Empire Notes

I’ve recently had the dubious pleasure of reading the 9/11 commission’s 500-page report, available in book form and on the Web.

The report points out that, far from some generalized “war on terrorism,” what we are faced with is a war on al-Qaeda and groups of similar ideology and tactics. In particular, in their view, the United States has a very clear and well-defined enemy, if one that is harder to track down and isolate than the armies of nation-states.

And, says the commission, the enemy is composed of evildoers. In the introduction, the commissioners say, “We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless.” One sentence later, they add, “It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. Collateral damage is not in its lexicon.”

You’ve all heard this kind of reasoning – on the left, from Richard Falk, who opposes some U.S. wars but supported the one in Afghanistan as a war against “apocalyptic terrorism." Basically, if for no other reason, this war is right because the other side has such great “hatred for innocent life,” as George Bush would put it.

And I don’t want to minimize the threat from jihadi terrorists, from Bali to Madrid. But I’ll tell you what I think of when I hear about complete lack of respect for human life.

I must have been about nine or ten when I read my first book about the Manhattan Project, and I learned that, when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the altitude at which it was set to explode was calculated to maximize the damage. You see, if the bomb explodes too close to the ground, then some of the blast is shielded by the ground and the range of destruction is less. And if it explodes too high up, then the force is attenuated by the time it hits the target. So they carefully calculated the exact right height at which it should explode in order to maximize the killing.

Just as in the statement of the 9/11 commission, no distinction was made between military and civilian targets. Harry Truman even had the gall to say, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.” Actually the entire reason that Hiroshima was selected was that it had so little military value that it had suffered virtually no bombing to that point and would give a good standard for judging the bomb’s destructive capacity.

People who are not Americans do not need detailed explanations of why the Hiroshima bombing was a deeply immoral act. For the rest of you, there is Gar Alperovitz’s magisterial work, “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb,” which documents how the United States knew that Japan would have surrendered without the bomb or an invasion, as well as the creation of the standard myth about how the bombing saved lives.

Three days later, fifty-nine years ago today, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, perhaps the single most gratuitous act of mass slaughter and mass terrorism in human history.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to shed light on issues that face us today, but unfortunately we have failed to learn the lessons they should have taught us. The Bush administration is currently attempting to start a new nuclear arms race. The racism that is at the heart of the attempt to revive colonialism in Iraq, and of its failure, was centrally entwined in the Greatest Generation’s Good War as well. A poll conducted in December 1944 had 13% of Americans saying that all Japanese should be exterminated after the war was over. Most of all we still, most of us, refuse to understand that apocalyptic terrorism can be and is carried out by human beings who look much like us.

As Alperovitz says at the end of the introduction to his book, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki – now – I think, have very little to do with the past. How we choose to deal, with them, I believe, may have everything to do with the future.”