Fatal, Futile and Inhumane: A Commentary on 100 Years of Aerial Bombing
H. Patricia Hynes
July 2009
(Note: This is a summary file with links to the extended version. )
The great twentieth-century change in
warfare has been the power of mass killing at a distance.
Glover
It’s commonly claimed by war planners that they use bombs
solely for strategic purposes: to destroy the enemy’s military capacity for war
with as little “collateral damage” as possible; to strike terror into enemy
citizens and crush their morale; to lose as few combatants as possible and
sustain support at home for war; and to win swift victory. For this last purpose, bombing has been
defended as an agent of peace.
The use and consequences of bombing in war reveal a
different reality, a reality which challenges the lingering humanitarian and
moral justifications for war.
Brief History
Even before airplanes were a viable technology,
apprehension surfaced about their use in war. This anxiety worked its way into
dystopian science fiction where themes of firebombing cities, space warfare,
annihilating whole countries with germ warfare, and pulverizing human
civilization into prehistory abounded.
The threat of aerial war succeeded in persuading all the country
participants, except
Focused lethality
During the Cold War, the annihilation capacity of
Drones
To the admiration of some, the current
Patterns
in Bombing: Asymmetry, Blowback, and Denial
Asymmetry
Bombing is increasingly used in asymmetric, highly unequal situations of military capacity: War from the air is waged against people on the ground. A major consequence of this is the steady increase in the proportion of civilians killed and wounded in armed conflict. (Read more)
Blowback
The impact of killing civilians indiscriminately often
generates the opposite of what is intended. It stimulates popular resistance
and sows the seeds of on-going conflict, a consequence termed blowback.
Public
Denial
National governments, museums, and media dutifully ignore and falsify the scale of civilian trauma and death inflicted by their country’s bombing, while they steadfastly venerate and romanticize military victory no matter what its abuses and crimes. (Read more)
Humanitarian and Moral Considerations
…the carpet of bombs is tightly woven, with
no holes for compassion…
Anonymous
Inevitability of Deliberate Civilian Death
Two of the purported goals of military bombing -- eliminating targets of strategic military value while minimizing “collateral damage” and crushing the morale and resistance of enemy citizens with dense destruction -- vie with each other. Generally the latter wins out, justified by another aim - the phantom goal of quick victory. (Read more)
Detached and Distanced Killing
When you drop bombs from six miles…in the
sky, you do not hear screams or see blood. You do not see children torn apart
in the explosions of your bombs…
Zinn
According to one historian of 20th century war
and genocide, the moral barriers against the mass killing of civilians were
weakened by the British economic blockade of German cities during the First
World War. This act of killing from a distance slowly starved
800,000 citizens to death and blazed the path toward mass bombing of cities in
World War II. (17)
World
of Human Settlements
We are now a world of cities on all continents, such that industry, infrastructure, commerce, schools, hospitals and homes are clustered together in dense agglomerations. Because of this demographic and geographic trend, war is and increasingly will be urban in its target and strategy. (Read more)
The Futility of Regulating War
War is cruel and you cannot refine it.
General George Sherman, from Lindqvist
War cannot be humanized, it can only be
abolished.
Albert Einstein, from Zinn
International Conventions on the Conduct of
War
The late 19th century anxiety about aerial
warfare has borne out, while the prescient efforts to ban bombing failed early
on. In their place, we have legal
protections for civilians (and prisoners) trapped in armed conflicts,
provisions on paper which perpetuate the hope that war can be contained within
legal and humanitarian bounds.
Just War Principles
Zinn, about bombing towns and cities in World
War II
Just War principles can be traced in the Christian
tradition to Augustine. He stated that the purpose of war is peace and that the
evil of war can be pursued for the good of peace. [Why is war exempt from the
Catholic axiom, the end does not justify
the means?] Though the timbre of statement is different, Pope John Paul II
upheld the just war perspective sixteen centuries later, when, on the eve of
the current war in Iraq, he pronounced ruefully, “War is not always inevitable,
it is always a defeat for humanity.”
Conclusion
Rape in civil society and, more so, in war – was once
accepted as normative. So also were
killing heretics, child labor and slavery.
Today these are crimes prohibited by international and national
law. War, on the other hand, continues
to be normative, even while it is widely recognized as a ruinous response to
within-country and between-country conflict.
Conducting war within humanitarian and ethical guidelines
seems increasingly to be a contradiction in terms, given the goals and nature
of aerial war. International
humanitarian conventions cannot prevent the inevitable social and economic
breakdown and chaos that is endemic to war, breakdown and chaos which are
accelerated by aerial warfare because of its speed, scale, and use in densely
populated areas. Like dueling to the death and other blood feuds; like sexual
violence, slavery, and child labor, war must be acknowledged as the
intrinsically violent, socially ruinous and inhumane activity that it has
always proven to be. Reform of war has been
tried for more than 100 years; it’s time for abolition.
Sources
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of Bombing.
2.
www.genevaconventions.org Accessed
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Mark M.
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and www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/napalm.htm
Accessed
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Day One: Before
6.
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Galbraith. A Journey Through
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Quotes
Anonymous. A
Woman in
Jonathan Glover. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth
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Howard Zinn. Just War.
.