Shelling the bush

By Neil Armstrong

As David Cameron sought a mandate to bomb targets in Syria, two images come to mind. One is from a line by Conrad in Heart of Darkness:

“Once…we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush…In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent…There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding.”

The attempt to mold the inhabitants of a region by smashing fire into its land was portrayed in the movie loosely based on Conrad's novella, named, appropriately enough, Apocalypse Now. Helicopter gunships strafed the foliage of Vietnam as if its very topography were being singled out for attack.

The other image is of Pyongyang by the end of the Korean War. The number of buildings left standing in that city was reputed to be in single digits. There were no targets at all. The generals in charge, you suppose, will have conveyed that Conradian "touch of insanity" to the political leaders whose decision it was to call a halt to the war.

In both these conflicts, the forces subject to attack professed to be communist, that creed of secular millenarianism which looks to create and hasten a utopia in which the state withers away and man no longer exploits his fellow man. In neither case did those forces "lose." In the latter, they crawled out from under the rubble to eventually become an independent nuclear power. Their mentality was formed and has frozen in that time of birth and tribulation.

Many of Syria's towns and cities today look like the aftermath of a magnitude 9 earthquake. To attack them again would be as illogical and fruitless as trying to pound sand into powder. The ideology of these people which the world and its armies want most to eviscerate under those buildings is as radically evil as was, say, that of the Khmer Rouge. However, unlike the Communist Manifesto, it is unthinkable that IS’s foundational text, the Koran, will soon or ever be historically sidelined. Those among the same book's followers who do not act in a like manner as IS argue that their peaceful ways are in themselves sufficient refutation of violent fundamentalist interpretations, without further need for interrogation or explanation. Fealty to the core belief was formed and has frozen in the time of its birth and tribulation.

David Cameron's contribution of missiles will be welcomed by the vaunters of suicide. They will be more cheese bait to rodents who know how to live off the traps laid out to kill them. Following the Paris attacks you could read online commentators fantasizing about employing neutron bombs against the fighters of IS. These infrastructure-friendly weapons are said to instantly vaporize biological organisms, but leave buildings away from the blast epicenter standing. What usually went unsaid, however, was that like all other bombs and incendiary devices, their effects, as you fire them into a continent, do not discriminate between armed adversaries and newborn babies.

The UK’s involvement conjures up an image of missiles and aerial hardware criss-crossing the Syrian skies like lights in a game of laser tag. With the collateral downing of a Russian fighter by Turkish forces last month it will take a single error in target identification to spark off a wider conflagration between great powers. Other methods of enemy degradation ― destruction of funding operations, robust infiltration by Special Forces, intelligence-sharing cooperation with rival participants, the establishment of a roadmap to a political solution and the detention of would-be enemy combatants ― should be exhaustingly ratcheted up.

It is estimated that a six-hour RAF Tornado flight dispensing a payload of four Paveway bombs and two Brimstone missiles would cost around 1 million pounds per mission. The costs rise considerably according to the payload employed. Tomahawk cruise missiles carried on Astute-class submarines cost nearly 1 million pounds each. After the pounding any of these weapons serve up, those who crawl out from under the bush will do so with their 7th-century mentality intact, aggrandized, and no nearer to reformation. It will take imagination and courage to remove them, the patience of decades to sideline their interpretations.

Neil Armstrong can be contacted at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.