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Article Excerpt
By: Colby Cosh

21st-century trebuchet

The U.S. war in Iraq has degenerated into a mop-up operation--and, depending on what happens between now and press time for this magazine, a manhunt for Saddam Hussein and his clan. After thousands of years of human conflict, war remains its old bloody self, ever to be regretted. Yet one cannot help feeling that a new element--an element, if it is not too naive to say so, of surgical cleanliness--has been added to warfare. Decades after aerial bombing began to prove its military worth in colonial and civil preludes to the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States and its allies are now combining space-age technology with the oldest long-range weapon of all: the catapult.

With the media dazzled by images of fire and explosion, it might be easy to overlook the allies' use of "inert bombs" against Iraqi targets near civilian populations. The technology was unveiled in 1999 by the New York Times in articles about sporadic coalition attacks on Iraqi air defences in the "no-fly zone." When Iraq began to move radar installations nearer to civilian neighbourhoods, hoping to create large numbers of dead innocents for the delectation of the western media, American munitions personnel found a simple solution: remove the explosive guts from Paveway bombs and fill them with concrete. Concrete-filled bombs--or, to call them by a more plain name, big rocks--have always been used on the practice range. Since they have much the same aerodynamic character as an ordinary bomb, they can still be laser-guided to a target. You don't want to be near one when it lands--they weigh 500 pounds and meet the target travelling 800 miles an hour--but they can flatten a radar array while leaving buildings next door intact.

As U.S. and British forces moved into Basra and Baghdad to wrest them from the disorganized remnants of Saddam's soldiers and fedayeen, large numbers of inert bombs were prepared for use on individual tanks and buildings in residential districts. An RAF group captain told the Welsh Western Mail that "The potential deployment of inert weapons is a part of the policy of proportionality, reducing the effects on civilians, property and on life." Yes, this is a war whose pre-emptiveness is perhaps without precedent; but so, at any rate, is the care being taken by the invader.

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