Mahmood Mamdani
When US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised an aerial war on Iraq that would "shock and awe" the world, he displayed a keen sense of military history, but not quite of America's soft political underbelly.
Bombing originated as a method of war considered fit for use against uncivilized peoples, so Sven Lindquist writes in A History of Bombing.
The first systematic aerial bombing in history was Britain's Royal Air Force against Somaliland in 1920. Bombing was then seen more as a form of punishment than as a way of winning a war.
Even when Nazis and Allies targeted urban concentrations on either side during the Second World War, prevailing military thinking held that the air force could not win a war. Victory would have to be achieved by ground forces.
This conventional wisdom was first challenged during the war in Laos (1964-74), itself a sideshow during the Vietnam War. Because a treaty with the Soviet Union forbade it from introducing ground troops in Laos, America could not fight there a war as conventional as it had fought in Vietnam.
Unprecedented brutality
Forced to improvise, the US resorted to a combination of a proxy war on the ground, using Laotian mercenaries, and a fierce aerial war.
Conducted without regard to the loss of Laotian lives, the unprecedented aerial brutality was politically possible because there was little public knowledge of the extent of bombing.
University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy summed up the facts that few Americans knew - that, over Laos, the US Air Force had fought "the largest air war in military history, dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation, the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during the Second World War."
Even if the public remained ignorant, the bombing of heavily populated areas aroused great concern in anti-war circles in the US.
A group of Cornell University scientists pointed out that the bombing had violated the principle of proportionality - "that a reasonable proportionality exist between the damage caused and the military gain sought" - under international law.
New York Times' Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Neil Sheehan wrote in his introduction to their report: "The air war may constitute a massive war crime by the American Government and its leaders."
Air war came into its own only with the end of the Cold War. The reason was political. It required a world without any effective check on American power to put into practice a doctrine that paid heed neither to the principle of proportionality nor to consequences for the civilian population.
The first opportunity for the US to unleash its aerial might came with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Determined to turn Saddam into an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the US, the US turned the 1991 Gulf War into a punishment.
Waged with little restraint, the Gulf War involved the US in the commission of numerous war crimes. Former Attorney-General Ramsey Clark charged that the Administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law", from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs.
As Iraq's infrastructure - roads, dams, electricity, water supply, industry - was targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties, destruction explained away as "collateral damage".
Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor who was also coordinator of a Harvard team on Iraq, reported that the Allied bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq - electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and health-care."
Even though the war ended, the bombardment continued. By October, 1999, US officials were telling Wall Street Journal they were running out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse."
That was two months before President Bill Clinton, bedeviled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and faced with a vote in the House of Representatives indicting him for perjury and obstruction of justice, decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq.
By the time the US and Britain invaded Iraq this month, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer than did the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos.
The US repeated the lessons of the Gulf War in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and promised Iraqis a repeat performance if the leadership did not surrender and the population did not applaud that surrender.
Described as "shock and awe" by its perpetrators, this mode of warfare proved nothing less than shocking and awful to its victims, and to those of us who dare keep our eyes open.
If America's strength is in its ability to wage this kind of war, its Achilles Heel is its eagerness to do so. The contradiction lies in the following:
On the one hand, the ability to wage this kind of air war is testimony to America's overall technological and military superiority. At the same time, this mode of warfare is distinguished by its capacity to spread a generalized terror by targeting the entire infrastructure of civilian livelihood, in fact, life itself.
America's resort to such extreme brutality - ironically, in the name of a war on terror - is symptomatic of its failure to translate an otherwise unrivalled technological and military superiority into political and moral leadership.
Prof Mamdani is a Herbert Lehman professor of government and director of Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, New York. He's currently lecturing at Makerere University, Kampala.
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