Written by Thickney   

The Orlando mass murder has triggered yet another round of argument as to what constitutes terrorism, what motivates it, and how one stops it. It’s not at all clear from initial information that Omar Mateen would even fall into this category, defined typically as “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” That standard definition of terrorism does, however, certainly include some of the more important foreign policy and military decisions made by the U.S. government over the past three generations. A useful starting place would be World War II.
Throughout most the war, the United States had refused to conduct “area bombing” – the massive, largely indiscriminate aerial bombardment of entire cities. This had been the approach, however, of the British government. Under the influence of Frederick Lindemann (an Oxford professor and a Viscount, who had never been close to a warzone), Winston Churchill authorized the RAF to destroy entire German cities. The best known of these was Dresden, a city of almost no military value, which was practically burned to the ground along with 100,000 of its residents in a massive RAF raid (the American contribution coming only the morning after – a limited attack on the city’s railroad yards.) The theory behind area bombing was that it would so frighten and demoralize the population that they would turn against their own government at some level or at least become less useful as war production worker bees. Albert Speer, head of German war production during many of these bombings, said that it actually energized the workforce – they saw German victory as the only way of staving off an apparently monstrous enemy willing to burn them and their children as they slept. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey produced after the war had much the same conclusion and reflected American military thinking at the time: with bombers and aircrews bound to be lost in missions, best to focus their attacks on key industrial/military targets. Again, Speer corroborated this, explaining afterward that the war had really ended in July of 1944: that month American bombers finished decimating Germany’s oil refineries and petrochemical plants, especially those used for making aircraft fuel.
But things went differently in Japan. It was only toward the start of 1945 that the Japanese home islands were within range of large-scale American bombing. At that time, targeting policy for the Army Air Force was taken over by the Committee of Operations
Analysts (COA), a largely civilian group that included Wall Street Bankers Thomas Lamont and Elihu Root Jr. By the summer of 1944 the COA was planning air operations against mainland Japan, recommending targets be chosen based on, “their compactness and combustibility, rather than for their economic or strategic importance.” In 1940 Vannevar Bush, the M.I.T. professor then heading the Carnegie Institute, had formed the National Defense Resource Council (NDRC) and in October, 1944 it calculated how many incendiary bombs were required to destroy Japan’s two dozen largest cities. Brig. Gen. Haywood Hansell, Air Force head Hap Arnold’s Chief of Staff, was an advocate of precision bombing and had shown results in his late 1944 raids against aircraft plants in Tokyo. Nonetheless he was ordered to fire-bomb Nagoya in January, 1945 and due to his continued opposition he was replaced by Gen. Curtis LeMay. On the night of May 9, 1945 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the Tokyo bombing, which LeMay followed up with area bombing of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe; many of the other cities were hit in a similar fashion.
The final attack in this series was, of course, the August 1945 dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was done despite assurances from all the relevant military commanders that their conventional strategy had worked: the island-hopping campaign in the SW Pacific had cut Japan off from necessary raw materials and the subsequent naval blockade of her home islands had ended her capacity to wage war. This resulted in all of these top-level officers opposing the nuclear attack: Gen Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Chester Nimitz, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest King, Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold, Strategic Air Forces chief Carl Spaatz, George Kenney (commander of air forces in the SW Pacific), and Chief of Staff Adm. William Leahy. Most expressed an opposition based on military as well as moral grounds, as demonstrated by Leahy’s comments: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it we had adopted the ethical standards common to barbarians in the dark ages.” He said later, “I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by killing women and children.”
But the generals and admirals had all been overruled by the political leaders. The use of atomic bombs was supported by President Truman along with his Secretary of State James Byrnes and War Secretary Henry Stimson. In discussing their use, the topic of the military situation in Japan had hardly arisen. It was another nation that concerned them. Stimson worried out loud that the July 1 meeting of Truman, Churchill,and Stalin would take place before the scheduled atomic bomb test, saying, “it seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy without having your master card in your hand,” and this delayed the Potsdam Conference until the first A-bomb detonation in New Mexico. Before the Conference Truman said of the atomic bomb: “If it explodes, as I think it will . . . I will certainly have a hammer on those boys.” Churchill said of the bomb, “We now have something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians.” By January, 1949 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had written up Plan Trojan, calling for the annihilation of seventy Russian cities in a nuclear first strike; but Russia’s first successful detonation of its own atomic bomb shortly thereafter made these plans moot. As for the end of WWII: American political leaders, against the advice of all relevant military commanders, conducted a massive attack on a civilian population for the purposes of influencing the political behavior of a third party. There is a word for such tactics.
And this brand of large caliber terrorism became the norm in the post-war period. Of great assistance to Gen. Curtis LeMay in carrying out his fire-bombing of Japan in 1945 was his statistical control officer, a bright young Harvard grad named Robert McNamara. After the war and a number of years as a top executive at the Ford Motor Company, McNamara was tapped in 1960 by President-elect Kennedy to serve as his Defense Secretary, a post he would hold until 1968. The focus during his tenure was, of course, the Vietnam War. Unlike their WWII-era predecessors, McNamara and his colleagues were unable to outline any strategic objectives forming a pathway to victory (in a number of reports he commissioned, it was pointed out that Vietnam was a rural society with little industry or other targets of military value.) In place of actual military strategy, the Kennedy-Johnson men substituted a three pronged approach: increase of enemy body count (sometimes called “production”), the “winning of hearts and minds” of the native population, and, above all, the demonstration of America’s will to keep inflicting punishment until its demands were met by the Communist government in the North.
The body count-oriented side of this was typified by the Strategic Hamlet campaign. Rural Vietnamese were moved from their homes into synthetic villages to be separated from the Communist-backed Viet Cong guerillas. Any who remained outside these hamlets were considered enemy combatants and thus all those areas were made free-fire zones (mainly for artillery and air strikes) in which each corpse was dutifully tallied as an enemy casualty. This was accompanied by air strikes against power stations and the country’s water infrastructure (dikes, dams, levees), which of course threatened food production. Mass civilian death, the destruction of whole villages and most civilian infrastructure, and large-scale deforestation resulted. This in turn gave rise to large-scale migration of civilians to the cities of South Vietnam, a venue seen as more suitable for the “hearts and minds” component of the conflict than the hamlets.
Walt Rostow, State Department official and key war planner, had marveled at the possibility of “television sets in thatch huts,” but Saigon and the other major cities became the actual sites for this social experiment, as described by then State Department consultant Samuel P. Huntington:

For if the “direct application of mechanical and conventional power,” takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operate. The Maoist-inspired rural revolution in undercut by the American-inspired urban revolution . . . The rural poor, on the other hand, may well find life in the city more attractive and comfortable than their previous existence in the countryside. The urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a getaway to a new and better way of life. For some poor migrants, the wartime urban boom has made possible incomes five times those which they had in the countryside.

The most notable income increases came to those involved in prostitution, drug trafficking, and other black market activities that dramatically increased. In addition to minimal food, housing, and medical care for incoming rural refugees, the U.S. government made sure to import sufficient numbers of motorcycles, stereos, televisions, and other modern consumer goods to support this “urban revolution.” The recipients were strangely lacking in gratitude though, as one RAND Corporation study found that 75% expressed hatred for the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies, a result already predicted in another study commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara after the initial bombing campaign in 1965 that read in part:

This tendency, in turn, seems to reflect a general failure to appreciate the fact, well-documented in the historical and social scientific literature, that a direct, frontal attack on a society tends to strengthen the social fabric of the nation, to increase popular support of the existing government, to improve the determination of both the leadership and the populace to fight back, to induce a variety of protective measures that reduce the society’s vulnerability to future attack, and to develop an increased capacity for quick repair and restoration of essential functions.

The whole trajectory of American isolation/concentration of Vietnam’s rural population accompanied by massive aerial bombardment against them, eventually leading to a mass exodus to the major cities where they were met with America’s boundless generosity with consumer electronics coexisted with the expectation among many that they would be won over by this. Even a cat or dog will shy away from a man offering treats if he has previously abused them – American strategy therefore assumed a level of thinking among Vietnamese somewhere below that of house pets.
The bombing conducted against North Vietnam was more finely calibrated. Increased movement of men and material southward via the Ho Chi Minh Trail was met by increased bombing against the North. Intense bombing campaigns also preceded any scheduled or potential diplomatic conferences, typified by the so-called Christmas Bombing in December of 1972 preceding the Paris Peace Conference. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy had first outlined this tactic of “sustained reprisals” in order to show that the U.S. leaders, “have the will and force and determination to take the necessary action and stay the course.” This was expounded upon further by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor:

What seems to be lacking is an agreed program covering several weeks which will combine the factors, frequency, weight, and location of attack into a rational pattern which will convince the leaders in Hanoi that we are on a dynamic schedule which will not remain static in a narrow zone far removed from them and the sources of their power but which is a moving growing threat which cannot be ignored.

This kind of high-explosives Morse code to Hanoi was continued under President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger, who had written as far back as 1957 in his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy on the prospect of waging war in the Third World: “Strategic doctrine must never lose sight that its purpose is to affect the will of the enemy, not to destroy him, and that we can be limited only by presenting the enemy with an unfavorable calculus of risks.” Nixon added his own embellishment to this train of thought with the so-called “Mad Man Theory” – the notion that making Vietnam, as well as their Russian and Chinese sponsors, think he was unhinged enough to do anything (including using nuclear weapons), would give the U.S. enhanced diplomatic bargaining power to achieve its goals.
After the U.S. lost in Vietnam, military intervention abroad continued but on a less spectacular scale as far as the deployment of conventional forces went. President Ronald Reagan and his top Pentagon officials (many of them forming the nucleus of what came to be called the “Neoconservatives”) decried any reluctance to use overwhelming armed force. They referred to this reluctance as the “Vietnam Syndrome.” An opportunity for such a large offensive came during the tenure of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, in the form of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Iraq, along with Syria and Libya, were secular Arab nationalist states that had enjoyed good relations (including military purchases) with the Soviet Union. The American response consisted of sending a large ground force (150,000 troops) and conducting a major bombing campaign, the main result of which was the near total destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure (especially its electrical grid and water treatment facilities.) As this took place, President Bush exclaimed to advisors, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”
Throughout the remainder of the Bush presidency and that of Bill Clinton, there remained in place stringent economic sanctions against Iraq (what was once referred to as a blockade.) This prevented sufficient imports of food, medicine, and the machinery and spare parts required to repair the destroyed infrastructure. The predictable result was mass civilian death from malnutrition and disease (especially water-borne illnesses.) This was done supposedly to “contain Saddam” or “destabilize the regime” despite the fact that his government remained firmly in place and was alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction. When asked directly about this state of affairs (including estimates of half a million dead Iraqi children due to sanctions) America’s Ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, in 1996 told her interviewer on television that “we think the price is worth it.” But it’s unclear what all this achieved beyond making Iraq a continuing object lesson of what happened to any nation that ran afoul of the American government.
Albright had already advocated for American military intervention into the Yugoslavian civil war – a multi-sided bloodbath involving a neo-fascist Croatian leadership, a Bosnian Muslim government that attracted support from foreign jihadist radicals, and a genocidal Serbian regime. America seemed to have no dog in the fight except for the fact that Serbia was one of Russia’s few Eastern European allies. At a 1993 meeting with Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell (who had been a key planner of the 1991 war against Iraq) Albright argued against the general in favor of intervention: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" As Powell, a decorated Vietnam veteran, later recounted, "I thought I would have an aneurysm." As Secretary of State in the late 90’s, Albright and others successfully convinced President Clinton to launch a bombing campaign against Serbia.
These measures, especially in the Middle East, were not enough for the Neoconservatives, then out of government. In 1996, David Wurmser, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle presented a strategy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It called for regime change in Iraq as a way of “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Syria was a target because it “challenges Israel on Lebanese soil,” mainly by (along with Iran) supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah. Wurmser wrote in a follow-up document “Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant” that, “…the battle over Iraq represents a desperate attempt by residual Soviet bloc allies in the Middle East to block the extension into the Middle East of the impending collapse that the rest of the Soviet bloc faced in 1989.”
These strategists and other Neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz (the top two officials in George H.W. Bush’s Pentagon) returned to power in 2001 under President George W. Bush and immediately began planning the next Iraq invasion. One of ideas they adopted as part of this effort was the aerial bombardment-intensive notion of “Shock and Awe.” The doctrine was written by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in 1996 for the National Defense University of the United States and sought, "to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe." Although the authors claimed that the need to "minimize civilian casualties, loss of life, and collateral damage" is a "political sensitivity which needs to be understood up front,” their doctrine of rapid dominance requires the capability to disrupt "means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure", and, in practice, "the appropriate balance of Shock and Awe must cause... the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of the adversary's society or render his ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction.” Using as an example a theoretical invasion of Iraq 20 years after Operation Desert Storm, the authors claimed, "Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure and the shutdown and control of the flow of all vital information and associated commerce so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.”
In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 commencement of the Syrian civil war, large portions of both nations descended into bloody chaos to the benefit of radical Islamic forces. This did nothing to dissuade officials in the Obama Administration from advocating assistance to Syrian rebels with ties to those very jihadist forces, whose elimination was supposedly the whole rationale for American military involvement in the region since 2001. Simultaneously, many were also arguing for military aid to Ukraine after a January, 2014 coup led to a civil war against Russian-backed rebels in the eastern part of that country. In an April 23, 2014 Op-Ed for CNBC “Stopping Russia Starts in Syria,” Anne-Marie Slaughter (formerly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s head of policy planning) wrote:

The solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.
. . . Obama took office with the aim of ending wars, not starting them. But if the US meets bullets with words, tyrants will draw their own conclusions. So will allies; Japan, for example, is now wondering how the US will respond should China manufacture a crisis over the disputed Senkaku Islands.
. . . Striking Syria might not end the civil war there, but it could prevent the eruption of a new one in Ukraine.

Quite apart from any moral considerations of inflicting massive casualties on civilians, American foreign policy and military planners since 1945 have seemingly not considered whether any of these diplomacy-through-fear initiatives have actually accomplished any of the things they were supposed to. American use of atomic weapons did nothing to dissuade Stalin from continuing Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, or from pushing Korea into war. American carpet-bombing of Southeast Asia never made the leaders in Hanoi think twice about continuing what they regarded as a war of national liberation. Repeated incursions into the Muslim world have substantially increased the territory held and power exercised by radical jihadist forces. Global saber-rattling and a major military (especially naval) build-up around China’s borders have seemingly affected that nation’s behavior not a bit; ditto for Russia’s reaction to American expansion of NATO and support of hostile nations on her border. And why should these outcomes have been otherwise? We are considering the peoples who have faced Hitler’s exterminations, Stalin’s gulags and purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the depredations of European and Japanese Imperialism. Do the men and women in Washington really have something in their terrorist tool box to outdo all of that?