[Mb-civic] TomDispatch - Mike Davis on the History of the Car Bomb

[William Swiggard]

Tomgram: Mike Davis on the History of the Car Bomb

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76140

In a column on March 23 (A Vision, Bruised and Dented 
<http://heartsoulandhumor.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-do-republicans-believe.html>), 
David Brooks of the New York Times' wrote about "the rise of what 
Richard Lowry of the National Review calls the 'To Hell With Them' 
Hawks." In part, Brooks characterized these hawks as being conservatives 
who "look at car bombs and cartoon riots and wonder whether Islam is 
really a religion of peace." One of the advantages of history is that 
you have to check such thoughts at the door. If Islam can't be 
considered a "religion of peace," thanks to what Mike Davis calls "the 
quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism," then at least its jihadists 
join a roiling crowd of less-than-peaceful car-bombers that has included 
Jews, Christians, Hindus, anarchists, French colonials, Mafiosos, 
members of the Irish Republican Army, and CIA operatives among others.

Now, consider joining Tomdispatch in one of the more original and less 
expectable voyages into the recent history of our world. The car bomb 
seems such a weapon of the moment that who even knew it had an 80 
year-long, tortured history. But Mike Davis, whose most recent projects 
include the only significant book on the Avian flu, The Monster at Our 
Door <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580115/nationbooks08>, 
and Planet of Slums 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670228/nationbooks08>, a 
startling analysis of the way significant parts of our planet have been 
rapidly urbanizing and de-industrializing all at once, almost invariably 
produces the unexpected. This week, Tomdispatch offers his two-part 
history of the car bomb, a series that puts one of the more terrifying 
phenomena of our moment into a new perspective and shines a dazzling 
light into any number of dark corners of our recent past. It will, at 
some future point, be expanded into a small book and so Davis would like 
to hear from anyone with information on other car bomb campaigns of the 
last half century. Tom


    The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)

"You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!

-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his 
comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario 
Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad 
Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly 
climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few 
blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: 
"Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" 
They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby 
Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- 
packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the 
celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. 
"Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories 
above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great 
cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of 
the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster 
and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan 
himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the great 
robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a 
poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an 
old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum 
of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist 
fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an 
invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead of the 
imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing 
had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents 
into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical potential of 
Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of 
an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to 
transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a 
high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to 
determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload 
of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 
4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by 
Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary 
Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: 
a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters 
fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically -- producing notable 
massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) -- but 
the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional 
Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised 
the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These 
new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and 
synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly 
powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the 
industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire 
city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete 
skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon 
that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its 
ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as 
terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck 
bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 
1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical sense -- over the combined 
firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet 
and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.

Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the 
1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United States, 
France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to bring their 
insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of the 
new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set up by 
the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi financing, in 
the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the Russians then 
occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle bomb attacks in 
13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded nearly 12,000. More 
importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the IRA and Gama'a 
al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two leading 
control-centers of the world economy -- the City of London (1992, 1993, 
and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced a reorganization of 
the global reinsurance industry.

In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall 
Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods and 
HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali. Suicide 
truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have been 
franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, and 
Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing car 
bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq, of 
course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties -- 
mainly civilian -- attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period 
between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb 
attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005, 
13 in Baghdad on New Year's Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs 
are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car 
bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in 
front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war.

Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the 
apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside "rings 
of steel" and "green zones," but the larger challenge of the car bomb 
seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the "sum 
of our fears," but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse of urban 
terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may be helpful 
to summarize those characteristics that make Buda's wagon such a 
formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban insecurity.

First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and 
destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily transport 
the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to the doorstep 
of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is still evolving, 
thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious bomb-makers. We have yet 
to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized explosions with a lethal 
blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs sheathed in enough nuclear 
waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive for generations.

Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be massacred 
with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and bootlegged 
electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the 
World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive outlay was in 
long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one half ton of urea) 
cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-foot-long Ryder van. 
In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the classic American 
riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost $1.1 million each.

Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although some 
still refuse to believe that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn't 
have secret assistance from a government or dark entity, two men in the 
proverbial phone booth -- a security-guard and a farmer -- successfully 
planned and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing with 
instructional books and information acquired from the gun-show circuit.

Fourth, like even the 'smartest' of aerial bombs, car bombs are 
inherently indiscriminate: "Collateral damage" is virtually inevitable. 
If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and sow panic in the 
widest circle, to operate a "strategy of tension," or just demoralize a 
society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally effective at 
destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base 
of support, as both the IRA and the ETA in Spain have independently 
discovered. The car bomb is an inherently fascist weapon.

Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic 
evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J. 
Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed the 
FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead after 
another for a decade. Most of Buda's descendants have also escaped 
identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly recommends 
car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork, including the 
CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian Pasdaran, and the 
Pakistani ISI -- all of whom have caused unspeakable carnage with such 
devices.

Preliminary Detonations (1948-63)

"Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center"

-- New York Times' headline (January 10,. 1952)

The members of the Stern Gang were ardent students of violence, 
self-declared Jewish admirers of Mussolini who steeped themselves in the 
terrorist traditions of the pre-1917 Russian Socialist-Revolutionary 
Party, the Macedonian IMRO, and the Italian Blackshirts. As the most 
extreme wing of the Zionist movement in Palestine -- "fascists" to the 
Haganah and "terrorists" to the British -- they were morally and 
tactically unfettered by considerations of diplomacy or world opinion. 
They had a fierce and well-deserved reputation for the originality of 
their operations and the unexpectedness of their attacks. On January 12, 
1947, as part of their campaign to prevent any compromise between 
mainstream Zionism and the British Labor government, they exploded a 
powerful truck bomb in the central police station in Haifa, resulting in 
144 casualties. Three months later, they repeated the tactic in Tel 
Aviv, blowing up the Sarona police barracks (5 dead) with a stolen 
postal truck filled with dynamite.

In December 1947, following the UN vote to partition Palestine, 
full-scale fighting broke out between Jewish and Arab communities from 
Haifa to Gaza. The Stern Gang, which rejected anything less than the 
restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the truck bomb its debut as a 
weapon of mass terror. On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress drove a 
truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the center of Jaffa and parked 
it next to the New Seray Building, which housed the Palestinian 
municipal government as well as a soup-kitchen for poor children. They 
cooly lingered for coffee at a nearby café before leaving a few minutes 
ahead of the detonation.

"A thunderous explosion," writes Adam LeBor in his history of Jaffa, 
"then shook the city. Broken glass and shattered masonry blew out across 
Clock Tower Square. The New Seray's centre and side walls collapsed in a 
pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the neo-classical façade 
survived. After a moment of silence, the screams began, 26 were killed, 
hundreds injured. Most were civilians, including many children eating at 
the charity kitchen." The bomb missed the local Palestinian leadership 
who had moved to another building, but the atrocity was highly 
successful in terrifying residents and setting the stage for their 
eventual flight.

It also provoked the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The Arab 
High Committee had its own secret weapon -- blond-haired British 
deserters, fighting on the side of the Palestinians. Nine days after the 
Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by Eddie Brown, a former 
police corporal whose brother had been murdered by the Irgun, 
commandeered a postal delivery truck which they packed with explosives 
and detonated in the center of Haifa's Jewish quarter, injuring 50 
people. Two weeks later, Brown, driving a stolen car and followed by a 
five-ton truck driven by a Palestinian in a police uniform, successfully 
passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and entered Jerusalem's 
New City. The driver parked in front of the Palestine Post, lit the 
fuse, and then escaped with Brown in his car. The newspaper headquarters 
was devastated with 1 dead and 20 wounded.

According to a chronicler of the episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the 
military leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was so impressed by the 
success of these operations -- inadvertently inspired by the Stern Gang 
-- that he authorized an ambitious sequel employing six British 
deserters. "This time three trucks were used, escorted by a stolen 
British armored car with a young blond man in police uniform standing in 
the turret." Again, the convoy easily passed through checkpoints and 
drove to the Atlantic Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night 
watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang, who then drove off in 
the armored car after setting charges in the three trucks. The explosion 
was huge and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead and 130 wounded.

The window of opportunity for such attacks -- the possibility of passing 
from one zone to another -- was rapidly closing as Palestinians and Jews 
braced for all-out warfare, but a final attack prefigured the car bomb's 
brilliant future as a tool of assassination. On March 11, the official 
limousine of the American consul-general, flying the stars and stripes 
and driven by the usual chauffeur, was admitted to the courtyard of the 
heavily-guarded Jewish Agency compound. The driver, a Christian 
Palestinian named Abu Yussef, hoped to kill Zionist leader David Ben 
Gurion, but the limousine was moved just before it exploded; 
nonetheless, 13 officials of the Jewish Foundation Fund died and 40 were 
injured.

This brief but furious exchange of car bombs between Arabs and Jews 
would enter into the collective memory of their conflict, but would not 
be resumed on a large scale until Israel and its Phalangist allies began 
to terrorize West Beirut with bombings in 1981: a provocation that would 
awake a Shiite sleeping dragon. Meanwhile, the real sequel was played 
out in Saigon: a series of car and motorcycle bomb atrocities in 1952-53 
that Graham Greene incorporated into the plot of his novel, The Quiet 
American, and which he portrayed as secretly orchestrated by his CIA 
operative Alden Pyle, who is conspiring to substitute a pro-American 
party for both the Viet-Minh (upon whom the actual bombings would be 
blamed) and the French (who are unable to guarantee public safety).

The real-life Quiet American was the counterinsurgency expert Colonel 
Edward Lansdale (fresh from victories against peasant Communists in the 
Philippines), and the real leader of the 'Third Force' was his protégé, 
General Trinh Minh The of the Cao Dai religious sect. There is no doubt, 
writes The's biographer, that the general "instigated many terrorist 
outrages in Saigon, using clockwork plastic charges loaded into 
vehicles, or hidden inside bicycle frames with charges. Notably, the Li 
An Minh [The's army] blew up cars in front of the Opera House in Saigon 
in 1952. These 'time-bombs' were reportedly made of 50-kg ordnance, used 
by the French air force, unexploded and collected by the Li An Minh."

Lansdale was dispatched to Saigon by Allen Dulles of the CIA some months 
after the Opera atrocity (hideously immortalized in a Life 
photographer's image of the upright corpse of a rickshaw driver with 
both legs blown off), which was officially blamed on Ho Chi Minh. 
Although Lansdale was well aware of General The's authorship of these 
sophisticated attacks (the explosives were hidden in false compartments 
next to car gas tanks), he nonetheless championed the Cao Dai warlord as 
a patriot in the mould of Washington and Jefferson. After either French 
agents or Vietminh cadre assassinated The, Landsdale eulogized him to a 
journalist as "a good man. He was moderate, he was a pretty good 
general, he was on our side, and he cost twenty-five thousand dollars."

Whether by emulation or reinvention, car bombs showed up next in another 
war-torn French colony -- Algiers during the last days of the pied noirs 
or French colonial settlers. Some of the embittered French officers in 
Saigon in 1952-53 would also become cadres of the Organisation de l'Armé 
Secrete (OAS), led by General Raoul Salan. In April 1961, after the 
failure of its uprising against French President Charles de Gaulle, who 
was prepared to negotiate a settlement with the Algerian rebels, the OAS 
turned to terrorism -- a veritable festival de plastique -- with all the 
formidable experience of its veteran paratroopers and legionnaires. Its 
declared enemies included De Gaulle himself, French security forces, 
communists, peace activists (including philosopher and activist 
Jean-Paul Sartre), and especially Algerian civilians. The most deadly of 
their car bombs killed 62 Moslem stevedores lining up for work at the 
docks in Algiers in May 1962, but succeeded only in bolstering the 
Algerian resolve to drive all the pied-noirs into the sea.

The next destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily. Angelo La 
Barbera, the Mafia capo of Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful 
attention to the Algerian bombings and may even have borrowed some OAS 
expertise when he launched his devastating attack on his Mafia rival, 
"Little Bird" Greco, in February 1963. Greco's bastion was the town of 
Ciaculli outside Palermo where he was protected by an army of henchmen. 
La Barbera surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa Romeo 
Giulietta. "This dainty four-door family saloon," writes John Dickie in 
his history of the Cosa Nostra, "was one of the symbols of Italy's 
economic miracle -- 'svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and 
convenient,' as the adverts proclaimed." The first explosive-packed 
Giulietta destroyed Greco's house; the second, a few weeks later, killed 
one of his key allies. Greco's gunmen retaliated, wounding La Barbera in 
Milan in May; in response, La Barbera's ambitious lieutenants Pietro 
Torreta and Tommaso Buscetta (later to become the most famous of all 
Mafia pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.

On June 30, 1963, "the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT" was left in 
one of the tangerine groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of butane 
with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat. A Giulietta had 
already exploded that morning in a nearby town, killing two people, so 
the carabinieri were cautious and summoned army engineers for 
assistance. "Two hours later two bomb disposal experts arrived, cut the 
fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lt. Mario 
Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot, he detonated the huge 
quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men were blown to pieces 
by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for 
hundreds of metres around." (The site is today marked by one of the 
several monuments to bomb victims in the Palermo region.)

Before this "First Mafia War" ended in 1964, the Sicilian population had 
learned to tremble at the very sight of a Giulietta and car bombings had 
become a permanent part of the Mafia repertoire. They were employed 
again during an even bloodier second Mafia war or Matanza in 1981-83, 
then turned against the Italian public in the early 1990s after the 
conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of sensational 
"maxi-trials." The most notorious of these blind-rage car bombings -- 
presumably organized by 'Tractor' Provenzano and his notorious 
Corleonese gang -- was the explosion in May 1993 that damaged the 
world-famous Uffizi Gallery in the heart of Florence and killed 5 
pedestrians, injuring 40 others.

"The Black Stuff"

"We could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto 
something, and it took off from there."

-- IRA veteran talking about the first ANFO car bomb

The first-generation car bombs -- Jaffa-Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers, and 
Palermo -- were deadly enough (with a maximum yield usually equal to 
several hundred pounds of TNT), but required access to stolen industrial 
or military explosives. Journeymen bomb-makers, however, were aware of a 
homemade alternative - notoriously dangerous to concoct, but offering 
almost unlimited vistas of destruction at a low cost. Ammonium nitrate 
is a universally available synthetic fertilizer and industrial 
ingredient with extraordinary explosive properties, as witnessed by such 
accidental cataclysms as an explosion at a chemical plant in Oppau, 
Germany in 1921 -- the shock waves were felt 150 miles away and only a 
vast crater remained where the plant had been -- and a Texas City 
disaster in 1947 (600 dead and 90% of the town structurally damaged). 
Ammonium nitrate is sold in half-ton quantities affordable by even the 
most cash-strapped terrorist, but the process of mixing it with fuel oil 
to create an ANFO explosive is more than a little tricky as the 
Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) found out in late 1971.

"The car bomb was [re]discovered entirely by accident," explains 
journalist Ed Maloney in his The Secret History of the IRA, "but its 
deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began in late 
December 1971 when the IRA's quartermaster general, Jack McCabe, was 
fatally injured in an explosion caused when an experimental, 
fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the 'black stuff' exploded as he 
was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern outskirts of 
Dublin. [Provisionals'] GHQ warned that the mix was too dangerous to 
handle, but Belfast had already received a consignment, and someone had 
the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a fuse and a 
timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast." The resulting 
explosion made a big impression upon the Belfast leadership.

The "black stuff" -- which the IRA soon learned how to handle safely -- 
freed the underground army from supply-side constraints: the car bomb 
enhanced destructive capacity yet reduced the likelihood of Volunteers 
being arrested or accidentally blown up. The ANFO-car bomb combination, 
in other words, was an unexpected military revolution, but one fraught 
with the potential for political and moral disaster. "The sheer size of 
the devices," emphasizes Moloney, "greatly increased the risk of 
civilian deaths in careless or bungled operations."

The IRA Army Council led by Sean MacStiofain, however, found the new 
weapon's awesome capabilities too seductive to worry about ways in which 
its grisly consequences might backfire on them. Indeed, car bombs 
reinforced the illusion, shared by most of the top leadership in 1972, 
that the IRA was one final military offensive away from victory over the 
English government. Accordingly, in March 1972, two car bombs were sent 
into Belfast city center followed by garbled phone warnings that led 
police to inadvertently evacuate people in the direction of one of the 
explosions: Five civilians were killed along with two members of the 
security forces. Despite the public outcry as well as the immediate 
traffic closure of the Royal Avenue shopping precinct, the Belfast 
Brigade's enthusiasm for the new weapon remained undiminished and the 
leadership plotted a huge attack designed to bring normal commercial 
life in Northern Ireland to an abrupt halt. MacStiofain boasted of an 
offensive of "the utmost ferocity and ruthessness" that would wreck the 
"colonial infrastructure."

On Friday, July 21st, IRA Volunteers left 20 car bombs or concealed 
charges on the periphery of the now-gated city center, with detonations 
timed to follow one another at approximately five-minute intervals. The 
first car bomb exploded in front of the Ulster Bank in north Belfast and 
blew both legs off a Catholic passerby; successive explosions damaged 
two railroad stations, the Ulster bus depot on Oxford Street, various 
railway junctions, and a mixed Catholic-Protestant residential area on 
Cavehill Road. "At the height of the bombing, the center of Belfast 
resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds of suffocating smoke 
enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost drowning 
out the hysterical screams of panicked shoppers." A series of telephoned 
IRA warnings just created more chaos, as civilians fled from one 
explosion only to be driven back by another. Seven civilians and two 
soldiers were killed and more than 130 people were seriously wounded.

Although not an economic knockout punch, "Bloody Friday" was the 
beginning of a "no business as usual" bombing campaign that quickly 
inflicted significant damage on the Northern Ireland economy, 
particularly its ability to attract private and foreign investment. The 
terror of that day also compelled authorities to tighten their 
anti-car-bomb "ring of steel" around the Belfast city center, making it 
the prototype for other fortified enclaves and future "green zones." In 
the tradition of their ancestors, the Fenians, who had originated 
dynamite terrorism in the 1870s, Irish Republicans had again added new 
pages to the textbook of urban guerrilla warfare. Foreign aficionados, 
particularly in the Middle East, undoubtedly paid close attention to the 
twin innovations of the ANFO car bomb and its employment in a protracted 
bombing campaign against an entire urban-regional economy.

What was less well understood outside of Ireland, however, was the 
enormity of the wound that the IRA's car bombs inflicted on the 
Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday destroyed much of the IRA's 
heroic-underdog popular image, produced deep revulsion amongst ordinary 
Catholics, and gave the British government an unexpected reprieve from 
the worldwide condemnation it had earned for the Blood Sunday massacre 
in Derry and internment without trial. Moreover, it gave the Army the 
perfect pretext to launch massive Operation Motorman: 13,000 troops led 
by Centurian tanks entered the "no-go" areas of Derry and Belfast and 
reclaimed control of the streets from the Republican movement. The same 
day, a bloody, bungled car bomb attack on the village of Claudy in 
County Londonderry killed 8 people. (Protestant Loyalist paramilitary 
groups -- who never bothered with warnings and deliberately targeted 
civilians on the other side -- would claim Bloody Friday and Claudy as 
sanctions for their triple car bomb attack on Dublin during afternoon 
rush hour on May 17, 1974 which left 33 dead, the highest one-day toll 
in the course of the "Troubles.")

The Belfast debacle led to a major turnover in IRA leadership, but 
failed to dispel their almost cargo-cult-like belief in the capacity of 
car bombs to turn the tide of battle. Forced onto the defensive by 
Motorman and the backlash to Bloody Friday, they decided to strike at 
the very heart of British power instead. The Belfast Brigade planned to 
send ten car bombs to London via the Dublin-Liverpool ferry using fresh 
volunteers with clean records, including two young sisters, Marion and 
Dolours Price. Snags arose and only four cars arrived in London; one of 
these was detonated in front of the Old Bailey, another in the center of 
Whitehall, close to the Prime Minister's house at Number 10 Downing 
Street. One hundred and eighty Londoners were injured and one was 
killed. Although the 8 IRA bombers were quickly caught, they were 
acclaimed in the West Belfast ghettoes and the operation became a 
template for future Provisional bombing campaigns in London, culminating 
in the huge explosions that shattered the City of London and unnerved 
the world insurance industry in 1992 and 1993.

Hell's Kitchen (the 1980s)

"We are soldiers of God and we crave death. We are ready to turn Lebanon 
into another Vietnam."

-- Hezbollah communiqué

Never in history has a single city been the battlefield for so many 
contesting ideologies, sectarian allegiances, local vendettas, or 
foreign conspiracies and interventions as Beirut in the early 1980s. 
Belfast's triangular conflicts -- three armed camps (Republican, 
Loyalist, and British) and their splinter groups -- seemed 
straightforward compared to the fractal, Russian-doll-like complexity of 
Lebanon's civil wars (Shiite versus Palestinian, for example) within 
civil wars (Maronite versus Moslem and Druze) within regional conflicts 
(Israel versus Syria) and surrogate wars (Iran versus the United States) 
within, ultimately, the Cold War. In the fall of 1971, for example, 
there were 58 different armed groups in West Beirut alone. With so many 
people trying to kill each other for so many different reasons, Beirut 
became to the technology of urban violence what a tropical rainforest is 
to the evolution of plants.

Car bombs began to regularly terrorize Moslem West Beirut in the fall of 
1981, apparently as part of an Israeli strategy to evict the Palestine 
Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. The Israeli secret service, 
the Mossad, had previously employed car bombs in Beirut to assassinate 
Palestinian leaders (novelist Ghassan Kanfani in July 1972, for 
example), so no one was especially surprised when evidence emerged that 
Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to Middle Eastern schoalr 
Rashid Khalidi, "A sequence of public confessions by captured drivers 
made clear these [car bombings] were being utilized by the Israelis and 
their Phalangist allies to increase the pressure on the PLO to leave."

Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when an "enormous [car] bomb blew a 
45-foot-crater in the road and brought down an entire block of 
apartments. The building collapsed like a concertina, crushing more than 
50 of its occupants to death, most of them Shia refugees from southern 
Lebanon." Several of the car bombers were captured and confessed that 
the bombs had been rigged by the Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of the 
FBI or the British Special Branch. But if such atrocities were designed 
to drive a wedge of terror between the PLO and Lebanese Moslems, they 
had the inadvertent result (as did the Israeli air force's later 
cluster-bombing of civilian neighborhoods) of turning the Shias from 
informal Israeli allies into shrewd and resolute enemies.

The new face of Shiite militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out 
of an amalgamation of Islamic Amal with other pro-Khomeini groupuscules. 
Trained and advised by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Bekaa Valley, 
Hezbollah was both an indigenous resistance movement with deep roots in 
the Shiite slums of southern Beirut and, at the same time, the long arm 
of Iran's theocratic revolution. Although some experts espouse 
alternative theories, Islamic Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen as the 
author, with Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating attacks 
on American and French forces in Beirut during 1983. Hezbollah's 
diabolic innovation was to marry the IRA's ANFO car bombs to the 
kamikaze -- using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of explosives into 
the lobbies of embassies and barracks in Beirut, and later into Israeli 
checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon.

The United States and France became targets of Hezbollah and its Syrian 
and Iranian patrons after the Multinational Force in Beirut, which 
supposedly had landed to allow for the safe evacuation of the PLO from 
that city, evolved into the informal and then open ally of the Maronite 
government in its civil war against the Moslem-Druze majority. The first 
retaliation against President Reagan's policy occurred on April 18, 
1983, when a pickup truck carrying 2,000 pounds of ANFO explosives 
suddenly swerved across traffic into the driveway of the oceanfront U.S. 
embassy in Beirut. The driver gunned the truck past a startled guard and 
crashed through the lobby door. "Even by Beirut standards," writes 
former CIA agent Robert Baer, "it was an enormous blast, shattering 
windows. The USS Guadalcanal, anchored five miles off the coast, 
shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the center of the 
seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained 
suspended for what seemed an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of 
dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper."

Whether as a result of superb intelligence or sheer luck, the bombing 
coincided with a visit to the embassy of Robert Ames, the CIA's national 
intelligence officer for the Near East. It killed him ("his hand was 
found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his finger") 
and all six members of the Beirut CIA station. "Never before had the CIA 
lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy from which 
the agency would never recover." It also left the Americans blind in 
Beirut, forcing them to scrounge for intelligence scraps from the French 
embassy or the British listening station offshore on Cyprus. (A year 
later, Hezbollah completed their massacre of the CIA in Beirut when they 
kidnapped and executed the replacement station chief, William Buckley.) 
As a result, the Agency never foresaw the coming of the 
mother-of-all-vehicle-bomb attacks.

Over the protests of Colonel Gerahty, the commander of the U.S. Marines 
onshore in Beirut, Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, Robert 
McFarlane, ordered the Sixth Fleet in September to open fire on Druze 
militia who were storming Lebanese Army Forces positions in the hills 
above Beirut -- bringing the United States into the conflict brazenly on 
the side of the reactionary Amin Gemayel government. A month later, a 
five-ton Mercedes dump truck hurled past sandbagged Marine sentries and 
smashed through a guardhouse into the ground floor of the "Beirut 
Hilton," the U.S. military barracks in a former PLO headquarters next to 
the international airport. The truck's payload was an incredible 12,000 
pounds of high explosives. "It is said to have been the largest 
non-nuclear blast ever [deliberately] detonated on the face of the 
earth." "The force of the explosion," continues Eric Hammel in his 
history of the Marine landing force, "initially lifted the entire 
four-story structure, shearing the bases of the concrete support 
columns, each measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced by 
numerous one and three quarter inch steel rods. The airborne building 
then fell in upon itself. A massive shock wave and ball of flaming gas 
was hurled in all directions." The Marine (and Navy) death toll of 241 
was the Corps' highest single-day loss since Iwo Jima in 1945.

Meanwhile, another Hezbollah kamikaze had crashed his explosive-laden 
van into the French barracks in West Beirut, toppling the eight-story 
structure, killing 58 soldiers. If the airport bomb repaid the Americans 
for saving Gemayal, this second explosion was probably a response to the 
French decision to supply Saddam Hussein with Super-Etendard jets and 
Exocet missiles to attack Iran. The hazy distinction between local 
Shiite grievances and the interests of Tehran was blurred further when 
two members of Hezbollah joined with 18 Iraqi Shias to truck-bomb the 
U.S. embassy in Kuwait in mid-December. The French embassy, the control 
tower at the airport, the main oil refinery and an expatriate 
residential compound were also targeted in what was clearly a stern 
warning to Iran's enemies.

Following another truck bombing against the French in Beirut as well as 
deadly attacks on Marine outposts, the Multinational Force began to 
withdraw from Lebanon in February 1984. It was Reagan's most stunning 
geopolitical defeat. In the impolite phrase of Washington Post reporter 
Bob Woodward, "Essentially we turned tail and ran and left Lebanon." 
American power in Lebanon, added Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, 
was neutralized by "just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen truck."

[This article -- a preliminary sketch for a book-length study -- will 
appear next year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National 
Insecurity State (Routledge 2007), edited by Michael Sorkin.]

Mike Davis is the author most recently of The Monster at Our Door: The 
Global Threat of Avian Flu 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580115/nationbooks08> (The 
New Press) and Planet of Slums 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670228/nationbooks08> 
(Verso). He lives in San Diego.

[Note for readers: Part 2 of Mike Davis's history of the car bomb, "Car 
Bombs with Wings," will be posted this Thursday.]

Copyright 2006 Mike Davis

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76140
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