[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Car Bomb's Brilliant Future

[Bill Totten]

by Vijay Prashad

ZNet (December 24 2007)


The first car bomb exploded on Wall Street. It was set there by an
Italian American anarchist, Mario Buda, in solidarity with Sacco and
Vanzetti. Forty people died on that September 1920 day, and the assassin
fled the country for his native Italy. J P Morgan's son was injured, and
Joseph Kennedy was shaken up. Nonetheless, writes Mike Davis in his
catalogue history (Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Verso,
2007), "a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap
metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the
inner sanctum of American capitalism".

Terror is a peculiar sensation. It scars us with the feeling that our
lives can prematurely end, and that things we hold dear can be destroyed
in moments. That feeling corrodes one's sense of security, and it is not
easy to wash away. Anyone who has experienced any form of trauma knows
what this feels like: it can be debilitating. Recovery is not as easy as
it is made out to be.

Naomi Klein's encyclopedic new book (The Shock Doctrine, Metropolitan,
2007) shows how a group of deceitful men such as Milton Friedman and his
Chicago Boys figured out how to use this trauma to their ends. If a
society is sufficiently shocked by an event of terror, it will be so
shaken up that a few prepared men can easily push through a regime of
order (however authoritarian) to give a feeling of security, while it
breaks down all institutions won by the people for their wellbeing. The
test case of Chile (1973) occupies Klein, but not for long. There are
too many societies that are victim of shock therapy, and each of them
teaches us something different about how terror is used by certain
sections to their benefit.

After 911, a shocking incident in each of its meanings, the US
government pledged not only to go after those who had conducted the
event (endless war), but also to better protect the American people. The
government now spends tens of billions of dollars on homeland security
(the National Priorities Project shows that whereas the Department of
Homeland Security spends $43 billion, the government-wide homeland
security expenditure is $58 billion, with some overlap between the two).
Some of it on senseless projects. The two thousand residents of
Dillingham, Alaska, for instance, should now feel safer with eighty
surveillance cameras (cost: $202,200), and the good people at the
Kentucky Office of Charitable Gaming should feel better for the $36,000
slated to "prevent terrorists from trying to raise money for their plots
at the state's bingo halls". These are easy to pick out from the
thousands of disbursements. It is harder to figure out which targets are
more plausible.

In 2003, the White House produced a National Strategy for the Physical
Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. The document
listed specific sites that needed to be defended. The numbers are
startling: 137 million postal and shipping sites, two million farms,
250,000 defense firms, 167,000 gas stations, 87,000 food processing
plants, 80,000 dams, 66,000 chemical plants, 3000 government facilities,
440 skyscrapers and on. Why some gas stations are listed and not others
raises the kind of bogus flag that befuddles bureaucrats. But that's
should not be the main issue under deliberation.

The main problem is whether it is possible to secure such a vast
territory, and its enormous footprint across the planet, from those who
are schooled in the arts of asymmetric warfare. A suicide bomber walks
into a Citibank office in Jakarta, or a car bomb explodes next to a US
convoy in Baghdad, or indeed a depressed kid kills a score of people in
a rural US high school. It is possible to stop each of these acts, but
only with a surveillance and interdiction apparatus that is enormous. In
Borges' "Of Exactitude in Science" he writes of an empire's obsession
with cartography, of making the perfect map. "In the course of Time,
these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as
the Empire and that coincided with it point for point". For the US, this
obsession is not so much with maps as with law enforcement: surveillance
to maintain order. If attacks will come anywhere, then everything must
be watched, and protected. This is impossible. A pair with guns and a
car terrorized Washington, DC in October 2002 (the "beltwar snipers
attacks"); they had no connection to al-Qaeda and nothing that would
have warned the FBI of an impending terror campaign. To believe that we
can actually spend our way into an armed safety is to hide in a gated
community (which is also porous for example, Baghdad's Green Zone
receives its share of mortar attacks).

Enter the RAND Corporation. Several months ago, its researchers produced
a report ("Exploring Terrorist Targeting Preferences", authored by
Martin Libicki, Peter Chalk and Melanie Sisson) that tried to delineate
a procedure to see how al-Qaeda will come up with its targets. Looking
at all the previous attacks, and looking at al-Qaeda's strategy, the
RAND researchers concluded, "The next attack may well take place in Ohio
even if there are reasons to believe that Ohio (or most of the other
fifty states) is not particularly favored for an attack". Al-Qaeda might
want to coerce the US, it might want to damage US society, it might want
to rally its own followers or it might simply franchise the attacks to
others; all this might come to pass, and yet we won't know where exactly
the "war of a thousand cuts" will strike. The Nazi war machine knew that
the allies could land at only a few beachheads (Normandy being one of
them); the Pentagon has no idea where or how al-Qaeda or its franchises
might do their next assault.

Indeed, in Mike Davis' book, he details, exhaustively, how the modern
state has not been able to fully repulse terrorist attacks through
military means. The only way, he concludes, is for a political solution.
The bulk of those who are maimed and killed by acts of terror are not
those who hold the reins of power: it is the ordinary people whose lives
are easier to take than those who hide in the planet's Green Zone. The
rest of us, Davis writes, live in the Red Zone, and it is in our
interest to think seriously about where terrorism comes from and how to
disarm it. The only solution is to remove the conditions that spawn the
social forces frustrated into the "propaganda of the deed". A Royal
Ulster Constabulary officer told journalist Tim Pat Coogan that the way
to get rid of car bombs in Ulster is to make political settlements. "Two
men with shovels can make up a thousand pound bomb in Fermanagh cowshed
and if for some reason the operation has to be aborted, they can
decommission it again, all within twelve hours. You can't decommission
shovels. It's minds which have to be decommissioned." As Davis says in
response, "Since there is little likelihood of any of the socio-economic
reforms or concessions to self-determination that might lead to the
large-scale 'decommissioning of minds' (indeed the trends are quite the
opposite), the car bomb has a brilliant future. Buda's wagon truly has
become the hot rod of the apocalypse."

Mike Davis is not dystopic, even as he is often read like that
(especially his work on Los Angeles). It is the world that appears
dystopic, particularly with so little motion to overturn the Davos
dispensation. Wars of terror and destructive nature, Naomi Klein writes,
have enabled those who siphon the people's labor to construct a
"disaster industrial complex", where tax money is given over to security
services and relief organizations who thrive on demolition. We have to
know how these systems operate in order to know how to overcome them: it
is this exercise of knowledge that makes these books utopian in the
purest sense.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/24prashad.cfm

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