'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

"Shock & Awe", six months on

Yesterday, Al-Hayat published a column I wrote earlier this month titled Six Months after the fall of Baghdad. I wrote it in a tremendous hurry, but it still seems to hold up pretty well.

I think it took me a while--after my February reading of the book on "Shock and Awe" written by Harlan Ullman and others; and after also, might I add, just missing having the chance to catch up w/ Harlan himself at the house of mutual friends in Dorset, UK, last August-- before I suddenly "got" that the whole S&A thing is as much (or more) about third-party onlookers as it is about the immediately ostensible "target" of such operations...

So here's the lead on what I wrote in Hayat:

It is six months since Baghdad fell to General Tommy Franks' forces, and already it is clear that the Bush administration's decision to launch the fundamentally unilateral, preventive war of early 2003 will change the whole Middle East and the whole global balance - but just not in the way they intended it to.

When Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded the President to launch this kind of war, in this kind of way, they were evidently hoping that it would send a huge wave of "shock and awe" not just through Iraq's military leadership, not just through the Middle East - but throughout the whole world. The swift and victorious assault against Iraq was designed to be the dramatic opening scene in a broader campaign to persuade the whole world of the sheer unstoppability of the unilateralist, "preventive war" doctrine that the President had outlined in his infamous "National Security Strategy" document of September 2002.

One can recall the thinking behind the design of President Truman's decision to employ not one but two of the U.S.'s brand-new atomic bombs over tightly-populated urban areas in Japan in August 1945. Was a campaign of such terrible and lethal consequences as that one necessary to persuade Japan's emperor to surrender? Probably not. (Many historians have argued, for example, that a "demonstrative" detonation of one or both bombs out at sea, but visible to Tokyo, could have brought about the surrender with considerably less loss of life. They have noted, too, that not sufficient times was allowed between the first detonation and the second to see if just one bomb could bring the offer of surrender.) But then, much of the intended "audience" for the launching of those two bombs was not in Japan - but in Russia, a country that in the eyes of many Americans would likely be the next challenger to Washington's worldwide power.

As U.S. strategist Harlan Ullman has noted, the intent of the Hiroshima bombing, as of the assault against Iraq, was primarily to induce "shock and awe". (Other people might use the term "terror".) But what needs noting in particular is that the aim is to spread this effect far more widely than just within the ranks of the immediate target. The aim on both occasions was shock and awe on a worldwide scale...

Nice to see Hayat putting more things up on their English-language website. I should check it out a bit more regularly than I have been.