Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
By Mike Davis
Verso, 2007
228 pages, $39.95 (hb)
An increasing supply of very angry people have turned that urban commonplace, the car, into a deadly manifesto. The new, home-made weapon requires only cheap industrial and agricultural ingredients plus a stolen or rented car, van or truck, writes Mike Davis in his horrifying but politically clarifying book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb.
In 1920 in New York, Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant indulging the anarchist fantasy of blowing up the ruling class, drove his horse-drawn wagon to Wall Street at lunchtime outside government and corporate offices and set off the blasting gelatin and metal projectiles that killed 40 people and injured 200.
In 1927, a Michigan farmer, blaming the bank foreclosure on his property on the taxes levied to pay for a new school, killed 38 of the school's children with a suicide car-bomb. In the '30s and '40s, the car-bomb was discovered by middle class opponents of the Cuban dictatorship, and by the rightwing Zionist terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun in Palestine.
In the '50s and '60s, the Vietnamese nationalist resistance adopted the bicycle-bomb and car-bomb as a guerrilla war tactic. The Mafia took to the car-bomb with gusto in Italy, aimed at Mob rivals, magistrates and leftists. Paramilitary terrorist French settlers used it indiscriminately in Algeria to foment a race war by massacring Muslims. In the '70s, University of Wisconsin anti-war student radicals, with "reckless stupidity", blew up a campus army building, inadvertently killing a young physicist, "an opponent of the Vietnam War", working late in his lab. Car-bomb specialists emerged with the Irish Republican Army in the early 1970s in Belfast and London, and with Protestant loyalist extremists in Dublin.
Israel's US-supported invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, when "scarcely a household was spared injury, property damage, or the arrest of a male member", triggered the rise of the slum-grown, Shiite suicide car-bombers of Hezbollah which, "as even the Israelis admit, was exacting in its targeting and avoidance of unintended casualties", killing, for example, 241 US Marines and sailors in a massive blast that destroyed a US military barracks in Beirut. Afghanistan bled from the Cold War anti-communist car-bombs of the CIA, which also taught the car-bombing trade to agents from Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who then tutored 35,000 Afghan and foreign mujahedin, "including the future cadre of Al Qaeda".
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, the US veteran of the 1991 Gulf War who believed the Pentagon had planted a computer chip in his brain, parked his truck-bomb outside the skyscraper housing federal departments in Oklahoma City, killing 168, damaging 312 buildings up to two miles away and creating a tremor recording 6.0 on the Richter scale. The century ended with some far left car-bombings in Europe against NATO targets, and the car-bomb as strategic commandment for secessionist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Basque nationalists of Eskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain. The drug lord and world's wealthiest criminal, Pablo Escobar, in Colombia, the "occult Maoists" of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, Pakistani jihadists and Hindu fundamentalists in India, and neo-Nazis in South Africa all entered the field, while southern Lebanon, Algeria, Italy and England were all revisited by the car-bomb.
US civilians began reaping Washington's foreign policy harvest in New York with the World Trade Center targeted in 1992 by Egyptian Islamists, and US military missions and embassies in Saudi Arabia, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, were truck-bombed in 1998. The ISI contracted Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s to train fighters for its state-sponsored jihad in Kashmir and also provided the expertise for blowing up Russian apartment buildings and subway stations by ISI-sponsored Chechen guerrillas.
Jemaah Islamiyah leader, Hambali, an "Afghan" graduate of ISI sabotage and terrorism schools, shifted the focus from embassies to the feast of "soft targets" at bars, cafes and nightclubs frequented by Westerners in Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia — the so-called "apostate" regimes addicted to earnings from hotels, casinos and beaches. The Kuta blasts in 2002 wiped 10% from Jakarta's stock exchange and at least 1% from Indonesia's GDP.
By 2006 in Iraq, car-bombings were averaging at least one every 36 hours and had claimed over 9,000 casualties, mainly civilian. Whilst the targeting of US military forces and puppet Iraqi police and army recruits by car-bombs represents a "rational strategy of resistance to the American occupation", says Davis, only the sectarian Al-Qaedist opponents of secular Iraqi nationalism are "served by the mass murder of Shiites" in their blood-soaked attempts to stir up intra-Muslim violence.
This chaotic spectrum of car-bombers makes the catch-all label "terrorist" a superficial "playground epithet" but what many car-bombers have in common, argues Davis, is "vast amounts of anti-Americanism (incubated by cluster bombs, refugee camps and oil corporations) and the brutal skills diffused by the CIA's and ISI's car-bomb academies". Most (suicide) car-bombers are not "simple-minded religious fanatics" but "local patriots responding to collective injustice, above all the humiliation of foreign occupation".
The car-bomb is, however, a blunt weapon. No matter how carefully targeted, political debacle is always a premature explosion, an unheeded warning, or a casual passer-by, away. As Davis logs with numbing diligence, rarely does a car-bomb not leave the mangled, often vaporised, bodies of luckless civilians in its wake, all of them "ordinary working class people", thus destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating the mass base of support.
The outrage of the "war on terror" cheerleaders, however, is fraudulent and hypocritical. "How can we compare on the scales of morality", asks Davis of the Vietnamese liberation movement's use of car-bombs, "against the almost 8 million tons of high explosives — the destructive equivalent of more than 100 Hiroshimas — that American planes eventually dropped on Indochina?". If we condemn the use of car-bombs to achieve political ends, then, says Davis, the censure applies many times more to the mass terror against civilians "routinely inflicted by the air forces and armies of so-called 'democracies'" like the US, Britain, France and Israel.
Neither can car-bombing be understood apart from its state terrorist antecedents. Chechen ferocity was raised to apocalyptic fury by Russian atrocities. ETA's terrorism was forged by a "horrific history of official repression that includes several generations of mass arrests, beatings, torture, executions and assassinations ... which the rest of the world has seldom acknowledged or bothered to condemn".
Furthermore, some of the world's foremost car-bomb terrorists come draped in respectable "security" garb. The intelligence agencies, armies and police of Israel, the US, Britain, Indonesia and Pakistan have all used the car-bomb as a "murderous arm of state power". Decades after Zionist terrorists began blowing up Palestinians, "Jihadis training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan" would study the memoirs of former Israeli prime minister and Irgun terrorist, Menachem Begin, as a "training manual in terrorism".
Defences against the car-bomb are few. Despite 6000 checkpoints in Baghdad guarded by 50,000 soldiers and police, only the "medievalised enclave" of the "Green Zone" is immune, whilst the urban masses outside in the "Red Zone" (the rest of Baghdad) are, like the global "Red Zone" population, utterly exposed. This inequality of vulnerability, says Davis, "must be pounded into the heads of politicians and police officials besotted with fantasies of 'beating the terrorists' with panoptical surveillance, ion detection technology, roadblocks, and, that sine qua non, the permanent suspension of civil liberties".
The car-bomb's future seems unfortunately assured, concludes Davis, as long as its geo-political and socio-economic causes go unaddressed — "every laser-guided missile falling on an apartment house in southern Beirut or a mud-walled compound in Kandahar is a future suicide truck-bomb headed for the centre of Tel Aviv or perhaps downtown to Los Angeles". The tools of the world's rulers — the politics of military power, the morality of hypocrisy and the economics of the exploitation of the poor — prime, rather than disarm, the car-bomb.