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Strategic Bombing: Terrorist Act or Necessary Force?
| Article
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19697 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,410 Words |
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Harry G. Summers, Jr.
Harry G. Summers, Jr., a retired U.S. army colonel, was a
military analyst for CNN, NBC, and the Los Angeles Times
during the Persian Gulf crisis. The sequel to his award-
winning Vietnam War analysis, On Strategy II: A Critical
Analysis of the Persian Gulf War, is forthcoming from Dell in
February 1992. |
Sanctimoniously proclaiming that war is hell is a classic case of stating the obvious. But that hasn't stopped antiwar protesters. During the Vietnam War they denounced that conflict as the most awful, most barbaric, most terrible war in human history.
Greenpeace, the environmental and antiwar advocacy group, labeled the Persian Gulf War "the most momentous and destructive war in modern history."
It's a good thing they qualified it, for when the Mongols took Baghdad in 1257, the entire garrison was murdered in cold blood, along with huge numbers of civilian men, women, and children. Exaggerated casualty estimates vary from 800,000 to 2,000,000; the real figure was probably closer to 100,000.
But one thing has not changed: Greenpeace's casualty figures were as exaggerated as those of the ancient chroniclers. According to their estimates, "about 10,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of the allied bombing" during what they called the "hyperwar."
"Americans visiting [Hanoi] during the attack [the so-called "Christmas bombing" during Operation LINEBACKER II in December 1972] urged the mayor to claim a death toll of ten thousand," reports Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History (Viking, 1983). "[The mayor] refused, saying that his government's credibility was at stake. The official North Vietnamese figure for civilian fatalities for the period was 1,318 in Hanoi..."
Hanoi's mayor Tran Duy Hung had a 1991 counterpart, The Nation's Erika Munk. "I think that the reason we didn't see more destruction," she wrote in a May 6, 1991 account of her postwar trip to Iraq, "was that it wasn't there." The official Iraqi estimate that 2,500 homes were leveled in Baghdad during the war "is not credible," she said. "If projections of civilian casualties in Baghdad are based on the highest estimates for the worst hit areas," Munk wrote, "the American 'clean' bombing of Baghdad was the direct cause of 3,000 civilian casualties."
Even with the higher estimate, she noted, "this would be the lowest number of civilian deaths from bombing of a major city in the history of modern war." But as Munk told the Washington Times's Bill Gertz, "Very few people I've spoken to since I came back want to hear the good news that Baghdad wasn't razed. What they seem to fear is that a bombing whose toll is long-term and still invisible isn't useful for mobilizing antiwar
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