The Poor Man's Air Force

Mike Davis has produced an instructive article (in two parts here and here) entitled "The Poor Man's Air Force" which traces the development and history of the car bomb through the conflicts of the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.

The first "car bomb" was detonated on a horse-drawn cart on Wall St. in 1920. But the car bomb did not really catch on until 27 years later when it was used by the Zionist Stern Gang against the British in Palestine. In response, the Arab High Committee enlisted British deserters to set retaliatory car bombs, and from there the technology flourished. Though sporadic, use of the car bomb was far flung, from Saigon in 1952 to Algiers in 1962.

But the "gates of hell" as Davis colorfully calls them, were not opened until 1972 when the Irish Republican Army, through a botched experiment with ammonium nitrate-fuel oil, unwittingly stumbled onto a cheap and incredibly powerful method by which destruction could be wrought with readily attainable ingredients. As Davis says, the IRA "elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level." It would soon display its industrial proficiency with a cascading series of attacks culminating in the spectacular "Black Friday" attack of July 21, 1972, when 20 car bombs were synchronized to explode in Belfast.

"The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities." The moral implications, whereby such awesome destructive power dramatically increased the numbers of indiscriminate casualties, would not prevent the further use of such a valuable siege weapon.

Beirut would surpass all other locales as the dynamo of the car bomb. From the mid-1970s, Israel's push to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon involved several spectacular car bomb attacks. But it was the response of Hezbollah in the early 1980s that launched the car bomb through the next stage of its evolution: the introduction of suicide.

Hezbollah's dramatic attack on the US embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983 (which decapitated the CIA in Lebanon), was merely a prelude to the most well-known car bomb ever detonated a month later. After President Reagan's overt engagement in the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah drove an explosive-laden truck into the American Marine barracks, resulting in 241 casualties. (Another truck was simultaneously driven into the French barracks, with 58 casualties.)

The results of these explosions were many, the most immediate being the US withdrawal from Lebanon. So far as the car bomb is concerned, Davis claims that this defeat had wider geopolitical repercussions than the defeat in Vietnam. The Vietnam War "belonged to the era of the Cold War's bipolar superpower rivalry. Hezbollah's war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the other hand, prefigured (and even inspired) the 'asymmetric' conflicts that characterize the millennium." The bombing of the Marine barracks was not merely the highest achievement of the car bomb, it was "the gold standard of terrorism."

Davis goes on to trace CIA involvement in the development of the car bomb, with particular attention given to events in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. He rounds off with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, noting that in the attack, true portability of destruction (as one could otherwise achieve only through air power) had been accomplished.

Of course, the history of the car bomb cannot be divorced from the political and social context in which it has developed. As with any other destructive technology, it requires human agency to set the power of the car bomb in motion. Davis, of course, is aware of this, but too often dives into the terminology of evil when he hints at the motivations for use of the car bomb. (When discussing the indiscriminate nature of the car bomb, he explicitly states that it "is an inherently fascist weapon." - Unlike, say, the precision-guided missile?)

Davis is at his best when he relates the state responses (particularly that of Britain) to the car bomb. The climate of fear produced by such a weapon directly resulted (as we have mentioned) in an unprecedented lock-down of London, culminating in a "ring of steel" much like the one built around Belfast's city center. But more than just concrete barriers and iron fences, surveillance cameras were installed to track the precise movement of people from the moment they enter the center of London to the moment they leave. In this climate of fear, a cordon of facial recognition software had been deployed against the populace in hopes of sussing out car bombs and other terrorists, before they deploy their weapons. Yet, as Davis dryly notes, "until some miracle technology emerges (and none is in sight) that allows authorities from a distance to 'sniff' a molecule or two of explosive in a stream of rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will continue to commute to work."

Beyond this, Davis does not interest himself with the political question of why certain groups feel the need to have their own equivalent to an air force. Perhaps his planned book-length version of the article will have more. This is a vital component to any complete study of the car bomb, and is the missing element to an otherwise engaging history.