Air War

Aerial attack always seems justified to those in the sky. The subtle distinctions that decide actions on the street are unintelligible from above.

It will take a long time for the perspective from the ground to give the other side of the story. Slaughterhouse Five was published 24 years after the firebombing of Dresden.

The newly leaked footage of two Apache helicopters shooting a cluster of Iraqis on the ground is not likely to elicit the domestic moral and emotional groundswell that critics of the American occupation might expect.

http://wikileaks.org/

Europeans might be horrified, but Americans have for too long now seen cop shows in which the audience automatically identifies with the camera in the police car or up in the helicopter. Whomever is being depicted in the grainy film must be guilty, otherwise they would not be in the crosshairs to begin with. If you are “caught” on an official video, you are doing something wrong—this presumption will lead audiences to side with the US military.

The contrast between the familiar American voices of the pilots versus the vague humanoids running on the ground will further pull viewers’ allegiances toward the US military. Yes, the gunners are callous and cocky in their gleeful annihilation of the Iraqis on the street, but again only audience members who have not played a violent video game before, nor watched a teenager play one, will really be surprised at the pilots’ jocular tone.

The audience is immune from the violence, with the camera circling in the air, our screens on our laps, at our desks. The war has been dragging on, no one is surprised that terrible things happen.

The difference that the vantage point makes is brought out vividly at the end of the video, when US troops arrive in vehicles, soon they run around much like the Iraqis killed minutes before, except this time they are uniformed men racing with wounded children in their arms.

Surely there is no real sociological difference between the Americans in the helicopter and those in the humvees, yet one bunch is cracking jokes about not bringing kids to a battle (how about not bringing a battle to kids?) and another bunch seems to be moving very quickly to save them. The Americans on the ground are racing to pick up the bodies of the people who had just a few minutes earlier been trying to pick up the bodies of the first victims. The only difference is that the Americans are in uniform and they are running in a deliberate direction because they do not think the helicopter will shoot at them. The Iraqis at the beginning of the video were milling around on the street, also not believing that they will be shot at from the helicopters.

These videos are immediate, even the leak did not take long—two years, but the slow moral process, the back and forth debate over what was justified or not, will drag on.

I remember in 1993 leading a group of retired UCLA graduates on a trip up the Mosel and down the Rhine. For the most part, these were very conservative people, from Orange County. The kind who tell you that Mexicans are ruining the California school system and that Germany is a nice place because it is so white.

There were two quiet guys who kept away from the others, modest and not particularly wealthy, if you asked them had they ever been in Germany before, they would say no, but they had been over it. They had both served in bombers during World War Two, felt they had done the right thing in the war, but now they wanted to come back fifty years later to see the place they had bombed.

They were shy, kept to themselves, didn’t eat and drink like the other travelers. One of them had gone to Stanford on the GI bill and studied German after the war. They were uncomplicated, not particularly arrogant or defensive, they just wanted to see the country, maybe talk to some of the people there.