Air Strikes Against the #IslamicState

The Law of Futility

By Binoy Kampmark

War is a dirty, unforgiving business.  It is not rendered clean by remote deployments and orders executed at a distance from seemingly safe areas.  It takes lives, inflicts unspeakable harm, and rarely brings smiles to those who suffer it. But the members of the US-led coalition currently involved in striking Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq would have you think otherwise.  They give the impression that clean distances are golden, and air strikes will have their intended “degrading” effect.  Therein lies the message about the false salvation of machinery – the technological panacea that rarely does what it is meant to.

The notion that air power would win the day has been something of a fetish for enthusiasts, both of the prophetic and practising sort.  It prophetically concerned H. G. Wells in The War in the Air(1908).  It enraptured Britain’s blood lusting Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris during World War II, who believed in characteristically delusional fashion that his death sowing fleets won the war in exclusive fashion.  Curtis “Demon” Le May fronted as the US equivalent, instrumental behind the striking of sixty-four Japanese cities between March and August 1945 that killed around 330,000 people.  The doctrinal holy water, however, came from the font of the US Strategic Bombing Survey.