It seems that the history of modern warfare is being increasingly written, not in the blood of soldiers who are paid to fight, but in that of civilians who are not. The appalling spectacle of Lebanese citizens being slaughtered by US bombs delivered by Israeli jets is only the latest evidence of this terrible truth.
It stems in large part from a change in conflict. Armies these days now rarely clash head to head on the battlefield. In recent history, as in the two Gulf wars against Iraq, the overwhelming technology of the Americans shattered the opposition even before the first units moved against it.
The root cause of the emergence of the civilian as the major victim of war is that nowadays, army regulars are called upon to fight guerillas. The attitude and approach of the soldiers has thus changed. Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, for instance, wear no uniforms. To all intents and purposes, they look just like the civilians within whose communities they shelter and hide. Insurgents may enjoy the voluntary support of locals, as in Vietnam during the US occupation or in Nepal during the Maoist insurrection. On the other hand, the irregular forces may survive by threatening and intimidating civilian populations. The problem for an ordinary soldier is how to distinguish between a civilian and an insurgent. Most modern armies train extensively for street fighting, the dirtiest and most nerve-wracking of engagements in which a twitching blind or a shadow in an alley may be a sniper or simply a terrified onlooker. But in the end, such combat often boils down to firing first on the grounds that the person responsible for that movement could very well be the enemy.
The American military — which, by the Vietnam War as George Steiner pointed out in “Language and Silence” had embraced the Nazi delight in euphemism — call the resulting slaying of civilians “collateral damage,” as if that somehow lessens the finality and enormity of the deaths.
But this malign process carries an even deeper horror. In the end, the civilian dead are included in a general body count of the enemy. The explanation for the fact that weapons are not found on or near the corpses is invariably that other insurgents spirited them away. A dead civilian looks just the same as a dead fighter and by classifying him or her as a combatant, the figures for “collateral damage” are magically reduced.
And there is another reason civilians are now paying a terrible price in guerrilla campaigns. Increasingly, precision-guided weapons are being used in “surgical” strikes. These high-tech horrors can make no discrimination whatsoever. Once their operator, often far, far away, has programmed them to do their evil work, they will close in remorselessly on their targets and obliterate them. They often leave little in the way of bodies to count. This must frustrate the generals who, as in Vietnam, end up counting their success cadaver by cadaver.
For luckless civilians caught in such a maelstrom, however, the tragedy is far more terrible.
