If those responsible for the bombing of London on July 7, killing almost 60 people, are "just murderers," irrational animals who need to be put down like rabid dogs, then let us at least be consistent and regard with the same condescending disgust those who were responsible for the bombing of Dresden 60 years ago this past February. Quoted in a Winnie Churchill apologetics site, Dr. Chris Harmon, who wrote on the Allies' "area bombing" in a book entitled most conveniently for this column, Are We Beasts?, suggests that Churchill went along reluntantly with his head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Harris, who

"had none of Churchill's moral qualms about the strategic bombing campaign, or if he did, he hid them well. He created a list of some fifty major target cities, usually selected for their size, war production, or critical location on transportation routes. Harris was grimly working through the list, complaining when the Combined Chiefs 'distracted' him with special targets related to ground campaigns or special interests like oil or U-boat pens.

"Dresden was on another list at Bomber Command - a short list of early 1945 targets that should be flattened to aid the Russian offensive. Churchill had frequently pressed Harris to use his bombers to aid the Russians, but they never talked about Dresden particularly, to my knowledge. It was one of several towns at the right time and place whose bombing would help the Red Army's advance in that sector. Also, John Colville's memoirs record, there had been a report that Axis armor was moving through the town. In short, Dresden was not a vengeance target, but a military one, and one more 'built up area' that was to be destroyed like the others in Germany."

Now isn't that Western rational thinking at its noblest? Someone's memoirs may have recorded that there had been an unconfirmed report of Axis armor moving through Dresden. Ergo, the children enjoying the carnival and circus that had come to town, and as many as a quarter million of their noncombatant neighbors — far surpassing the death toll of Hiroshima, whose 60th anniversary approaches — should be offered as a holocaust before the god of Allied military victory.

Dresden's railroad yards, by the way, were unscathed by any of the 600,000 incendiary bombs that rained for fourteen hours upon this city of cigarettes and china. The updated 2005 edition of the first (1963) book on this war crime, David Irving's Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden is available here.

Dresden was not "payback" for Coventry, where German bombs killed a total of 340 British noncombtants. Even Churchill at his most plastered would not equate these departures from "just war," probably the War's most tragic casualty. No, this was just one item on Bomber Harris' to-do list in the effort to aid, of all things, the advance of Stalin's armies, which would inaugurate the entrenchment of Communism in Eastern Europe for nearly fifty years. (I wonder how many Londoners give a thought to the statue that was erected in 1992 in his honor just off Trafalgar Square.) No, "payback" more aptly describes that German bombing itself.

You see, the German bombing of Coventry was rational retaliation for the exceedingly rational British strategy of beating WWI-induced aversion to war out of Britons by provoking Germany to bomb British cities.

Shades of Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor!

Let's listen to the boasting — published before the war's end! — of a most educated, rational British gentleman, J. M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, from his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated, which in its entirety may be downloaded in .pdf format here:

"Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones. Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany. There was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany. We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland. Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves." [Boldface mine.--AF]

If today's terrorists are "just murderers," then so were yesterday's. If yesterday's acted immorally but rationally, then so do today's. When for decades the IRA acted immorally they nevertheless acted rationally, and today they act both morally and rationally by renouncing the initiation of force in their efforts to end British occupation of Northern Ireland. Only human beings, not wild beasts, can be so morally and intellectually converted.

The U.S.-led "counterinsurgency" in Iraq and global "war against terror" are supported by a bodyguard of lying propaganda about rational motivations, "ours" and "theirs" (i.e, "we" have them, "they" don't). Lives depend on how soon we penetrate the veil, rather than wrapping it around our heads like a blindfold.

Second, he warns readers not to be fooled into thinking the book is "a search for truth," because my "mind is all but made up." By pretending to equate my state of mind before I began my research with my state of mind after I finished it, he appears to warn readers that I arrived at my views before examining the evidence. However, since he must know otherwise (assuming he read the introduction), he has simply helped the reader notice that it is his own approach that he has described. For he then says, "Griffin simply cannot accept that our national security system totally failed all on its own on September 11." So, although my book revolves around the choice between these two theories--official complicity or massive official incompetence--Baer announces that the latter is the truth, saying that the attacks succeeded because of "a confluence of incompetence, spurious assumptions and self-delusion on a grand scale," thereby suggesting that my book can be dismissed not by refuting its evidence but by dogmatically accepting the incompetence theory.

Third, Baer says that the incompetence theory is really implausible. After pointing to the failure of NORAD to protect us on 9/11, he asks: "Can it really be that incompetent?" He also shows that the claims of the FBI and CIA to have been "surprised by 9/11" are implausible.

Fourth, Baer uses strong words to denounce the book's ideas, calling them "wacky," "monstrous," and referring to one of my sources as a "crackpot author." This resort to name-calling is Baer's clearest signal that in his view the book's evidence cannot be challenged on its own terms.

Fifth, after pointing out that the Bush Administration used 9/11 as a pretext for the war in Iraq, he calls it a "senseless war." He thereby pretends not to be aware that the desire for a pretext to take over a country with the world's second-largest known oil reserves could have provided a powerful motive.

At this point, I must add that despite my admiration for Baer's subtle way of supporting my case for an investigation into the charge of official complicity, he misleads readers by suggesting that the case for the claim that the Bush Administration reaped foreseeable benefits from 9/11 rests entirely on this pretext for the attack on Iraq. I pointed out, however, that 9/11 was also a pretext to pass the Patriot Act, to attack Afghanistan (for oil, gas and bases) and to jack up military spending, especially for the US Space Command, with its goal of weaponizing space. But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise splendid review.

David Ray Griffin
Santa Barbara, CA
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Nation Company L.P.

Where is it written, for example, that "democracy" is some goodie that Iraqis and Afghanis must "get" at practically any cost in blood and treasure to those peoples as well as to non-Iraqis and non-Afghanis? (Remember how only yesterday we were narrowly obsessed only with protecting ourselves from "weapons of mass destruction"?) I detect in Blair’s tone irritation with those who would subject the swirl of events in which we are caught up, as in a tornado, to calm historical, causal analysis. By pathologizing such an effort as "frankly complete nonsense" Blair implies that those who would engage in it are morally defective.

To render a morally outrageous behavior intelligible by setting it within a context of reasons, i.e., motivations, is not to justify that behavior. Neither is it to suggest that we ought not to criminalize the behavior and apprehend and punish those who engage in it.

It is, rather, to make the behavior-generated problem more manageable. It does so by inviting us to inquire whether other behavior, perhaps our own, has over time motivated the ill-behaving ones to do what they do and to the extent that they do. Having completed that inquiry, we would not necessarily change our behavior, but at least we would know whether, and to what degree, one of its generative factors was ever within our control. We may even conclude that any such behavior modification on our part would not matter, in the sense that future instances of the morally outrageous behavior that we already provoked are likely to occur, even if we should repent of them in sackcloth and ashes.

The salient point is that in the case of morally outrageous human behavior we are not dealing with an impersonal natural phenomenon like, for example, a volcano whose future eruption we are helpless to control. Like the people who choose to live near volcanoes, we attach a cost to our present and past behavior and then, in accordance with our principles and with an estimation of the risks and costs of a prospective course of action alongside its expected benefits, we decide and act. So, for example, while we keep watch over our children as best we can and teach them to be careful, we will not lock them in basements just because some men would prey on them in the streets. Rather, we attach a heavy price to such predations and monitor known predators' every move.

It may be that it is better to risk suffering the evil consequences of the ill-behaving ones while attempting to render them harmless than to renounce our "provocative" behavior. But in that case we ought be in command of the historical facts and be quite clear about who "we" are. That is, who has decided that the cost of persistence in which behavior is worth the cost that some people obviously bear more heavily than do others? How do those many others relate to the deciding few? Just why has there been a Western military presence on Muslim lands? To protect Israel? To protect the flow of oil? These are intelligible motivations. But are they sacrosanct? I doubt that the people who pay dearly and in many ways to maintain that presence would think so.

We study World War I and its aftermath, for example, not to find a “sliver of excuse” for Hitler’s crimes, but to understand whether there were any actions on the part of the belligerents (and later victors) that they could have avoided, thereby making the war, and Hitlerism, impossible. (World War II is unthinkable without Hitlerism which, in its concrete historical existence, is in turn unthinkable absent World War I. Someone tell me quickly: What great good came out of “The Great War” next to which the enormity of World War II is not worth mentioning?) We engage in that sort of thought experiment, not to reverse history, but to learn lessons for the present situation. For the latter is not sui generis, an anomaly with no known analogies. It is rather an all-too-intelligible example of the cumulative effect of decades of direct and indirect military interventionism for the benefit of particular interests – oil and Israel, Israel and oil – while rationalizing it with lies about universal benefits. To pretend otherwise is frankly complete nonsense.

[For a related commentary, see Ian Markham, “Did Bush Cooperate with Terrorists?” in Zion’s Herald, November/December, 2004.]

The answer is that one of our main tasks as theologians is to comment on current events in light of the fact that our first allegiance must be to God, who created and loves all people, indeed all forms of life. If we believe that our political and military leaders are acting on the basis of policies that are diametrically opposed to the divine purposes, it is incumbent upon us to say this. This is especially the case if we live in a rich and powerful country, the policies of which affect the welfare of other peoples, even other species. This is all the more true if these leaders are claiming divine support for their policies, as did Vice President Cheney in sending out a Christmas card with the statement: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” [1]

Accordingly, when I came to the conclusion that the Bush-Cheney administration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this empire under the pretext of the “war on terror,” I decided that I needed to say so by means of summarizing the evidence for this conclusion.

I am also often asked how I first came to this conclusion. I did not do so immediately. For about a year and a half, I accepted the government’s conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks were orchestrated entirely by members of al-Qaeda. But I also accepted the standard liberal view, according to which the attacks were “blowback” for US foreign policy. [2] On that assumption, I began working on a book about the American empire.

Endnotes

1 Institutional Investors Hold the Key to Better Governance, Financial Times, July 21, 2003.

2 CEOs: Why They’re So Unloved, Business Week, April 22, 2002.

To request a free copy of the issue of Zion’s Herald with the whole article, go here.

Kennedy is half-right: Santorum should apologize, but not for riling him up, which at least lets the world know the old windbag bellows still, but for being “snookered,” as Jude Wanniski put it, by another Rick, i.e., neocon word-wizard Richard Perle.

At least the insurgents do not insult us by invoking Catholic casuistry, as does Santorum: a peek into the Inner Sanctum Santorum of two years ago reveals a mind drunk with swinish myths of Perle. Their disconnection from reality is risible until one realizes they set off genuine weapons of mass destruction, bringing in their train a nightmarish existence for ordinary Iraqi people, whose numbers have been violently diminished by 12,000 since Saddam’s ouster, a death toll now increasing at the rate of 800 per month, to outline their suffering no further.

And one belongs in a sanatorium, not the Senate, if one believes, as does Rick, that a dozen years of sanctions counted as a “peaceful means” of persuasion. On this there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Bushi'ite Santorum and Clintonista Albright.

Imagine if every Iraqi had been asked in early 2003: “Which would you prefer: (a) the continuation of more or less predictable life, such as it is under Saddam Hussein, or (b) the likely prospect of unpredictable violent death of you and your children at the hands of insurgents for whom the Americans will create a window of opportunity in ousting Saddam?” Each of them had the moral right to answer that question for him- or herself. “Pro-Lifers” like Santorum, however, usurped that right, turned their country upside down, and sent us the bill. Consistent pro-lifers will not allow the entertainment value of his opinions on moral climatology to obscure his culpability.