Q. When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

A. When he/she bombs or strafes from an airplane.

Tom Englehardt of TomDispatch today has a long post about the overreliance of the American military upon the use of air power in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The post details numerous incidents of civilian deaths, "collateral damage" resulting from American airstrikes.

But the post's fundamental argument is that such deaths are so routine and unavoidable that one must acknowledge the fact that to use air power is to willingly and routinely countenance the death and maiming of "innocent non-combatants". The decision to engage in forms of warfare in which civilians are inevitably, if not targeted, then at least targets, is a routine part of American military strategy:

In distant war, particularly wars where Americans alone control the skies and can fly in them with relative impunity, the trade-off is clear indeed: our soldiers for their civilian dead "including women and children."

This is not an aberrant side effect of air war but its heart and soul. The airplane is a weapon of war, but it is also a weapon of terror -- and it is meant to be. From the beginning, it was used not to "win over" enemy populations -- after all, how could that be done from the distant skies? -- but to crush or terrorize them into submission.

Englehardt is right on there. In the 1920s, early theorists of air power, American Billy Mitchell and Italian Giulio Douhet, advocated the "strategic" use of aircraft not simply to attack an enemy's armed forces, but its cities in order to break the will of the populace. This theory was put to the test in WWII by Germany and Japan and England and America, with at best mixed results. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the primarily merely the logical extension of German, British and American firebombing attacks on major British, German and Japanese cities, whose desired effect was civilian casualties and, well, terror.

Atomic weaponry proved the key to the success of such aerial terrorism, by exponentially raising the potency of such acts: and we invented (and used) the first true "weapons of mass destruction." Let's stop kidding ourselves.

Englehardt concludes:

We in the U.S. recognize butchery when we see it -- the atrocity of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck bomb, the beheading. 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. Air power is, in the military itself, little short of a religion of force, impermeable to reason, to history, to examples of what it does (and what it is incapable of doing). It is in our interest not to see air war as a -- possibly the -- modern form of barbarism.

Ours is, of course, a callous and dishonest way of thinking about war from the air (undoubtedly because it is the form of barbarism, unlike the car bomb or the beheading, that benefits us). It is time to be more honest. It is time for reporters to take the words "incident," "mistake," "accident," "inadvertent," "errant," and "collateral damage" out of their reportorial vocabularies when it comes to air power. At the level of policy, civilian deaths from the air should be seen as "advertent." They are not mistakes or they wouldn't happen so repeatedly. They are the very givens of this kind of warfare.

This is, or should be, obvious. If we want to "withdraw" from Iraq (or Afghanistan) via the Gates Plan, we should at least be clear about what that is likely to mean -- the slaughter of large numbers of civilians "including women and children." And it will not be due to a series of mistakes or incidents; it will not be errant or inadvertent. It will be policy itself. It will be the Washington -- and in the end the American -- consensus.

A thing to keep in mind when we hear discussions of "redeployment" and "withdrawal": reduction in ground forces will almost certainly entail still more extensive use of air forces. This will only further reduce any remaining differences between our policies and those of al Qaeda as regards the death of innocents.