Modern warfare is an exercise in
savagery.
By Donald Kaul
They
were droning on about drones the other day in Washington.
The
Senate Intelligence (ha-ha) Committee was grilling CIA chief-designate John
Brennan on the use of unmanned aircraft during his tenure as President Barack
Obama’s adviser on terrorism.
Drones
are being used a lot, according to Brennan, who was in charge of the drone
program. But only for a good cause.
His answers satisfied some, not others. Mainly, the critics wanted to make sure we were killing people humanely, with full attention to their human rights. We don’t want to be war criminals.
That’s
so mid-Twentieth Century. There was a time when people could actually be
shocked by the slaughter of civilians during a war.
The
most famous example that comes to mind is the bombing of the Spanish town of
Guernica by fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Guernica
was a market town of no particular military importance but it favored the
Republican cause during the war. So the infamous Condor Legion, under Hitler’s
command, swooped in on a spring day in 1937 and bombed it flat.
The
international reaction was immediate and immense. Newspapers all over the world
condemned the attack as barbaric and beyond the rules of warfare.
Hundreds
of people died in the raid, which Pablo Picasso immortalized in one of the greatest anti-war
paintings ever made.
That
reaction seems almost quaint in its innocence, given the subsequent events of
World War II. By 1945, Hitler had killed thousands more in his rocket attacks
on London, destroyed Warsaw, and sent millions to the gas chambers. England had
retaliated by leveling Dresden, where 25,000 died.
The
United States killed 100,000 Japanese in one night of Tokyo firebombing and
more than 200,000 by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost
all of the dead were civilians.
The
United States has bombed dozens of countries since then, all in the name of
peace — most dramatically Vietnam and its neighbors, where we used more
explosives than we did in all of World War II.
And
we’re worried whether our reliance on drones adheres to the finer points of
bombing etiquette? We’re missing the larger moral point.
We
kid ourselves that our warfare is moral and clean and good and that it’s the
other guys who commit the war crimes. Don’t believe it.
Modern
warfare is an exercise in savagery. If you’re not willing to sign up for that,
don’t go to war.
Think
of napalm, for example, a liquid flame designed to stick to the skin as it
burns it away.
Or
our flechette bombs, fitted with dozens of barbs to tear apart flesh.
Or
our landmines scattered across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which are still
blowing legs off farmers in southeast Asia.
I
hearken back to my favorite military philosopher, William Tecumseh Sherman,
famous for unapologetically burning down Atlanta during the Civil War.
“War
is cruelty,” he said. “There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is,
the sooner it will be over.”
Southerners
hate Sherman still, but it can’t be said that he didn’t warn them. In a letter
to a friend in the South, written on the eve of the war, he said:
“You
people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be
drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly,
madness, a crime against civilization…War is a terrible thing!”
Then
he made it so.
The
recent film that best captures that for me is “Zero Dark Thirty,” about Osama
bin Laden’s killing.
It’s
been criticized for justifying torture as a means of obtaining information from
prisoners, but I don’t think it does.
Rather,
it shows with unflinching honesty the tactics we are using. And a nasty piece
of work they are.
It
would be nice if we could have it both ways: be good guys and triumphant.
Unfortunately, life ain’t like that.
Believe
Sherman — war is Hell.