Iraq: Why 'Shock and Awe' targeted shopping malls

July 19, 2005 8:19 | by William Van Wagenen

Driving through Baghdad during my assignment here in the last month has allowed me to see the destruction caused by the aerial bombardment that preceded the U.S. invasion in 2003. A bombed out government-run shopping mall, which resembled the huge Wal-Mart stores back home in the States, struck me as odd. Curious as to whether the bombing of this shopping mall had been an accident, I asked our driver whether any other malls had been bombed. He simply laughed and said, "Many!" He later showed us several other shopping malls around Baghdad that U.S. forces had bombed. We noticed that the bombing of the Rashid market in downtown Baghdad was so precise that no other buildings next to it, including a mosque, seemed to have suffered damage.

Why did the U.S. bother to bomb markets and shopping malls? The logic of targeting civilian infrastructure appears in the book from which the Bush Administration drew its bombing strategy in 2003. Military researchers at the National Defense University wrote Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996. The text suggested applying U.S. military "resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist."

Through Shock and Awe, the authors hoped that "the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese" would result. President Bush responded enthusiastically to the concept of "Shock and Awe" when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld introduced it to him in the lead up to the war

Fortunately, U.S. military planners decided not to bomb Iraq's civilian infrastructure to the extent they did in the Gulf War in 1991, when Iraq's power stations were among the primary U.S. targets In 1991, the aimof the U.S. was to destroy Iraq and wait for one of Saddam's "Sunni henchman" to overthrow him. The U.S. could then absolve itself of responsibility and let Saddam Hussein deal with the war's horrific aftermath.

Despite this restraint, the effect of the 2003 bombing on Iraqis was still horrendous. A study by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that some 100,000 Iraqis have died as result of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation, primarily due to U.S./U.K. bombing . In Palestine, I watched the coverage of the U.S. Invasion on Al-Jazeera. Each morning the network broadcast gruesome scenes of dead women and children, victims of the U.S. bombing each night before.

As a war against Iran may be upon us in the coming years, we need to keep in mind the effects of U.S. military tactics on civilian populations. Targeting civilians is still terrorism, whether undertaken for the

best of motives or the worst.

William van Wagenen is in Iraq as part of a team from the US pacifist group Christian Peacemaker Teams.

See also



http://www.spectrezine.org/MiddleEast/iraq5.htm http://www.spectrezine.org/MiddleEast/Addington12.htm