Terrorism and War

Before dawn on April 14, 1945, a young American bombardier was awakened in East Anglia, England to be briefed on one last bombing mission.  He was surprised, since for weeks his squadron had been bombing cities throughout Germany, and there were no targets left. The Allied forces were moving through Germany, and surrender was imminent. 

That young American was Howard Zinn, who would later become "the People’s Historian" and a professor of Political Science. Zinn and his fellow airmen were told they would be bombing a small seaside city in France – Royan – where a couple of thousand German troops were trapped, waiting out the endgame of the Allied invasion.  Zinn thought there were only twelve bombers involved in the raid, but it turns out there were 1200.  Furthermore, as he recounted later, they were carrying a new type of weapon:

So twelve hundred heavy bombers were sent over. I didn’t know how many bombers were sent. All I knew was my squadron of twelve bombers were going over. I could see other squadrons. It wasn’t until later, when I did research into it after the war, that I realized that it was twelve hundred heavy bombers going over against two or three thousand German soldiers. But they told us in the briefing, You’re going to carry a different time of bomb in the bomb bay. Not the usual demolition bomb. You’re going to carry canisters, long cylinders of jellied gasoline. It didn’t mean anything to us, except we knew jellied gasoline would ignite. It was napalm.

Zinn later learned that 1,700 French citizens – mostly women and children – were killed in the awful firestorm.  It is not known how many of the German soldiers perished.  The US command was pleased with the outcome, and with the performance of the weapon.  Napalm would later be deployed on a massive scale in Vietnam. 

The experience of bombing defenseless civilians changed Zinn forever, and he grew to realize the awful consequences of his actions – and of war in general.  He has not stopped.  In today’s Boston Globe he writes about the utter folly of the "War on Terror":

"Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our

time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist" is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable."

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental" events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism."