http://electroniciraq.net/news/2035.shtmlWilliam Van Wagenen, Electronic Iraq, 6 July 2005
Driving through Baghdad during
my stay here in the last month has allowed me to see some of the
destruction caused by the aerial bombardment which preceded the US
invasion. One thing that struck me as odd was a bombed out government
run shopping mall, which resembled the huge Wal-Mart stores back home in
the States. I asked our driver about it, who said the Americans bombed
it during the 2003 invasion. He said one could find anything there,
including food, clothing, and so forth. Curious as to whether the
bombing of this shopping mall had been an accident, I asked our driver
whether any other malls had been bombed. He simply laughed and said,
"Many!" He later showed us several of the shopping malls around Baghdad
that had been bombed by US forces. In all, we saw three government run
shopping malls, and two major markets which had been destroyed. We
noticed that the bombing of the Rashid market in downtown Baghdad was so
precise that no other buildings next to it, including a mosque, seemed
to be harmed. Our driver knew of other malls that had been bombed, but
they were either far away or in areas he felt were too dangerous to
visit. . .
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." 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."
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. 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."
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