>From AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15027
Shock and Awe: Guernica Revisited
By Gar Smith, AlterNet
January 27, 2003
Forget Osama. Forget Saddam. The Pentagon's newest target is the city of Baghdad.
U.S. military strategists have announced a plan to pummel Iraq with as many as 800
cruise missiles in the space of two days. Many of
these missiles would rain down on Baghdad, a city of five million people. If George W.
Bush gets the war he wants, Baghdad could
become the 21st century's Guernica.
On April 26, 1937, 25 Nazi bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of bombs and incendiaries on
the peaceful Basque village. Seventy percent
of the town was destroyed and 1,500 people, a third of the population, were killed.
The Pentagon now predicts that the Iraq blitzkrieg could approximate the devastation
of a nuclear explosion. "The sheer size of this
has never been ... contemplated before," one Pentagon strategist boasted to CBS News.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad."
The Pentagon dubbed its cold-blooded attack plan "Shock and Awe," a bizarre
conjunction of trauma and admiration.
The concept of Shock and Awe was first developed by the Pentagon's National Defense
University (NDU) in 1996 as part of the "Rapid
Dominance" strategy. The strategy was first used in Afghanistan. In their 1996 NDU
book, "Shock and Awe," authors Harlan K. Ullman
and James P. Wade wrote of the need to mount an assault with "sufficiently
intimidating and compelling factors to force or otherwise
convince an adversary to accept our will."
With an unsettling air of appreciation, Ullman and Wade invoked the haunting images
from "old photographs and movie or television
screens [depicting] the comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great
bombardments of World War I. Those images and
expressions of shock transcend race, culture and history."
Shock and awe also were the emotions that Americans experienced on Sept. 11, 2001.
Now, like the 9/11 terrorists, Bush and Co. are
planning a similar act of almost unparalleled ferocity a devastating premeditated
attack on a civilian urban population.
Bush seems determined to follow in the footsteps of Hulagu Khan and Tamerlane, the
Mongol warlords who laid bloody waste to Baghdad
in 1258 and 1401.
But destroying Baghdad will not uncover hidden chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
(if, in fact, any exist). Destroying Baghdad
will not capture, topple or kill Saddam Hussein. Shock and Awe's expressed goal is
simple: in the words of Harlan Ullman, to destroy
the Iraqi people "physically, emotionally and psychologically."
Ironically, this was also the goal of the Nazi strategists who destroyed Guernica. The
town had no strategic value as a military
target, but, like Baghdad, it was a cultural and religious center. Guernica was
devastated to terrorize the population and break the
spirit of the Basque resistance.
Surely cruise missiles have been programmed to demolish the Baath Party Headquarters,
presidential palaces and Republican Guard
compounds. But have missiles also been preset to obliterate the al-Qadiriya Shrine,
the Tomb of Imam al-A'dham and the Mosque of
Sheik Abdul Qadir al-Ghailani?
We now know that there was no military need to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaski. The detonations were intended to
demonstrate to the world and to the Soviet Union, especially that the U.S. had a
functioning superweapon. Having sole possession
of "The Bomb" gave Washington the power to dominate post-war world politics.
Similarly, the destruction of Baghdad seems designed to underscore Bush's belligerent
warning to the rest of the world: "You're
either with us or you're against us."
Washington's new National Security Strategy describes an America dominating the world
militarily, politically and economically.
In a report published a month before the U.S. presidential elections, the conservative
Project for the New American Century insisted
on instituting a "global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power
rival, and shaping the international security order
in line with American principles and interests."
This ringing endorsement of hyper-imperialism was co-authored by Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Jeb
Bush, none of whom (with the one exception of Rumsfeld) ever volunteered for military
service.
Today, thousands of citizen volunteers from around the world are converging in Iraq to
stand as nonviolent "human shields" in hopes
of forestalling a U.S. assault. The brave men and women in this international "Peace
Army" include anti-war activists, religious
witnesses, retirees, U.S. military veterans and members of families who lost loved
ones in the September 11 attack.
Mr. Bush repeated
