. 

US Employs Old Colonial Ways To Gain Control

It used to be called terror bombing, but now it's dignified with the label of `a new strategy', known as Shock and Awe.

By Alexander Cockburn

Dublin, Ireland, 9 February, 2003

The word `new', as in `new US doctrine', or `new imperial role', has no place in any discussion of the latest western plans for Iraq, any more than does the silly phrase `Revolution in Military Affairs'.

The Pentagon is leaking plans for its impending missile barrage of Baghdad and other ancient settlements in the Cradle of Civilisation. It used to be called terror bombing, but now it's dignified with the label of `a new strategy', known as Shock and Awe.

The strategy, so news stories excitedly disclose, was "conceived at the National Defence University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 Cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days, designed as in 1991 to destroy infrastructure such as water and power supplies".

The barrage will supposedly involve more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS News. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The self-styled architect of Shock and Awe, Harlan Ullman of the Defence Group Inc, claims his plan will rely on precision-guided weapons. He talks of a "simultaneous effect -- rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima -- not taking days or weeks, but minutes".

When he relayed the Shock and Awe scenario to the audience of CBS Evening News, Dan Rather said solemnly: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defence Department thinks could help the Iraqi military."

But the Iraqis had no reason to chafe at Rather's patriotic discretion. They know what happened in 1991, which itself was a replication of western bombing strategies in Iraq stretching back as far as 1920, when the Royal Air Force ventured into the shock and awe business in the earliest moment of Iraq's existence as a mandate of the League of Nations after the First World War.

As with Palestine and Transjordan, the newly-conceived entity of Iraq was under British supervision. As the Turks were evicted, there was brave talk of an independent Iraq, but soon came the familiar vista of colonial supervisors and occupying troops from British garrisons in India.

Though Iraq was, as it is today, an essay in enforced multiculturalism -- Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'a -- British stupidity soon wrought the near-miracle of the unified revolt of 1920.

At a cost of some 8,000 Iraqi lives, the revolt was finally suppressed, but the British government reeled at the expense of rushing large numbers of troops to the scene. The bill exceeded the entire cost of financing the Arab rising against the Ottomans in World War I.

At this point, the Royal Air Force, desperately seeking rationales for independent existence, stepped forward and offered itself as a thrifty guarantor of the `security' of Iraq. The RAF took over its new duties in 1922. Only four years old as an independent arm of the British military, it had already formulated a prototype of `shock and awe'.

Here's what Wing Commander JA Chamier wrote in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute in 1921, under the boastful title The Use of Air Power for Replacing Military Garrisons: "The Air Force must, if called upon to administer punishment, do it with all its might and in the proper manner . . . The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle . . . This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with."

Citing Chamier's prescriptions in a witty essay on The Myth of Air Control in Aerospace Power Journal, the military historian James Corum cites the RAF's Notes on the Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq as proudly pointing out that "within 45 minutes a full-sized village . . . can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five planes".

But just as Tony Blair today faces dissent in the ranks of the British Labour Party, so too did dissent ascend from the same ranks three quarters of a century ago, after the first Labour government came to power in 1924.

Displaying far more moral fibre than his remote political descendant in the Foreign Office -- the repellent Jack Straw -- Colonial Secretary James Thomas wrote to the high commissioner in Iraq stating flatly that reports of heavy civilian casualties in Iraq, consequent on the RAF's raids, "will not be easily explained or defended in parliament by me".

The RAF fine-tuned its PR about collateral damage. Henceforth there would be early warnings of `shock and awe' forays, leaving time for the villagers to run away. Then the bombs would rain down -- though not, so the RAF insisted, with the aim of actually destroying the village, but merely of disrupting daily life (out in the field, such niceties were swiftly discarded).

This was before the days when oil had become the prime objective of western plunder in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, but time-honoured methods of imperial extortion from subject peoples required the collection of taxes, and the RAF was placed in charge of bombing to extort money.

Nothing has changed: the `tax' in its modern guise is recapture and control of Iraq's oil.

Naturally enough, the RAF was at great pains to suppress in its reports and histories of campaigns in Iraq the role of the army, giving the entirely false impression that air power alone could maintain imperial control.

In fact, RAF bombing accuracy in the interwar period was mostly awful, and there were all the usual unfortunate mistakes, familiar today to those following US bombing mishaps in Afghanistan.

Bombing remote Kurd villages was one thing, but dropping bombs on Palestinian villages quite another. The outbreak of the Arab revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 elicited eager suggestions from RAF commanders such as Air Commodore Arthur Harris, commanding officer of the RAF in Palestine and later chief of Bomber Command in World War II, and hence one of the major war criminals of the 20th century.

Harris offered his recipe to halt Arab unrest. Drop "one 250-pound or 500-pound bomb in each village that speaks out of turn ... The only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied."

The British army saw this as folly, and certain to make a bad situation worse. Harris's advice was rejected, and the world had to wait until later years to see Israeli bombers dropping US-supplied explosives on Palestinian villages and camps.

In the years after World War II the US Air Force prowled eagerly through the RAF's mendacious accounts of its prewar triumphs in Iraq.

In an article in Air University Review in 1983, Lt Col David Dean, USAF, issued a fervent but misleading testimonial of the RAF's experience with air control, which he saw as a cheap and effective way of policing the empire. The airpower theorist Carl Builder again argued in 1995 that it provided an excellent model for the kind of "constabulary missions" in support of the United Nations or "peace operations".

But as Corum concludes: "the idealised air control system described by US Air Force writers never really existed ...

"Basically, one could barely justify air control as a doctrine 80 years ago, and people who advocate an updated version of such doctrine for current US Air Force operations have misread history."

So much for `new strategies' and `revolutions in military affairs'.

The punitive expedition pressed by Bush and his circle remains squarely within the tradition of similar punitive expeditions launched, with aerial bombardments, nearly 80 years ago over the same terrain.

Alexander Cockburn has worked in the US as a journalist for the past 30 years and is the author of two books.

OTHER HEADLINES

US and Britain give Saddam just 48 hours to leave Iraq

US Severs Last Ties With Iraq: 

How Much Will A war Cost?: As little as $99 billion but as much as $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

Rumsfeld Disowned By German Relatives: The American defense chief Donald Rumsfeld has been disowned by his anti-war relatives in north Germany

PROTEST AND THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY : To all our internet friends out there, who might be interested in protest and how their actions can effect changes in government policy. Please read it, because this is not quite public knowledge, yet is pertinent to every act of ours and its resulting effects

What Makes A Massacre?: War is, of course, never pretty, and some aspects of these stories will be familiar to anyone who has confronted the realities of modern warfare.

Between Armageddon and Peace—Iraq and the Israeli Occupation: If Ariel Sharon had his druthers, the US would oblige by conducting Israel's proxy war against a long list of targets, including Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and even Saudi Arabia

Another Powell Lie Revealed: Truth Behind US 'Poison Factory' Claim: Colin Powell's terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill.

HOME