The myth of the precision war

[mota bhai 2,675]

by RAFIA ZAKARIA

THE month of September has brought war before. It was on Sept 7, 1940, that the sustained bombing of London by Germany’s Nazi regime began.

Known now as the Blitz, this bombing campaign would last 267 days, or nearly 37 weeks. Night after night, German aircraft would ply the skies over the city, dropping bombs into the darkness below and hoping to cause as much damage as possible. Before it was all over, nearly 100 tonnes of explosives would be dropped on the city.

As history would tell it, war was different in those days. At the purely technological level, the pilots who flew over London were guided only by the city lights below. No lights meant no targets, so the inhabitants of London in September 1940 had to embrace darkness.

The blackout was a prominent feature of the Second World War: curtains had to be pulled, headlights and lamplights — all lights — had to be extinguished.

With the sound of the siren that signalled the German raids, those who did not have underground shelters in their own buildings or homes had to make their way to public shelters where they spent the night in cramped bunks amid complete strangers.

All night, citizen volunteers who had taken up the task of air-raid wardens walked up and down the darkened streets to ensure that no speck of light gave the city away. The bombs fell nevertheless.

Daylight would reveal the damage and also relieve the suffering. The Germans attacked only at night, and people could pause, pretend to follow their pre-war routines, and imagine that the threat of death did not dangle as close as the approach of darkness.

At the same time, with bombing so close and destruction so nearly complete, the war was all encompassing. In the accounts of those who lived in London during the Blitz, the complete disruption of society and culture by the bombings meant that everyone who experienced it was thrown into a sense of camaraderie.

The bombs, the citizens of London learned, could target anyone, rich or poor, famous or ordinary, old or young, and so everyone became in a sense the same, crouching in the darkness and hoping that the bomb that fell from above would not descend on them.

In the closeness of war was the togetherness of war, in the visible suffering was unity, and in all of it was an understanding of conflict as something real, proximate and transformative.

As the world ponders another war this September, the experience of Londoners during the Second World War provides an occasion for pause. Few of those young and alive today have experienced the sorts of complete war described here. If the bombs of old were blindly dropped and unguided by radars, and the targets selected a long while away, the bombs of today are surgical and precise.

Again and again, the vocabulary of exactness is presented as proof of war’s justification. There are no mistakes made by laser-guided missiles, we are all told; the world’s new instruments of destruction can ask for directions, knock at doors and practically ask for identification before they kill.

That, at least, is what we believe; in the rhetorical union of warmongering and precision, we imagine its cruelties dissipated, even eliminated. To enable the continuation of this metaphor, warmongers successfully stanch all news of mistakes, of blindly or wrongly dropped bombs, of accidentally struck houses and mistakenly killed people.

The success and popularity of the targeted war, one that can far more indulgently be inflicted on populations, depends on the myth of its precision.

If the wars of old were denounced by the sheer facts of destruction, witnessed night after night by those who lived through their terror and still emerged alive, the wars of today rely on the spared being oblivious to the danger they face, comfortably convinced that the targets are always someone else.

The truth of the faraway war applies to Pakistan today. Our own war is a war of small doses, taking from us bit by bit for over a decade — a war that leaves just enough tiny bits of normalcy for the deception that insists there is no war at all.

In our modern age, where enemies are murky and agendas even more so, many imagine the blunt and blind terrors of past wars as a condition far worse than our own. It is a crucial myth and, increasingly, a global one.

Perhaps in order to believe in the necessity of war after the horrors of the Second World War, a new lie was necessary — the idea that killing, when done carefully, is somehow not really war at all.

As the US mulls its march into Syria and the drums sound loudly over the rest of the world, the myth of precision will once again dominate the discussion. Pakistan, which is still living through that country’s last war of precision, has much to contribute.

When the US began its drone war in the country, many were in support, believing that the precise killing of marked men would rid the country of the disease of violent extremism.

As the American drones fired, the terrorists scattered, making new homes in dense cities and towns, winning the hearts of Pakistanis who opposed American imperialism.

In the continued survival of terrorism in Pakistan, the myth of modern war’s accuracy lies exposed, the blurry boundaries of armed conflict and the easy proliferation of a million new evils all revealed.

Proof, however, does not convince the passionate and proud; and in an America still enraptured with the myth of precision — the lie of a correct conflict carved with righteous exactitude — there is hunger yet for a new war.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

http://dawn.com/news/1040467/precision-wars

[Jacque67 7,328]

Yes, several of my now deceased relatives who experienced the Blitz in London, spoke of it with a certain fondness. Lots of hanky- panky went on in the bomb shelters.