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Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment PDF

241 Pages·2006·0.78 MB·English
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grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page i ABOUT THIS BOOK Terrorism and the United States’ self-declared war on terrorism are the defining leitmotifs of the times we live in. They are being used throughout the Western world to justify widespread derogations of civil liberties and the overwhelming use of force, increasingly via strategic bombing. These aerial bombardments are aimed either explicitly at civilian populations as a matter of strategy or deployed in circumstances where extensive civilian deaths are guaranteed but are euphemistically written off as collateral damage or accidental. In this important book, Professor Beau Grosscup recounts the engrossing history of aerial bombardment of civilian populations throughout the 20th century right up to the present day in Afghanistan and Iraq. He shows how certain European colonial powers, notably Britain, initiated its use between the two World Wars; how wholesale bombard- ment of civilians was an instrument of choice used by all the major contestants of the Second World War. And how, since then, it has been refined conceptually and practised extensively by the United States in Korea, Vietnam and more recently in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Beau Grosscup exposes the labyrinth of rationalizations put forward, in particular by the United States, that attempt to exclude strategic bombing from being labelled state terrorism, and he further exposes the race, gender and class biases that lie behind these justifications of aerial bombing of ‘other’ people. This unique modern history of strategic bombing exposes the dirty secret about the so-called ‘clean’ use of air power and aims to rally public support against the politically motivated manipulations of the terrorism issue by the Western bombing nations. The author asserts that if terrorism is to be diminished in the future, the role United States aerial bombing plays in sustaining the global cycle of violence must be recognized and confronted. grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page ii ABOUT THE AUTHOR Beau Grosscup is Professor of International Relations, California State University, Chico. He has made a special study of terrorism for many years, and is the author of Newest Explosions of Terrorism, now in its 4th edition. grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page iii B E A U G R O S S C U P STRATEGIC TERROR THE POLITICS AND ETHICS OF AERIAL BOMBARDMENT SIRD KUALA LUMPUR Zed Books LONDON AND NEW YORK grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page iv Strategic Terror was first published in 2006 by In Malaysia: Strategic Information Research Development (SIRD), No. 11/4E, Petaling Jaya, 46200 Selangor In the rest of the world: Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA. www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Beau Grosscup, 2006 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. The right of Beau Grosscup to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Cover designed by Andrew Corbett Set in 9/13 pt Georgia by Long House, Cumbria, UK Printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Ltd Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. All rights reserved A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library US Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 1 84277 542 1 hb ISBN 1 84277 543 X pb ISBN 978 1 84277 542 4 hb ISBN 978 1 84277 543 1 pb ISBN 983 2535 832 (Malaysia) grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page v C o n t e n t Acknowledgements viii s List of Abbreviations ix Prologue x 1 Shock and Awe!! Shock and Awe!! 1 ‘Shock and Awe’ and Terrorism 3 The Political Culture of ‘Shock and Awe’ 4 Civilian Casualties: Whose Counting? 7 Iraqi Civilian Casualties: Blaming the Victims 11 2 The Origins of Strategic Bombing 15 The Great War and Strategic Bombing Theory 16 The Prophets Speak 19 Civilians in Warfare 25 3 Who Is to Be Bombed? The Self and Other in Imperial Culture 28 The Rise of Imperial Culture 29 The Imperial Center: Bombing in the Great Wars of the Future 36 The Militarized Prophets 43 Bombing Civilians To Win 47 Lives of the Prophets 51 4 Strategic Bombing Comes of Age 54 Bombs for the Colonial Masses 54 Total War in the Imperial Center: The Search for Rules 57 The Fascists Bomb Republican Spain 58 The United States Entry into Strategic Bombing 60 Strategic Bombing in World War Two 63 5 Cold War Strategic Bombing: From Korea to Vietnam 70 US Cold War Bombing Doctrine 70 Total War: The Atomic Strategic Bombing Scenario 74 A Return to Conventional Strategic Bombing 75 The Bombing of Korea 77 Lessons of the Forgotten War 81 Bombing Indochina 84 Assessing the Civilian Carnage 87 Objectifying Indochina’s Victims 91 grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page vi 6 Terrorists in the Bombsights 94 The Politics of Terrorism 94 The New World Order: Keeping Terrorism at a Distance 98 7 Strategic Bombing in the 1990s 105 The Persian Gulf War: Planning the Air Attack 107 The ‘Hyperwar’ 110 Hyperwar: Assessing the Carnage 111 Terrorizing the Environment 114 Counting the Hyperwar Dead 115 Playing the Terrorism Card 117 Race, Class and Gender in the New Terrorism 119 Bombing the Terrorists of the New World Order 121 Israeli and Russian Strategic Bombing 122 NATO’s ‘Humanitarian’ Bombing of Kosovo-Serbia 126 Bombing the Environment: Indirect Civilian Deaths 132 8 Bombing to Win: 9/11 and the War on Terrorism 137 The Strategic Bombing of 9/11 138 Bush’s Post-9/11 War on Terrorism 139 The Revenge Bombing of Afghanistan 142 The New Precision War: How Accurate? 145 Counting Civilian Casualties: Business as Usual 148 The Pentagon Makes Civilian Casualties Disappear 151 9 Dodging the Terrorism Label 156 The Politics of Defining Terrorism 156 The Instrument of Political Socialization 157 Imaging Terrorism 159 The Politics and Ethics of Linguicide 160 How to Avoid the Terrorism Label When Bombing 165 10 Terror from the Skies 177 Is Strategic Bombing Terrorism? 179 Strategic Bombing as Terrorism 184 The Real Terrorism Divide 186 What Must Be Done? 187 Notes 191 Select Bibliography 213 Index 219 grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page vii For Cooper Grant My treasure, my heart, my peace … were that I could follow in your footsteps grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page viii Acknowledgements This book belongs to many people, especially those who have expressed contempt for terrorism wherever it occurs, whoever the perpetrator is and for whatever reason. Unknown to most of you, individually and collec- tively you have been my mentors. May these pages give you more reason to persevere? My thanks go to all the students in my Politics of Terrorism classes at California State University, Chico, with a special salute to those who, in the post-11 September 2001 jingoistic climate, listened patiently to, thought deeply about, and argued constructively with the ideas of this dissident student of terrorism. The support from the CSU Chico Summer Scholars Program, the insistence of my Department of Political Science and California Faculty Association colleagues that sabbaticals are essential to democratic intellectualism in an increasingly corporate academic culture, and the many venues that invited me to test my ideas were all instrumental to this project. Grateful appreciation goes to the editorial staff of Zed Books, especially Robert Molteno and Anne Rodford for their patience, hard work and encouragement, all of which made for a most constructive professional experience. Professors Beverly Crawford, Mimi Riley, John Martin, Miriam Monges, Joseph Russo and Scott Sibary, I am indebted to your soul-filled friendship, first-rate intellect and considerable expertise. I am particularly appreciative of your insistence that we sort through my various confusions. Finally, I am deeply beholden to Richard ‘Ricky’ Nadeau for his incessant interest in and invaluable help with this project. Besides epitomizing in theory and practice the true meaning of intellectual, you are a magnificent person and public treasure. George Charles ‘Beau’ Grosscup III Cohasset, California viii grosscup 00 prelims 2/5/06 8:50 pm Page ix Abbreviations and Acronyms ACTS Air Corps Tactical School BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CEP Circular Error Probable CSIS Center for Strategic and International Security DU Depleted Uranium FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation IRC International Red Cross IRA Irish Republican Army JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NLF National Liberation Front OPEC Oil Producing Exporting Countries PGM (Precision-Guided Missile) PLO Palestinian Liberation Front Psyops Psychological Operations RAF Royal Air Force SAC Strategic Air Command SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Education Fund UNITA National Union for Total Independence of Angola USAID United States Agency for International Development USSBS United States Strategic Bombing Survey 9/11 September 11 2001 ix

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This book shows how certain European colonial powers, notably Britain, initiated aerial bombardment of civilians after World War I, how it was an instrument of choice in World War II, and how it has since been refined and practised by the US in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. It e
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