Читать книгу Governing from the Skies - Thomas Hippler - Страница 8

Tripoli, 1 November 1911. ‘I decided that today I would try to drop bombs from the aeroplane. No one had ever tried such a thing, and if I succeed I shall be happy to have been the first,’ Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father. The engineer from Genoa had obtained his pilot’s wings just at the time that the Italian government decided to embark on the conquest of a colonial empire in Libya. Gavotti’s record to date was limited to an unauthorized flight above the Vatican, which led to his detention for a few days, and to second place in a race between Bologna and Venice. But in late September 1911 things began to hot up in Libya: the Sublime Porte had refused to cede Tripoli and Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Less than a week later, the city fell into the hands of the Italians. As a member of a small ‘airmen’s flotilla’, Gavotti was posted to Africa a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday.

At dawn on 1 November, Gavotti took off in his plane and headed for the Mediterranean. He had no specific mission order, but he did have a definite idea. He made a wide turn above the sea before heading for the small oasis of Aïn Zara, some fifteen kilometres south-east of Tripoli, where he had noticed a troop of Arab fighters on an earlier reconnaissance flight:

I held the joystick with one hand, and with the other I untied the cord that held the cover of the box. I took a bomb from the box, which I placed on my knees. Transferring the joystick to my other hand, with the free one I removed a detonator from the small box. I put it in my mouth. I closed the box, placed the detonator in the bomb and looked down. I was ready. I was about one kilometre from the oasis.

The Ottoman army, caught unawares by the Italian aggression, met with considerable difficulties. So much so that Fethi Bey, the Ottoman military commander of the Tripoli region, decided to withdraw his troops and call on indigenous units to use guerrilla tactics. Gavotti’s task in Libya was to undertake strategic reconnaissance missions and keep the general staff informed of the manoeuvres of the enemy forces. But guerrilla fighters do not act like a regular army: they do not concentrate their forces in the same fashion, and can move among the civilian population like ‘fish in water’. In such conditions, strategic reconnaissance was completely useless and the Italian airmen had to invent new missions for themselves. Hence the initiative of Giulio Gavotti. It would have a long posterity.

Tripoli, 1 November 2011. NATO planes had stopped their bombing a day ago. The air strikes on Libya, which had begun on 19 March, ended on 31 October, one day short of a century since the very first bombing by plane. By a strange historical and geographical coincidence, the bombs launched by the NATO planes fell in the same places as those of Gavotti a hundred years earlier. History repeated itself, seeming to invite us to revisit a century of air bombardments. The historiography of air warfare, which has focused above all on the question of the legitimacy and utility of strategic bombing in the Second World War, finds it hard to take into account the importance of the colonial precedent, most often viewed as simply a ‘dress rehearsal’ before the ‘real war’ between the great powers.¹ Yet the history of air bombing is full of this kind of ‘geographical coincidence’: the regions subjected to such bombing in the inter-war years particularly included Iraq, Syria, and the Indian ‘north-west frontier’: Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan.

What, then, happened on 1 November 1911?

I saw two encampments close to a white building, the first with about two hundred men, the second with some fifty. Just before reaching them I took the bomb in my right hand; I removed the safety pin with my teeth and let the bomb fall from the aircraft. I managed to follow it for a few seconds with my eyes before it disappeared. Soon after, I saw a dark cloud rise from the centre of the smaller camp. I had aimed at the larger one but I was lucky. I was spot on.

When he activated the detonator with his teeth, Gavotti did more than experiment with a new way of launching bombs: he revolutionized warfare. It is only today that we are beginning to measure the scope of the revolution commenced in the Libyan sky. Having left on a reconnaissance mission, Gavotti struck an encampment of fighters. This historical first of dropping a bomb from the air resembled in some respects an artillery action, but with the difference that the forces Gavotti targeted were not officially engaged in battle. Besides, Aïn Zara was not simply a gathering point for potential insurgents: the oasis was also a social and economic system. This was precisely the novelty: by dropping a bomb on Aïn Zara, Gavotti did not just hit a target, he actually constituted a new type of target. A hybrid target, which indifferently mingled civilian and military objectives and, among the latter, regular and irregular forces. In this way Gavotti inaugurated a new way of thinking about and making war, the hybrid and ‘asymmetrical’ wars that have been an obsession ever since.

It is the spectacularly innovative aspect of this event that strategic thinking has focused on: with aircraft it became possible to strike not only armed forces but an entire socioeconomic system. It was in no way surprising, therefore, that air power should have been viewed as a solution to the war of position of 1914–18. The unprecedented development of weaponry in the early years of the century seemed to have ruled out completely any kind of offensive. Faced with the impossibility of breaking the front, aviation made it possible to get round it and strike no longer the military forces deployed but the very sources of their power: industrial production, means of transport, political cohesion, and popular morale. Faced with tactical stalemate on the front, aviation offered the possibility of waging a strategic offensive.

Aerial bombing thus became an essential element of ‘total war’ in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. From Guernica to Dresden, by way of Coventry, Rotterdam, and Brest, European memories of the Second World War are marked by the experience of bombed cities. The ravages of this war are still well anchored in European ‘communicative memory’,² and recent historiography has conducted important work, particularly on the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan. This chapter in the history of air warfare had long been avoided, seeming as it did to mark a dilemma in terms of historiographical ethics: was it permissible to place at the centre of analysis the deliberate attack on German civilians during the Second World War? The history of air warfare was thus caught in a normative cul-de-sac.

To escape from this means remembering Bourdieu’s postulate that the fundamental theoretical operation in social sciences lies in the definition of the object.³ We can note therefore that the normative question surreptitiously introduces a theoretical decision that is anything but anodyne: to situate strategic bombing solely in the context of total war in Europe. Yet bombing from the air did not start in Europe but in the Libyan desert, before striking the Middle East, Waziristan, Africa, the Philippines, and Nicaragua. Before reaching the centre, bombing was experimented with and perfected on the periphery of the world system; before European cities were transformed into fields of ruins, there was the colonial matrix of total war.

Although it was only in the 1920s that the systematic destruction of socio-economic resources was integrated into the corpus of military doctrine, it was already virtually present in the bombing of Aïn Zara. Air war thus corroborates Hannah Arendt’s thesis that colonialism provided the model for totalitarianism, and particularly for the totalization of war. In other words, air bombing does not relate just to the memory of European peoples, it forms an essential chapter of what is nowadays called ‘global history’. This approach was born from an idea that is simple in appearance: that the world is one, and that everything that happens in one part of the globe inevitably has effects on the ‘world system’ as a whole. To adopt a ‘global’ perspective also implies contextualizing differently the value judgements that underlie any theoretical analysis.⁴

Accordingly, far from beginning with the Second World War, air strikes were already part of the arsenal deployed by all the great powers in the colonies. The Royal Air Force promised to render the same service as ground forces but at lower cost: to tame the anti-colonial revolts that were shaking these territories. The concept of ‘police bombing’ was born. Designed to restore order, air strikes were no longer a practice of warfare, but rather one of ‘policing’, even ‘imperial policing’: they were practised not within the frontiers of a state, but on a global scale, as a means of governing the world. The order thus imposed was not that of a particular political sovereignty, but rather that of an entire world system. This book proposes to follow the evolution of this government of the world, from the early twentieth century through to today, taking as its guiding threat the privileged instrument of this: air bombing with ‘police’ objectives.

‘Police bombing’ was employed first of all in Iraq. Initially the method chosen was that of a man-hunt, machine-gunning anti-colonial fighters from the plane. But as insurgents often managed to hide, the airmen, out of frustration, aimed their machine guns at cattle. This gave rise to a brilliant idea: instead of hunting down rebels, cut off their resources; and if they cannot be killed, make them die anyway, from hunger, thirst, or disease. This strategic diagnosis was thus not very different from what would be applied in Europe, where, rather than attacking the enemy directly, the preference was to attack the sources of his power. In both cases, the approach is indirect. Maritime blockade had already played a major role in the collapse of the Central Powers during the First World War, and the Royal Air Force now invented by analogy the concept of ‘air blockade’. Operations began with several days of heavy bombardment. The intensity of the attacks then diminished, but remained sufficiently strong to keep the insurgent tribes away from their villages, fields, pasturage, and water sources. The objective of the bombing was to destroy the social and economic life of rebel populations, in order to ‘dry up’ the milieu in which the insurgents waged their combat.

The history of warfare in the twentieth century was marked by a radical transformation in the relationship between opposing forces, of which ‘police bombing’ was the most manifest sign. In the classic conception of war, occupation of territory is in both senses the end of military action. The victor occupies the territory of the vanquished, appropriates it, and pacifies it. As executive sovereign, he establishes a relationship of protection and obedience with the civilian population. War by air bombing undoes this connection. Occupation of the ground is no longer an objective, since bombing is precisely designed as a substitute for occupation. By the same token, occupation no longer means an end to war. The air force is the favoured arm of the ‘endless’ wars we know today, wars that do not speak their name, but are presented simply as police operations on the world scale.

The colonized peoples were the target of the first air attacks, using either bombs, machine guns or poison gas. It was not insurgents that these aimed at but rather whole populations, and through them an entire social and economic structure. In this sense, such practices reflect the dominant approach in ‘small wars’, which, as opposed to ‘real’ wars, in which one state opposes another, aims not to defeat an army but to terrorize a population. From this point of view, colonial air attack simply extended existing practices, attacking civilian populations to punish them collectively, or even exterminate them. With the advent of aviation, however, the principles of ‘small’ wars could be applied to major warfare. This would no longer be a matter of striking enemy armies, but rather peoples, exactly as had been the habit in the colonies.

How should we understand this extension of colonial practices to the world population as a whole? A comparison between air strategies on the colonial periphery and in Europe brings a response that is both obvious and disturbing: in both cases, war is the business of a whole people and no longer simply a matter for the state, as a transcendent entity in relation to its citizens. War is ‘democratized’: if all citizens take part in the war effort, in one way or another, it is absurd to target only those who wield arms and spare those who make possible the use of these by their everyday work. Death in war is no longer the aristocratic privilege of the warrior; it is ‘democratized’ and becomes accessible to all.

Furthermore, since the people now have the possibility of influencing the military actions of their governments, whether electorally or by strikes, it would be doubly illogical to spare them. Civilians are as important as soldiers in the war effort, and as citizens, they collectively constitute the sovereign against whom war is waged. In a democracy, the population is at the same time an active part of the war effort and responsible for the actions of the government. The bomb launched from a plane is in a sense the democratic weapon par excellence: it can strike each and every one, omnes et singulatim, the people and the citizen. With the qualification that some are more a part of this ‘people’ than others, given that class differentiation holds a determining place in air strategy. Anyone may be a potential target, but it is workers above all who are singled out, for reasons both technological and political.

Working-class districts, more densely populated than the bourgeois quarters and less well protected against fire, were particularly suited to the incendiary bombs dropped in the Second World War. On top of such technical considerations, air strategy was guided by the idea that the working class, a key segment of the war effort, was also the least integrated part of the population politically. Behind the strategy of the burned-out city, therefore, lay a ‘revolutionary’ perspective, whose ultimate aim was to trigger a working-class revolt against the existing government. If war had become the business of the ‘people’, then targeting the workers revealed the constitutive ambivalence of this ‘people’. Who were actually being targeted? The collective sovereign, that unified political body that is the subject of politics? Or, on the contrary, the ‘common people’, those fringes of the population who can only be the object of politics?

If the object of air war is that paradoxical entity, the democratic ‘people’ – both unified political body and force of social destabilization, collective sovereign and ‘populace’ – this involves two complementary strategies towards this object, one offensive and the other defensive. On the offensive side, the enemy people are bombed in order to destroy their unity with a view to releasing the forces of anarchy and revolt. In Europe, the people were essentially conceived by reference to the state, their form of political organization. Bombing the people meant attacking the state or, more precisely, acting so that the people would rise against the state. Banking on the lack of coincidence between people and state, the air offensive aims to undo the unity of the body politic and reduce it to the status of a ‘populace’. The conclusion that forces itself on us is that national war in the strict sense never existed, owing to the fact that, ever since its invention with the wars of the French Revolution, war between nations has always hidden a class war. The uncertainty about the nature of the ‘people’ to bomb corresponds precisely to this concealed war that works on a nation from within.

Strategists were well aware of this duality, which is why their doctrines of air offensive were systematically coupled with a defensive strategy. If the object, on the offensive level, was to undo the unity between people and state, the policy of anti-aircraft defence aimed to transform the ‘populace’ into a unified body politic, to actively construct the moral and political unity of a people. A whole series of measures were taken in Europe with a view to strengthening the coherence of the nationalized peoples. The air-raid shelter became the place where the unity of people and state was materially elaborated, but the social system of the bunker could not function without a political and social scaffolding, designed to discipline and train the population and thus integrate them into the nationalized political edifice.

Among these measures, that of ‘welfare’ had pride of place, a social and democratic state taking responsibility for the life and well-being of the people. The symmetry between life and death, social state and air bombing, biopolitics and ‘thanatopolitics’, found its perfect expression in the Rosinenbomber, the ‘candy bomber’ (literally ‘raisin bomber’) exhibited at the former Berlin airport of Tempelhof to commemorate the air bridge of 1948–49. West Berlin, reduced to ruins by Anglo-American bombing, was supplied by air for a whole year. The Allied pilots, viewed until 1945 as ‘air terrorists’, were hailed as saviours three years later. Killing with fire bombs or maintaining life by transporting food and fuel; or, what comes to the same thing, making a statized people or unmaking them by reducing them to the state of a populace.

This unstable dualism between people and state was not found in colonial bombing, which was thus both a clearer and a more ‘modern’ scenario than the massive destruction of certain European cities. Clearer, because in the colonies there was quite simply no state apparatus that could be targeted. But above all, the strategy was more ‘modern’, inasmuch as combatting insurgent groups and their social, economic, and ecological environment directly connected with the global configuration, without the mediation of the nation state. As we shall see, as early as 1864, Victor Hugo formulated the hope that air power would bring universal peace; then H. G. Wells, a Fabian socialist and member of the League for Peace during the First World War, championed a ‘world state’ capable of intervening militarily everywhere in the world in case of manifest disorder.⁵ And, perhaps more surprising, the Italian general Giulio Douhet was not just content to recommend attacking civilian populations from the air using bombs and toxic gas, but championed at the same time a key idea of pacifism, that of an ‘international tribunal’ that would prevent war by submitting its decisions to sanction by air forces.⁶

‘Pilot as policeman, bomb as baton’ – this is where the colonial practice of police bombing links up with humanist cosmopolitism.⁷ While the colonial project is today largely discredited, the idea of a military air force with cosmopolitical ends continues to prosper, so much so that it is found in Article 45 of the United Nations charter: ‘Members shall hold immediately available national air-force contingents for combined international enforcement action.’ Air strikes as not only a ‘democratic’ practice, but also humanist, cosmopolitan, and even pacifist?

In any case, cosmopolitism, as represented at the institutional level by the United Nations, leads us back to our point of departure: Libya. As distinct from the air strikes of 1911, those of 2011 were motivated not by a ‘civilizing mission’ but by humanitarian reasons, precisely spelled out by a Security Council resolution. They pertain therefore to what the theorist of ‘new wars’, Mary Kaldor, has called ‘cosmopolitical law enforcement’, designed to tackle forces of fragmentation, the erosion of state power, ‘identity politics’, and ‘asymmetrical wars’.⁸ And it is precisely these elements that connect the Libyan experience of 1911 with that of 2011: all the factors that the ‘new wars’ theorists present as bound up with globalization were in fact already at work in colonial ‘police bombing’.

In this way, the history of aerial bombing converges with the major themes of twentieth-century history: the nationalization of societies and war; democracy and totalitarianism; colonialism and decolonization; Third Worldism and globalization; the social state and its decline in the face of neoliberalism. From this point of view, the history of aerial bombing offers a point of entry, an ‘Ansatzpunkt’ such as Erich Auerbach demanded for a philological approach to world literature, into writing a global history of the twentieth century: ‘a particular phenomenon, the best delimited, the most concrete possible’,⁹ yet one that makes it possible, in the manner of a transverse section, to draw together some of the salient characteristics of this century. In short, bombing functions as the starting point of a global history. Its ambition is not encyclopaedic, and the history presented here does not claim to be in any way exhaustive. Yet it presents a series of examples that seem particularly instructive for our understanding of the developments in the world system over the course of the past century.

Our wars are increasingly hybrid, conflating civilian and military aspects, regular and irregular fighters. They are also becoming increasingly asymmetrical on the levels of technology and ‘morale’. Air strikes, which are unilateral by nature, are situated beyond the classic combat that opposes two equal adversaries. And, despite the very complimentary attributes conferred on it (aviation as the weapon of civilization, perpetual peace, cosmopolitism, and the airman as a knight of the skies), nothing is less chivalrous than air war, which substitutes unilateral strike for combat, and transforms the adversary into a nuisance to be eliminated. We can understand, however, why the strategist Edward Luttwak should see it as the privileged instrument of his ‘post-heroic’ war: it has no victims (in the ranks of the justiciars), it eliminates the problem of mobilization and, at the same stroke, makes it possible to dispense with democratic debate.¹⁰ In a word, this war is no longer a war but a police operation. The bomb is not the sword of the knight of the sky, but the deadly truncheon of the global cop.

Just as the activities of police and military forces are increasingly less disassociated from one another, so the distinction between the citizen and the enemy to be killed also tends to be effaced. The targeted assassination of the Islamist Anwar al-Aulaqi offers a good example of this. While it was illegal to bug his phone without the authorization of a judge, this US citizen could be killed by a drone on 30 September 2011 without any legal process or the least judicial control, simply on the order of the president of the United States. The evolution of air warfare thus reveals to the world the convergence between the ‘advances’ of international law and the pure violence of the state.