This begs the question, why did the US bother to bomb markets and shopping malls? In war, don't armies kill other armies, and weapons destroy other weapons? The logic of targeting civilian infrastructure is explained in the book from which the Bush administration's "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq was drawn. Military researchers at the National Defense University wrote Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996, declaring the supposedly new doctrine of applying US military "resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist." For this to be successful "psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved (emphasis added)." Through Shock and Awe, it is hoped that "the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese" will result. "This Shock and Awe may not necessitate imposing the full destruction of either nuclear weapons or advanced conventional technologies but must be underwritten by the ability to do so. . . to convey the unmistakable message that unconditional compliance is the only available recourse. It will imply more than the direct application of force. . . This could include means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure." The violence unleashed must be "all encompassing" in "scope", using "force against force and supporting capability (emphasis added)" [1].

In other words, Shock and Awe bombing would be used against Iraq to directly target the infrastructure necessary for the survival of the Iraqi civilian population, as well as threaten the use of nuclear weapons in an offensive capacity, in order to "break the will" of the Iraqi regime and force its capitulation.

Targeting civilians for the sake of achieving political or military goals constitutes terrorism. Rather than denounce the idea that America should engage in state terrorism on a massive scale, President Bush responded enthusiastically to the concept of "Shock and Awe" when it was introduced to him by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in the lead up to the war [2]. Several weeks before the invasion, CBS Evening News reported positively about this new strategy, interviewing the main author of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, Harlan Ullman. CBS also quoted one Pentagon official who had been briefed on the plans as saying, "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad ... the sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before" [3].

Fortunately, US military planners decided not to bomb Iraq's civilian infrastructure to the extent they did in the Gulf War in 1991, where Iraq's power stations were among the primary US targets [4]. What is interesting to note is that not devastating Iraq's civilian infrastructure fully appears to have been a departure from the officially endorsed US military doctrine (and previous practice). My view is that Iraq's power plants and water treatment facilities were spared this time around because in 2003 the US was planning to occupy Iraq directly, and if the infrastructure had been completely destroyed, the US would be shackled with the problem of repairing it. In 1991, the aim was to destroy Iraq and wait for one of Saddam's "Sunni henchman" [5] to overthrow him, and thus the US could simply absolve itself of responsibility and let Saddam deal with the war's horrific aftermath. Another possibility is that Saddam's regime fell so quickly that imposing the full shock and awe regime upon the civilian population did not become necessary.

Despite the exercise of some restraint, the effect of the bombing on Iraqis was still horrendous. A study by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that some 100,000 Iraqis have died as result of the US-led invasion and occupation, primarily due to US/UK bombing [6]. Because I was in Palestine at the time, the only coverage of the US invasion I saw was on Al-Jazeera. Each morning they broadcast gruesome scenes of dead women and children, victims of the US bombing each night before. As a war against Iran may possibly be upon us in the coming years, it is important to keep in mind the effects of US military tactics on civilian populations, especially if one considers the rhetoric of our government to liberate oppressed peoples to be sincere. Targeting civilians is still terrorism, whether undertaken for the best of motives or the worst.

Notes:

[1] Ullman, Harlan K. "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance." National Defense University, 1996. All quotes are from the prologue and introduction. I have not provided the page numbers because I am referencing an online version. I suggest reading the whole book to get an idea of the major concerns US military planners deal with. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/shock-n-awe_index.html

[2] Woodward, Bob. Plan of Attack, Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 102.

[3] Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage, CBS News Online, January 24th, 2003. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/24/eveningnews/main537928.shtml

[4] Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets, Washington Post, June 23, 1991.

[5] This was the strategy adopted by the CIA, according to leading Neo-con Richard Perle. An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. David Frum, Richard Perle, 2003, Random House, New York, p. 16-17.

[6] Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey. The Lancet, Volume 364, Number 9445, 30 October 2004.