The Bombing Delusion

We still do not know how much damage last month’s US air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused. “I believe it was total obliteration,” US President Donald Trump bragged at the NATO summit in June.

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But an early US intelligence report suggests that Iran could begin enriching uranium again ina few months; Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has reached the same conclusion.

One thing we can say with relative confidence, however, is that the massive Israeli-US bombing campaign did not spark an uprising against the Islamic Republic - the outcome that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had hoped for. Trump even mused that regime change is the obvious solution to a government that “is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN,” but without clarifying whether efforts to “MIGA” should come from within or outside the country.

The notion that bombing civilians will break their morale and turn them against their own leaders is old and mostly discredited. It didn’t work during the Spanish Civil War, when the Germans and Italians bombed Guernica in 1937, or during World War II, when Hitler unleashed the blitz on Britain, or the Allies annihilated cities in Nazi Germany. Operation Rolling Thunder, which lasted from 1965-68 in North Vietnam, failed to meet this goal, as has the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Strategic bombing, also called saturation or terror bombing, was a tactic devised between the two world wars largely by the Italian general Giulio Douhet. But during WWII, these brutal aerial attacks came to be associated with Arthur “Bomber” Harris, commander in chief of Britain’s RAF Bomber Command, and Curtis Emerson LeMay, a US Air Force general. The latter, after wiping out Japanese cities in 1944-45 and killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, once admitted that if the US had lost, he would have been tried as a war criminal.