The Bombers Fail Again

The effect of suicide and car bombers in Iraq can be likened to the Axis and Allied bomber campaigns in World War 2. They make a lot of noise, kill large numbers of innocents, and get a lot of press coverage. Yet, when the dust settles, and the debris is cleared, they make little impact on the war as a whole.

Hitler discovered this the hard way when he attempted to conquer England by airpower alone. Attacks on the British population only served to unite the nation behind their tenacious Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and gain them much sympathy from isolationist Americans.

Remarkably, airpower advocates in Britain and America decided they could accomplish what the Nazis failed to do, bomb the enemy into submission. Great and mighty bomber fleets were then launched, some a thousand strong, against population centers in Germany. With Europe practically flattened and many millions of enemy dead from the bombings, it still took the combined allied armies to physically defeat Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.

Now another form of terror bombing is attempting to win in the Middle East. In fact, much good is being accomplished despite the attacks, such as the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure, and the steady forming of a new democratic government. So we see the suicide bombers, like their high-flying forbearers of the World War, are not living up to expectations.