The U.S. has a habit of debuting new bombing technology on developing nations
The ugly legacy of colonialism persists in our military actions today
When the Mother of All Bombs (known officially as the GBU-43/B MOAB) was dropped on a suspected underground ISIS bunker in Afghanistan this month, a number of people objected to the use of the particularly destructive weapon. The main criticism seemed to center around the size of the weapon itself, with the 21,000-pound bomb being called overkill by some.
But the most interesting commentary probably came from former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, who tweeted that “This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing grounds for new and dangerous weapons.”
He’s got a point. There is a dark history of Western military powers testing novel weapons and strategies on technologically overmatched non-Western (and non-white) populations. It’s a legacy that mixes the brutal arrogance of colonialism with the technological promise of an easy fix. There are of course numerous examples of this cruel dynamic at play in the centuries leading up to the 20th — conquistadors with dogs and swords, gunpowder in general — but the disparity that currently exists between the material advantages of Western countries and the technological capability of enemies abroad continues to be exploited in ways that conform to a recognizable pattern.
Western colonialism has always been facilitated in large part by technological superiority in war. This advantage has been put to use not only to destroy as many “enemy combatants” as possible, but also to perform dominance in order to intimidate into submission. And also to spare as many lives of Western combatants as possible. There’s a deep connection between the “shock and awe” of laser-guided bombs leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti performing the first aerial attack by dropping hand grenades out of his plane over Libya in 1911. Both were relatively safe (for the attackers) displays of technological superiority.
The strange combination of ruthlessness and a “hands off” attitude has been a common one throughout the history of Western militaries operating in colonized spaces. After taking control of what’s now Iraq in 1920, for instance, the British military took the approach of “control without occupation,” which meant an overreliance on technological superiority. In this case, air power. Nascent rebellion against their newly acquired colonial overlords (who were replacing the Ottomans) was met with novel air techniques developed precisely to quell armed rebellions of recalcitrant subjects. As Jonathan Glancey wrote for The Guardian, “The British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both the north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the flying dogs of war to ‘police’ them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone, and reed villages…During the period of direct British rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal states.”
Chemical weapons themselves were of course pioneered during WWI, but there’s a universe of difference between two relatively equal armies lined up along a determined front using similarly horrific weapons, and those same weapons being used against a mixed civilian-combatant population in a scenario where the battlegrounds can be anywhere. It’s telling that weapons developed for the eschatological scale of a “war to end all wars” was used rather casually to control civilian populations in colonial holdings. Even though it was probably Churchill who most famously advocated for their use when he said that he was “…strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [to] spread a lively terror,” it was America who perfected their terrible use in Vietnam. As Jeffery St. Clair writes, “From 1966 to 1972, the United States dumped more than 12 million gallons of Agent Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5 million acres of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The government of Vietnam estimated the civilian casualties from Agent Orange at more than 500,000. The legacy continues with high levels of birth defects in areas that were saturated with the chemical.”
East Asian countries in particular experienced the wrath of Western coercive overkill. The atomic attacks on Japan are a much debated example. But less discussed are the Marshall Islands themselves, where from 1946 to 1958, 67 nuclear tests were conducted. Spread over time, that’s the equivalent of over one Hiroshima blast every single day during the testing period. A United Nations human rights council report defined the situation on the islands as “near-irreversible environmental contamination” that has led to the “indefinite displacement” of former inhabitants. It might not be an instance of experimentation mixed with control of a rebellious population, but it does speak to a cavalier attitude about testing powerful military weapons in places the average American voter hardly ever thinks about.
Because depleted uranium has a half-life of something like 4.5 billion years (about the age of our solar system), it’s a particularly insidious threat. America’s use of depleted uranium rounds in the first Gulf War — a total of 320 tons used — continue to cause spikes in cancer rates and birth defects. But this is the kicker: we continue to use depleted uranium rounds in our air strikes on the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, despite knowing their dangers full well. Some have even called the use of depleted uranium “as malicious as Syrian chemical weapons”.
To be fair, it’s not just America. As Moustafa Bayoumi recently wrote in The Guardian, the Russians have also “…exploited its campaign assisting the Assad regime in Syria to test out 162 new weapons systems, including new cruise missiles and long-range bombers…Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu used the occasion of Vladimir Putin’s 63rd birthday to announce that Russia had fired cruise missiles at targets in Syria from the Caspian Sea, some 900 miles away.” But just because it’s the game of major world powers doesn’t make it right. Even if some experts claim that the MOAB was the right tool for the job in killing a few ISIS agents, Karzai’s tweet should give us pause to consider the broader socio-political blowback that using such a grandiose and novel weapon might cause — and how by repeating historical mistakes we could be inadvertently undermining our larger strategic goal of working with Afghanistan as an ally.
