Mediapart, the French leftist website, has an interview with Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and author of the most-referenced book on the effects of air attacks throughout history. He says, “The carpet bombing of Iran will not achieve its goals, even if the regime has been decapitated.”
I post a basic translation below.
“There is virtually no chance that the current bombing will lead to positive regime change in Iran,” Robert Pape said by phone from the United States, where he is a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago.
The political scientist is the author of a book, published 30 years ago, but still widely discussed in military academies in the United States. Entitled Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, the book is based on the study of 33 air campaigns ranging from Japan in 1944-1945 to Iraq in 1991.
Pape says, “Since the First World War, dozens and dozens of attempts have been made by many countries, including the United States, Britain, Israel and Russia, to use air power to try to impose regime change.”
But these “interventions systematically lead to two results. First, the regime in place remains unchanged. Of course, leaders are killed, but they are replaced by people who look a lot like them. And, more profoundly, we are seeing a radicalisation among the new leaders, who are more aggressive and inclined to take more radical measures, including military ones. These are the two scenarios that we must prepare for today with the attack on Iran.”
Does history really provide no counter-example? “Not a single one since the First World War,” insists Pape. That is to say, over more than a century. The only possible counter-examples presuppose the presence of friendly forces on the ground, allowing for a coordinated air and ground campaign. But that’s not the case here.
The fact, as is the case with the Iranian regime, and even more so after the bloodbath committed last January, that its leaders are hated by a significant part of the population does not change anything. “There are no exceptions,” insists Pape, using the example of the Libyan dictatorship.
“In April 1986, the United States tried to eliminate Muammar Gaddafi, who was very unpopular with a large part of his people, with all the precision weapons our country had. It didn’t work, and it radicalised Gaddafi, leading the Libyans to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 in the Lockerbie bombing, killing more than 250 civilians. »
In his work entitled The Government of Heaven. Global History of Aerial Bombardments (Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014), historian Thomas Hippler showed the colonial genesis of these campaigns bringing “Peace to white peoples, and bombs to the colonised” and reached conclusions close to that of Robert Pape.
In particular, resuming the debates on the strategic effectiveness of the bombings intended to obtain the surrenders of Germany and Japan during the last months of the Second World War, Thomas Hippler showed a radicalisation of air offensives despite the weakness of the results and the scale of the human losses.
Several actors and theoreticians of the war nevertheless evoke, contrary to Robert Pape’s theses, the Allied Force operation carried out in the spring of 1999 against the regime of Slobodan Milošević, characterised by a massive and exclusive commitment of air power and which overcame the Serbian president’s determination without ground troop support. An objection that Robert Pape nevertheless considered insufficient to undermine his entire thesis in a 2004 article in the journal Foreign Affairs entitled “The True Worth of Air Power”.
In any case, how does the American political scientist understand the decision of the United States to engage in Iran alongside Israel while Libya, bombed in 2011, and Iraq, attacked in 2003, remain semi-failed states subject to social and political chaos, and the Taliban have regained power in Afghanistan?
“For me, this is linked to internal political pressures in the United States,” replies Pape. Donald Trump’s bellicose foreign policy is less linked to a real geopolitical strategy than to internal balances within his own camp. This is true for Venezuela. This is true for Greenland. And this is true now for Iran. President Trump simply decided that the best political calculation for him – and I mean the best internal political calculation – was to bomb Iran.”
And if you want more on this topic, nearly 24 years ago (!) at the start of the “War on Terror”, I reviewed Sven Lindqvist’s book A History of Bombing, which describes a century of aerial bombardment. I wrote, “This book unmasks the horror that ruling classes have inflicted on ordinary people through aerial bombardment during the last 100 years.
“It shows the brutality of the armed wing of capitalist competition and the hypocrisy of Western leaders who denounce the violence of people who fight back against imperialism.”
Whatever else has changed in the last quarter of a century, that hasn’t.
