Monday, July 09, 2007

Airborne terror

Tom Engelhardt reminds us, again, that American terrorism comes most often via bombs dropped from the sky, an obvious truism if there ever was one. Nevertheless, a truism that Americans go to extraordinary lengths to obscure.

"We in the U.S. recognize butchery when we see it -- the atrocity of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck bomb, the beheading," Engelhardt offers. "These acts are obviously barbaric in nature. But our favored way of war -- war from a distance -- has, for us, been pre-cleansed of barbarism. Or rather its essential barbarism has been turned into a set of 'errant incidents,' of 'accidents,' of 'mistakes' repeatedly made over more than six decades."