- At the Ditchley Park conference during World War II,
Winston Churchill called for a "balance of virtue" in Europe
rather than a balance of power. Soon after that, with Germany about to
collapse in February 1945, with East and West Germany already occupied
by the Allied armies and the Russians, he mercilessly ordered an air bombardment
of Dresden - the Venice of the North - which was packed with old men, women
and children. To paraphrase an old Winnie speech, some virtue. There were
no factories, no army depots, no communication centers, nothing but cathedrals,
museums and monuments in Dresden, but 135,000 civilians had to be incinerated
in one night alone because of an Englishman,s pathological hatred of the
Germans.
-
- I once asked Churchill,s grandson and namesake, an old
friend of mine, about Dresden. "Now look here, old boy," he answered
rather aggressively - but always smiling, like the English tend to do when
they,re about to lift your wallet - "What about your Germans, they
weren,t exactly nice guys, were they?" Young Winston missed the point.
Hitler may not have been the most compassionate of men, but Churchill was
the one wearing the white hat. He was supposed to fight clean. Or was it
perhaps normal that Churchill had anthrax bacteria cultivated specifically
to drop over German territory? Again, very late in the war.
-
- I suppose megalomaniac criminals like Stalin, Mao, Hitler
and Pol Pot never spared a single thought for the millions and millions
of people who were murdered as they strove to achieve world revolution
and world domination. But Churchill? Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber")
Harris, who devised the system of bombing civilian targets, is regarded
in some circles - and not just in Germany - as little better than a mass
murderer. During World War II the major protagonists used bombing in very
different ways. The "nicest," ironically, were the Luftwaffe,
which preferred tactical bombing in conjunction with ground forces (Blitzkrieg).
The Americans were almost as "nice." The U.S. Army Air Corps
believed in strategic bombing, but condemned terror attacks on unarmed
civilians, opting instead for the precision bombing of military and industrial
targets.
-
- Not so the Brits. They were convinced that wars could
be won only by eroding enemy morale - which meant attacking the civilian
population. (Let us not also forget that our British cousins were the first
to use deadly concentration camps, against Afrikaners during the Boer War.)
Let,s face it. Bombers, when deployed strategically, are fundamentally
a terror weapon. The trouble is that bombing has never destroyed civilian
morale in any meaningful way; if anything it unites the victims against
their enemies. Some 600,000 unarmed German civilians died from bombing
alone, but the German troops continued to gallantly fight until the very
bitter end.
-
- The opposite side of the argument was that the Germans
had it coming to them, and that they could have surrendered to stop the
bombing. That,s a foolish argument. A civilian did not exactly have a choice
in Germany back then. And then there is the ludicrous Daniel Goldhagen
theory that all Germans were "willing executioners" and deserved
everything they got. Which brings me to the point I wish to make: America,s
most enduring contribution to history is that, unlike other great powers,
it did not routinely use force to impose its will. (Okay, a little bit
in Cuba, and a little bit in Mexico, and a little bit in the Philippines,
and what,s an Indian or two...) But suddenly, with the coming to power
of the Draft Dodger, the cruise missile and strategic bombing became Uncle
Sam,s favorite diplomatic maneuver. We know that tiny Central American
countries have gone to war over a soccer match, but launching missiles
to divert opinion over a blowjob is 100 times more ridiculous.
-
- The Balkans are still suffering terribly from NATO,s
bombing, an act that was as immoral as it was opportunistic on the part
of the preening war criminal Madeleine Albright and her gang. (She needed
a legacy.) It was reported in September 1999 that levels of radiation in
Macedonia had increased 800 percent, and last year mothers in Bosnia were
giving birth to children with leukemia. Both the Clinton and Blair gangs
at first refused to acknowledge that depleted uranium-tipped rounds were
used, butas everyone knowsthe last time Clinton and Blair told the truth
was very, very long ago, when they were still in diapers, if then.
-
- The sole purpose and justification for using depleted
uranium in weapons is that shells are capable of penetrating heavily armored
tanks. Some 31,000 such rounds were fired from NATO aircraft in Kosovo;
the total number of Yugoslav tank losses was 13. Which means that the huge
majority of rounds either missed or were fired indiscriminately.
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- Dresden lives. The politicians who order such shootings
do not have the slightest interest in military realities, just tv coverage
in the nightly news. The long-term contamination of the region is not their
concern. Last week my colleague Scott McConnell sure got it right. (When
was the last time he got it wrong?) World domination through force of arms
isn,t supposed to be the American way. George Bush was right to fight for
Kuwait. Clinton was wrong to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children
through sanctions. Playing the biggest boy on the block will see Uncle
Sam end up the way of the Russian bear. President Bush needs to reshape
sanctions on Iraq. Colin Powell, a decent man, understands the limitations
of bombing. Saddam Hussein is probably more popular today than he was 10
years ago. there must be another way, and the new regime in Washington
has to see this before it's too late. >
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