In support of Bombing

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start an essay with that title!  But the decision to bomb the forces of the Islamic State (IS) has tempted my thinking.  Lets see where this gets us.

Aerial bombing seems to me to be the ultimate in terrorism.  Particularly given the nature of an advanced warning that it is going to happen.  People on the ground can look forward with anticipation of the terror knowing that bombs will be rained down on them.

Compare this to a suicide bombing.  Nobody knows its going to happen except the suicide bomber, and suddenly there is blood and guts everywhere.  The terror is in the fright and horror of the after event, rather than in any anticipation before hand.

The crews in a plane, on the other hand are high above, mostly way beyond any risk of aggression from below in a position basically to rain terror on whoever is below.

For me this is an act of gross cowardice.  Whereas a suicide bombing takes enormous courage on the part of the bomber.  The fact that it is also idiocy is another matter altogether.

Both are idiocy.  Both are aimed at unspeakable loss of life, of strangers rather than intimates, those who one might meet in say single combat.  Both are the act of bullies, unable to resist the need to make their presence felt, to make their statement of power, unable to find a way of living together otherwise.

However does that mean that we can be in support of the use of bombing?

Powerful governments have always adopted the greatest terrorist threat they can to force their views.  The blitz of London and other cities in England was Hitler's attempt to subjugate the British early in WWII.  Churchill's carpet bombing of Dresden and other cities in Germany was his attempt to bring Hitler to his knees later in the same war.  And Truman's dropping of the A-bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima similarly, and finally brought that war to its close.  In all cases the bombing followed an offer of a surrender.

Still gross acts of terrorism, and conducted from a position of power but with great cowardice.  (This latter attribution not to belittle the efforts of the airmen who took part in the raids, nor of the sacrifices many of them made.)

The bombing of IS targets approved by Obama, is required of course because of the unconscionable errors made by the US presidents of the last 25 years.  If we (they!) had not wished to topple Saddam Hussein etc, we would not be in the position we are to day, of a power vacuum in Iraq that the forces of IS (originally we called them ISIS, though neither I suppose is what they call themselves) have been able to fill.  Despite Kerry's shuffling around in the mid-east, I doubt an offer of surrender has been made to IS.

What truly scares us is their apparent philosophy.  I say apparent, since I have read no credible journalistic reporting of the aims and motives of the newly declared caliphate.  But the reporting of the threat to non-muslims of, pay a tax, convert, or be killed, appears singularly brutal.  I have seen no clean indication of what the tax might be, but have to presume given the intensity of the western reaction to the threat that it is beyond the means of most to pay it.  It is also antithetical to our mores to tell or be told pay up or die!

So it boils down to a sense that IS is being exceptionally intolerant of others.  Given our sense of fairness in that the only thing to be intolerant of is intolerance itself, we respond to their intolerance with an intolerance of our own, though it is unlikely to make much difference in the long run, and may have many unintended consequences:  Bomb the heck out of them.