Bombs are the fool’s gold of war. Imprecise, expensive and cruel, their
strategic utility diminishes the farther they fall from a politician’s desk.
The US, with Britain in tepid accord, has been bombing unstable Muslim states
for 16 years and has delivered nothing but death and anarchy. But the bombs
have warmed the souls of successive presidents and prime ministers. A good
explosion reaches parts of the body politic no other policy can reach.
Over the last
week Donald Trump has seen his stock soar, even with supposed liberals, as he
veers from the anti-interventionism of his election campaign and drops bombs
on Syria and Afghanistan. Neither country poses the remotest threat
to America’s national security. In neither is the US technically “at war”. Both
were precisely the conflicts that Trump insisted he would abandon to
concentrate on “America first”.
Now the
president has tasted the sweet cup of war. A measure of his absurdity is that
the beneficiary of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (Moab) missile dropped on the
Afghan mountains will be the local rivals of its alleged Isis victims, the
rebel Taliban. It is doubtful that Trump worries about this irony. He just
wanted to be seen, as he once put it, to “bomb the shit out of Isis”. He is now
so hooked on gesture bombings that he holds a press conference to boast of each
one.
The obscenity
of the US’s legally questionable power projection is that it wins no battles
and gains no territory. Western armies are clearly exhausted by fruitless ground
wars in distant parts of the world. As a result, drones, cruise missiles and
Moabs are forced to bear the burden of “something must be done.” As the
mistakenly bombed civilians of Mosul know to their cost, the targeting is
inexact, but the political aim is precise. It is to secure publicity by
terrifying distant places with displays of death and destruction.
Trump openly
admits that the latest bombing was “to send an important signal to North
Korea”. Such signals may be hi-tech, sophisticated and great on television, but
they are terrorist all the same. And we have the hypocrisy to accuse others of
similar staged gestures intended to change policy by acts of violence.
The US is
clearly being led by a one-man wild card whose aides are struggling to bring
him under some sort of control. During the cold war, unpredictability in a
leader was seen as a powerful adjunct to a nuclear deterrent. It led to a
crippling arms race. Are we really back to those days? The only sane response
remains to keep a sense of proportion, put on a hard hat and hope for the
nightmare to pass. What is baffling is why Britain feels the need to tag along
in meek support.
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