Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age - The Allure Of Total Destruction

President Harry Truman didn't exactly want to bomb the Imperial Japanese back to the Stone Age, but close; and so he dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shortly thereafter the Emperor offered his complete surrender. 

 

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to show the Red Chinese little mercy and advised Truman to go north of the Korean border and bomb them to smithereens.  

During the War in Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, military advisor to Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater advised LBJ's government to bomb the North Vietnamese 'back to the Stone Age'.  Johnson of course wanted to do so, eliminate the terrorist North in one fell swoop, but the 'hearts and minds' policy of the US Government - i.e. protecting civilians at all costs, thus encouraging them to switch sides and become partisans instead of Viet Cong insurgents - made that impossible, 

Instead, Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon unveiled Rolling Thunder, the air campaign in which fleets of B-52 bombers dropped massive explosive payloads on North Vietnamese positions in the South and on Haiphong harbor.  That show of might would either bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table or force him to surrender. 

Truman, angered that General MacArthur went against his orders, and considering him a dangerous man, a loose cannon, relieved him of command - a bad decision as it turned out because 'The Red Menace' was exactly as the old soldier expected.  Mao and his legions became strong enough to become a serious threat to the region and to America. China went on to be the biggest arms and materiel supporter to North Vietnam, prolonged the conflict, and contributed significantly to the North's victory and the Communist reunification of the country. 

Donald Trump's hawkish generals advised the same Stone Age policy in America's war with Iran.  Regime change was obviously not enough, they said.  We eliminated the Ayatollah and mutilated his successor, but Iranian rockets keep falling on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the trucial states. Iranian missile silos have been carefully distributed throughout the country and are hidden well underground, so surgical strikes cannot totally eliminate them.  Armed drones are similarly deployed, and despite the best CIA and Mossad intelligence, many remain undetected. 

Iran has shown resilience and no fear.  They not only killed thousands of their own civilians during street protests, but have lashed out at friend and foe alike to show their military power.  It is a hateful, brutal, totalitarian regime which knows only violence; so there is only one way to eliminate the terrorist threat of the Iranian theocracy, say the hawks, and that is total destruction, reducing every official hiding place, every arms facility, every energy stockpile to rubble. 

The problem with total war, say more moderate military chiefs, is that the Iranian people are our allies, unlike the complicit Germans and Japanese in World War II.  We cannot afford to wipe them off the map, nor would we want to. 

So what to do? There isn't a day that goes by that Donald Trump doesn't want to pick up the phone and tell the Armed Services Chief of Staff to pull the trigger and unleash hell, destroy the country, then shelter the refugees and rebuild the country in America's image. 

The same holds true for Gaza and Lebanon.  Hamas has shown itself to be a worthy client of Iran, attacking Israel, arming and rearming itself to continue its avowed extermination of the Jews.  Hezbollah in Lebanon is no different.  They are implacable enemies of Israel, faithful clients of Iran, and have vowed to continue their aggression until the last man standing has fallen.  

Israel has done the needful.  It has not reduced Gaza to rubble, but nearly.  Netanyahu has his hand on the Stone Age trigger and is ready to pull it, eliminate Hamas, its tunnels, its armories, its depots, and its barracks.  There is little hesitation in his war room, for the population like that of Nazi Germany is not only complicit but collaborating.  Blowing the whole place off the face of the earth and making the region safe for Jews and enabling Jewish expansion might not be such a bad idea. 

There seems to be no end to war, and wars have always been fought for the same predictable, expected, familiar reasons - territory, resources, and geopolitical influence, all the international expression of human nature.  From childhood to adulthood, the same ineluctable, irresistible forces for dominance and survival persist. 

What is less widely acknowledged is an attraction to the power and glory of war - the Sturm und Drang, the apocalyptic fires of devastation, the savagery, and immense godlike power of raining death and destruction down on the enemy, seeing a fireball rising to the sky, pillars of black, cumulus smoke, and bits and pieces of the destroyed target spiraling up and up and back down to earth. 

Wars could not happen unless they satisfy some primal urge  It is not enough to say the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were needed to complete a German historic circle; or that the Pope's legions marching across Europe were only to annihilate the Muslim invaders in the Holy Land, that Russia simply needed a warm water port, that Iran felt a Persian destiny to control the Middle East, that the United States feared the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. 

The allure of war is primal, primeval, responding to urges set in ribonucleic acid chains in the first homo sapiens and long before in those genetic sets of the jungle, the ocean, and the veldt. 

So not only are the generals in the war room anxious to use the magnificent store of arms under their control, they must use them.  They are just as programmed to blow things to smithereens as their counterparts in the past. 

One Vietnam War fighter pilot described his experience this way:

There was nothing like it.  I was God, Shiva the Destroyer, a master of the universe flying no more than a few feet  over the treetops, unloading death and destruction, howling in the cockpit over the roar of the engine and the explosions below, dropping napalm and seeing the forest explode in a firestorm with great orange clouds of fire, ascending to 5000 feet, looking down on the smoke and ash and burning, incinerating carpet below.  It was magnificent.

 

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  

Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war until the Biblical nuclear destruction of Japan. This was the apotheosis of war. Atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed them completely in a few minutes of unthinkable power.  Wars of annihilation and Genghis Khan were back.

It was not until Vietnam that the spectacle of a fiery superhuman war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

The Founding Fathers of America were brilliant in their understanding of human nature and therefore wrote a Constitutional provision for civilian oversight of the military.  They understood that if generals had control of a large store of weapons, they would want to use it.  As importantly Jefferson and his colleagues understood that using this military might is a fulfillment of the most ineradicable male desire- to blow things up.  

Just as Hamilton argued for and got a provision in the Constitution for an intermediate legislative body to protect the nation from the will of the rabble, Jefferson insisted upon civilian control of the military - a buffer, a safe zone.  Of course both men are turning over in their graves.  The rabble rules and the military always wins out. 

'How much can we blow up?', Trump was reported to have asked his Joint Chiefs, hoping for 'A lot' as the answer, but modern warfare since WW II has always been political, complex, and often unclear.  'The fog of war' as Clausewitz said, and the President had to listen to opinions all over the spectrum. 

If Iran pisses him off, Trump is likely to unleash hell and be done with the bloody mess; but the days of the Crusades, Genghis Khan, and Hiroshima are long gone.  Still, the red button is still armed and waiting on the President's desk in the Oval Office, and only time will tell.