sullied by the means. Colonel Kurtz's pile of little arms is the definitive darkness at the heart of war. Every time you go to war, that's the contract you enter. But as long as the pictures don't get through and the narrative is carefully controlled, the arms won't be seen and the armless won't be heard.
Lasswell, that greatest of all propaganda theorists, made much of Britain promptly cutting the Atlantic cable from Germany to the US in 1914. The ultimate and decisive exercise in control, he thought. Add to that Stalin's cute little insight that one death is a tragedy and a million but a number, and you have the reason why we'll never forget that poor cook hurtling towards the Manhattan pavement - and hardly remember a thing that happened in and to Afghanistan.
So if the bastards who gave us S11 give us another ghastly something for Christmas, it'll all come out of the blue again. That's the serial-loss-of- innocence thingy Hitchens and Lapham have been on about ...
Ever more bleakly yours, Rob.
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