Empire of Destruction: Mosul reveals Myth of Precision Bombing
22 July 2017By Tom Engelhardt
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style:
precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a
carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth;
special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a
triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a
glorious dream of limited destruction combined with unlimited power and
success. In reality, it would prove to be a nightmare of the first order.
If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade
and a half, I would suggest rubble. It’s been a painfully apt term since
September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this
century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization. Let me
explain what I mean.
In recent weeks, another major city in Iraq has officially been “liberated”
(almost) from the militants of the Islamic State. However, the results of the
U.S.-backed Iraqi military campaign to retake Mosul, that country’s second
largest city, don’t fit any ordinary definition of triumph or victory. It
began in October 2016 and, at nine months and counting, has been longer than
the World War II battle of Stalingrad. Week after week, in street to street
fighting, with U.S. airstrikes repeatedly called in on neighborhoods still
filled with terrified Mosulites, unknown but potentially staggering numbers of
civilians have died. More than a million people — yes, you read that figure
correctly — were uprooted from their homes and major portions of the Western
half of the city they fled, including its ancient historic sections, have been
turned into rubble.
This should be the definition of victory as defeat, success as disaster. It’s
also a pattern. It’s been the essential story of the American war on terror
since, in the month after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush loosed
American air power on Afghanistan. That first air campaign began what has
increasingly come to look like the full-scale rubblization of significant
parts of the Greater Middle East.
By not simply going after the crew who committed those attacks but deciding to
take down the Taliban, occupy Afghanistan, and in 2003, invade Iraq, Bush’s
administration opened the proverbial can of worms in that vast region. An
imperial urge to overthrow Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, who had once been
Washington’s guy in the Middle East only to become its mortal enemy (and who
had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11), proved one of the fatal
miscalculations of the imperial era.
So, too, did the deeply engrained fantasy of Bush administration officials
that they controlled a high-tech, precision military that could project power
in ways no other nation on the planet or in history ever had; a military that
would be, in the president’s words, “the greatest force for human liberation
the world has ever known.” With Iraq occupied and garrisoned (Korea-style) for
generations to come, his top officials assumed that they would take down
fundamentalist Iran (sound familiar?) and other hostile regimes in the region,
creating a Pax Americana there. (Hence, the particular irony of the present
Iranian ascendancy in Iraq.) In the pursuit of such fantasies of global power,
the Bush administration, in effect, punched a devastating hole in the oil
heartlands of the Middle East. In the pungent imagery of Abu Mussa, head of
the Arab League at the time, the U.S. chose to drive straight through “the
gates of hell.”
Rubblizing the Greater Middle East
In the 15-plus years since 9/11, parts of an expanding swathe of the planet —
from Pakistan’s borderlands in South Asia to Libya in North Africa — were
catastrophically unsettled. Tiny groups of Islamic terrorists multiplied
exponentially into both local and transnational organizations, spreading
across the region with the help of American “precision” warfare and the anger
it stirred among helpless civilian populations. States began to totter or
fail. Countries essentially collapsed, loosing a tide of refugees on the
world, as year after year, the U.S. military, its Special Operations forces,
and the CIA were increasingly deployed in one fashion or another in one
country after another.
Though in case after case the results were visibly disastrous, like so many
addicts, the three post-9/11 administrations in Washington seemed incapable of
drawing the obvious conclusions and instead continued to do more of the same
(with modest adjustments of one sort of another). The results, unsurprisingly
enough, were similarly disappointing or disastrous.
Despite the doubts about such a form of global warfare that candidate Trump
raised during the 2016 election campaign, the process has only escalated in
the first months of his presidency. Washington, it seems, just can’t help
itself in its drive to pursue this version of war in all its grim imprecision
to its increasingly imprecise but predictably destructive conclusions. Worse
yet, if the leading military and political figures in Washington have their
way, none of this may end in our lifetime. (In recent years, for example, the
Pentagon and those who channel its thoughts have begun speaking of a
“generational approach” or a “generational struggle” in Afghanistan.)
If anything, so many years after it was launched, the war on terror shows
every sign of continuing to expand and rubble is increasingly the name of the
game. Here’s a very partial tally sheet on the subject:
In addition to Mosul, a number of Iraq’s other major cities and towns —
including Ramadi and Fallujah — have also been reduced to rubble. Across the
border in Syria, where a brutal civil war has been raging for six years,
numerous cities and towns from Homs to parts of Aleppo have essentially been
destroyed. Raqqa, the “capital” of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, is now
under siege. (American Special Operations forces are already reportedly active
inside its breached walls, working with allied Kurdish and Syrian rebel
forces.) It, too, will be “liberated” sooner or later — that is to say,
destroyed.
As in Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, American planes have been striking ISIS
positions in the urban heart of Raqqa and killing civilians, evidently in
sizeable numbers, while rubblizing parts of the city. And such activities have
in recent years only been spreading. In distant Libya, for instance, the city
of Sirte is in ruins after a similar struggle involving local forces, American
air power, and ISIS militants. In Yemen, for the last two years the Saudis
have been conducting a never-ending air campaign (with American support),
significantly aimed at the civilian population; they have, that is, been
rubblizing that country, while paving the way for a devastating famine and a
horrific cholera epidemic that can’t be checked, given the condition of that
impoverished, embattled land.
Only recently, this sort of destruction has spread for the first time beyond
the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. In late May, on the island of
Mindanao in the southern Philippines, local Muslim rebels identified with ISIS
took Marawi City. Since they moved in, much of its population of 200,000 has
been displaced and almost two months later they still hold parts of the city,
while engaged in Mosul-style urban warfare with the Filipino military (backed
by U.S. Special Operations advisers). In the process, the area has reportedly
suffered Mosul-style rubblization.
In most of these rubblized cities and the regions around them, even when
“victory” is declared, worse yet is in sight. In Iraq, for instance, with the
“caliphate” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi now being dismantled, ISIS remains a
genuinely threatening guerilla force, the Sunni and Shiite communities
(including armed Shiite militias) show little sign of coming together, and in
the north of the country the Kurds are threatening to declare an independent
state. So fighting of various sorts is essentially guaranteed and the
possibility of Iraq turning into a full-scale failed state or several
devastated mini-states remains all too real, even as the Trump administration
is reportedly pushing Congress for permission to construct and occupy new
“temporary” military bases and other facilities in the country (and in
neighboring Syria).
Worse yet, across the Greater Middle East, “reconstruction” is basically not
even a concept. There’s simply no money for it. Oil prices remain deeply
depressed and, from Libya and Yemen to Iraq and Syria, countries are either
too poor or too divided to begin the reconstruction of much of anything. Nor —
and this is a given — will Donald Trump’s America be launching the
war-on-terror equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the region. And even if it
did, the record of the post-9/11 years already shows that the highly
militarized American version of “reconstruction” or “nation building” via
crony warrior corporations in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been one of the
great scams of our time. (More American taxpayer dollars have been poured into
reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan alone than went into the whole of the
Marshall Plan and it’s painfully obvious how effective that proved to be.)
Of course, as in Syria’s civil war, Washington is hardly responsible for all
the destruction in the region. ISIS itself has been a remarkably destructive
and brutal killing machine with its own impressive record of urban
rubblization. And yet most of the destruction in the region was triggered, at
least, by the militarized dreams and plans of the Bush administration, by its
response to 9/11 (which ended up being something like Osama bin Laden’s dream
scenario). Don’t forget that ISIS’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was a
creature of the American invasion and occupation of that country and that ISIS
itself was essentially formed in an American military prison camp in that
country where its future caliph was confined.
And in case you think any lessons have been learned from all of this, think
again. In the first months of the Trump administration, the U.S. has
essentially decided on a new mini-surge of troops and air power in
Afghanistan; deployed for the first time the largest non-nuclear weapon in its
arsenal there; promised the Saudis more support in their war in Yemen; has
increased its air strikes and special operations activities in Somalia; is
preparing for a new U.S. military presence in Libya; increased U.S. forces and
eased the rules for air strikes in civilian areas of Iraq and elsewhere; and
sent U.S. special operators and other personnel in rising numbers into both
Iraq and Syria.
No matter the president, the ante only seems to go up when it comes to the
“war on terror,” a war of imprecision that has helped uproot record numbers of
people on this planet, with the usual predictable results: the further spread
of terror groups, the further destabilization of state structures, rising
numbers of displaced and dead civilians, and the rubblization of expanding
parts of the planet.
While no one would deny the destructive potential of great imperial powers
historically, the American empire of destruction may be unique. At the height
of its military strength in these years, it has been utterly incapable of
translating that power advantage into anything but rubblization.
Living in the Rubble, a Short History of the Twenty-First Century
Let me speak personally here, since I live in the remarkably protected and
peaceful heart of that empire of destruction and in the very city where it all
began. What eternally puzzles me is the inability of those who run that
imperial machinery to absorb what’s actually happened since 9/11 and draw any
reasonable conclusions from it. After all, so much of what I’ve been
describing seems, at this point, dismally predictable.
If anything, the “generational” nature of the war on terror and the way it
became a permanent war of terror should by now seem too obvious for
discussion. And yet, whatever he said on the campaign trail, President Trump
promptly appointed to key positions the very generals who have long been
immersed in fighting America’s wars across the Greater Middle East and are
clearly ready to do more of the same. Why in the world anyone, even those
generals, should imagine that such an approach could result in anything more
“successful” is beyond me.
In many ways, rubblization has been at the heart of this whole process,
starting with the 9/11 moment. After all, the very point of those attacks was
to turn the symbols of American power — the Pentagon (military power); the
World Trade Center (financial power); and the Capitol or some other Washington
edifice (political power, as the hijacked plane that crashed in a field in
Pennsylvania was undoubtedly heading there) — into so much rubble. In the
process, thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered.
In some ways, much of the rubblization of the Greater Middle East in recent
years could be thought of as, however unconsciously, a campaign of vengeance
for the horror and insult of the air assaults on that September morning in
2001, which pulverized the tallest towers of my hometown. Ever since, American
war has, in a sense, involved paying Osama bin Laden back in kind, but on a
staggering scale. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, a shocking but passing
moment for Americans has become everyday life for whole populations and
innocents have died in numbers that would add up to so many World Trade
Centers piled atop each other.
The origins of TomDispatch, the website I run, also lie in the rubble. I was
in New York City on that day. I experienced the shock of the attacks and the
smell of those burning buildings. A friend of mine saw a hijacked plane
hitting one of the towers and another biked into the smoke-filled area looking
for his daughter. I went down to the site of the attacks with my own daughter
within days and wandered the nearby streets, catching glimpses of those giant
shards of destroyed buildings.
In the phrase of that moment, in the wake of 9/11, everything “changed” and,
in a sense, indeed it did. I felt it. Who didn’t? I noted the sense of fear
rising nationally and the repetitious ceremonies across the country in which
Americans hailed themselves as the planet’s most exceptional victims,
survivors, and (in the future) victors. In those post-9/11 weeks, I became
increasingly aware of how a growing sense of shock and a desire for vengeance
among the populace was freeing Bush administration officials (who had for
years been dreaming about making the “lone superpower” omnipotent in a
historically unprecedented way) to act more or less as they wished.
As for myself, I was overcome by a sense that the period to follow would be
the worst of my life, far worse than the Vietnam era (the last time I had been
truly mobilized politically). And of one thing I was certain: things would not
go well. I had an urge to do something, though no idea what.
In early October 2001, the Bush administration unleashed its air power on
Afghanistan, a campaign that, in a sense, would never end but simply spread
across the Greater Middle East. (By now, the U.S. has launched repeated air
strikes in at least seven countries in the region.) At that moment, someone
emailed me an article by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan who had been in the U.S. for
years but had continued to follow events in his country of birth.
His piece, which appeared at the website Counterpunch, would prove prescient
indeed, especially since it had been written in mid-September, just days after
9/11. At that moment, as Ansary noted, Americans were already threatening — in
a phrase adopted from the Vietnam War era — to bomb Afghanistan “back to the
Stone Age.” What purpose, he wondered, could possibly be served by such a
bombing campaign since, as he put it, “new bombs would only stir the rubble of
earlier bombs”? As he pointed out, Afghanistan, then largely ruled by the grim
Taliban, had essentially been turned into rubble years before in the proxy war
the Soviets and Americans fought there until the Red Army limped home in
defeat in 1989. The rubble that was already Afghanistan would only increase in
the brutal civil war that followed. And in the years before 2001, little had
been rebuilt. So, as Ansary made clear, the U.S. was about to launch its air
power for the first time in the twenty-first century against a country with
nothing, a country of ruins and in ruins.
From such an act he predicted disaster. And so it would be. At the time,
something about that image of air strikes on rubble stunned me, in part
because it felt both horrifying and true, in part because it seemed such an
ominous signal of what might lie in our future, and in part because nothing
like it could then be found in the mainstream news or in any kind of debate
about how to respond to 9/11 (of which there was essentially none).
Impulsively, I emailed his piece out with a note of my own to friends and
relatives, something I had never done before. That, as it turned out, would be
the start of what became an ever-expanding no-name listserv and, a little more
than a year later, TomDispatch.
A Plutocracy of the Rubble?
So the first word to fully catch my attention and set me in motion in the
post-9/11 era was “rubble.” It’s sad that, almost 16 years later, Americans
are still obsessively afraid for themselves, a fear that has helped fund and
build a national security state of staggering dimensions. On the other hand,
remarkably few of us have any sense of the endless 9/11-style experiences our
military has so imprecisely delivered to the world. The bombs may be smart,
but the acts couldn’t be dumber.
In this country, there is essentially no sense of responsibility for the
spread of terrorism, the crumbling of states, the destruction of lives and
livelihoods, the tidal flow of refugees, and the rubblization of some of the
planet’s great cities. There’s no reasonable assessment of the true nature and
effects of American warfare abroad: its imprecision, its idiocy, its
destructiveness. In this peaceful land, it’s hard to imagine the true impact
of the imprecision of war, American-style. Given the way things are going,
it’s easy enough, however, to imagine the scenario of Tamim Ansari writ large
in the Trump years and those to follow: Americans continuing to bomb the
rubble they had such a hand in creating across the Greater Middle East.
And yet distant imperial wars do have a way of coming home, and not just in
the form of new surveillance techniques, or drones flying over “the homeland,”
or the full-scale militarization of police forces. Without those disastrous,
never-ending wars, I suspect that the election of Donald Trump would have been
unlikely. And while he will not loose such “precision” warfare on the homeland
itself, his project (and that of the congressional Republicans) — from health
care to the environment — is visibly aimed at rubblizing American society. If
he were capable, he would certainly create a plutocracy of the rubble in a
world where ruins are increasingly the norm.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The
End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick
Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow
Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
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