A Palestinian woman is standing in her kitchen when she hears a deafening bang. Rushing to her living room she sees her family in pieces, spread across floors, walls and ceiling. The horror is total and meaningless. Nobody meant it to happen, so what was its cause?
The tragedy in Gaza surely marks the time when the world declares air-launched bombs and long-distance shells to be illegal under the 1983 Geneva convention. They should be on a par with chemical munitions, white phosphorous, cluster bombs and delayed-action land mines. They pose a threat to noncombatants that should be intolerable even in the miserable context of war.
I can accept Israeli claims that they are not intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza. But the failure of their chosen armaments had the same effect. The civilian death toll is now put at over 1,000, mostly women and children. It is barely conceivable that the most accurate weapon of war, an infantryman, would deliberately enter a house and massacre unarmed women and children as they have their dinner. As a result, mercifully few do. When such cold-blooded murder is committed, from the 1968 My Lai killings in Vietnam to those now coming to light in Iraq, we are appalled, and inquiries, trials and disciplinary procedures follow.
Those killing from the air need have no sight of the carnage they unleash. They are placed at both a geographical and a moral distance, with a license allowed no soldier on the ground. Whether they are dispatching free-fall bombs or GPS-guided missiles, tank shells or predator drones, Hamas’ Qassam rockets or improvised explosive devices, they know they often miss their targets, but they launder any carnage as “collateral damage” and leave politicians to handle the backlash. The soldier shrugs and walks away, with no obligation to humanity beyond the occasional apology and a reference to the other side being just as bad.
If gas, landmines, chemical weapons and cluster munitions are now banned — a ban broadly obeyed by most civilized armies — why not aerial bombardment? Rather than employ infantry to clear an apparently hostile settlement, commanders call in air strikes and pound it to rubble. The Israelis have responded to the Hamas bombardment of their towns with a far heavier bombardment of Gaza. Both endanger civilians to a degree that cannot be other than criminal. That human shield tactics may be involved is no excuse: the law does not permit the killing of innocents in the hope of reaching the guilty.
The bombing of urban infrastructure is an act of terror, meant to weaken the resistance of victims and cause them to surrender. This was the case with the West’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and Baghdad in 2003, the latter under the openly terrorist rubric of “shock and awe”. Neither achieved the ambition proclaimed by the champions of air power, Bomber Harris’s promise “to win the war from the air”.
British Foreign Secreatary David Miliband declared yesterday the title “war on terror” to be “misleading and mistaken”. It apparently “gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda”. In reality terrorism was a disparate phenomenon, often internal to state politics. Besides, wrote the foreign secretary: “Terrorists succeed when they force countries to respond with violence and repression.”
Miliband is right. But did Miliband protest when Tony Blair reportedly pleaded with George Bush to be the first to bomb Kabul in 2001? Is this the same Miliband who sat silent as a member of the government that supported “shock and awe”? Is he now pleading with the Americans to stop using weapons against the Pashtun — such as aerial assassination — that exacerbate both war and terror? The truth is that the war Miliband is still waging against militant Islam has been conducted largely by weapons of terror, namely bombs and long-distance artillery shells. They have killed untold thousands of noncombatants since the “war” began in 2001 — a violence far more devastating than the Israelis have inflicted on Gaza — destroying unimaginable numbers of homes.
If Israel fails to win its political objectives in Gaza, it will in part be because of its massively destructive attempt to terrify the Palestinians into surrender from the air. Every errant missile explodes on the television screens of the world. In the complex politics of war, these weapons are like torture. They numb moral sensibility and do harm beyond all justification of victory. They should be abolished. If we wish to kill other people for whatever reason, we should use only weapons that kill the right ones.
