A massive explosion on Wall Street. Many dead and the foundation of America's financial system dealt a damaging blow. A shadowy transnational movement behind the attack. This is 1920, after Italian anarchist Mario Buda rode a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron slugs up to J.P. Morgan's headquarters and lit a fuse. The world's cities have never been the same.
In his new book Buda's Wagon, urbanist Mike Davis, well-known for his study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, traces the development of the car bomb and its effects on urban life. The United Nations estimates that more than half the world's population now lives in cities, and Davis believes we are all increasingly vulnerable to attack from these ultimate "idiot weapons," that "even in the most remote science-fiction future" there will be no defense. He talked with TAP about the devastating history and grim future of the car bomb.
What's so special about cars? What makes them so remarkable? Explosions come in all sorts of packages. Are you stretching things a bit when you call the September 11 attacks "car bombs with wings"?
No, I don't think so. The architect of the 1992 van bombing left behind a note in which he complained because his ambition had been to actually bring down one of the towers. This was Ramzi Yousef, and of course it was his uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who's alleged to be the planner of the 9-11 attack. It really was simply a scaling up of the same principle. But the whole point about car bombs is that these are idiot weapons. Unlike almost any other weapon that civilian society has ever faced there's no clear technical fix, there's no security solution, other than to wall off high-value parts of the city. But that tends to just deflect car bombs to other areas, as we've seen as the result of the so-called surge in Baghdad.
There really is no solution in sight. One of the questions I grapple with in my little book is why a weapon so idiot-simple and yet devastating and almost impossible to defend against, why did it take so long for it to acquire the kind of sinister authority it now has in urban life? I put a lot of emphasis on the role played by the U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi support for the resistance against the Soviets, in transferring the technology of terrorism, including car bombs, on an impressive scale. Of course, today you'd simply download it or watch a PowerPoint presentation on the Internet. Or, as I did, buy a little book off Amazon.com that teaches you how to make the state-of-the-art military explosives in your basement.
You say car bombs are "inherently fascist," but sometimes you seem to sympathize with the grievances, if not the methods, of their users. Do you think they could ever be used in a way that wasn't fascist?
As I try to show in the book, this has been a long moral debate amongst resistance movements, nationalist movements, liberation movements, for decades. I thought particularly eloquent and important was the stand taken by Nelson Mandela when he was in prison at Robben Island. This was after a series of South African military interventions and targeted murders of ANC members in exile. There's tremendous pressure on the African National Congress to retaliate. And they in fact did a couple of car bombings against government installations. Mandela was very critical of this, and he opposed it, because he argued that the long-term moral damage to the movement and to the movement's sense of righteousness would be far greater than any tactical advantage it gained in the short term.
And having lived in Northern Ireland for a year in the 1970s and again for a year in the 1980s, I understand and have sympathies for the Republican side. But I've also seen, like anyone who lived in that country in the early 70s did, the immense self-inflicted damage that was done by car bombings on civilian targets. So there's no absolute answer to that. I'm simply making the point that just like air forces, of which they're the poor man's equivalent, car bombs with very few exceptions risk the slaughter of innocents, and raise really disturbing moral questions.
On the other hand, if your strategic aim is precisely to wreck carnage, to operate a strategy of tension, to undermine morale, to push a country into the abyss as is happening with Iraq right now, car bombs are perfect. Because they're deadly, they're cheap, they're accurate, and they can be extremely anonymous. In the book I, for instance, attribute the famous bombings in the early '80s in Beirut to Hezbollah, but the real authorship of this has never been completely established. And indeed, in Beirut, often when there was a bombing or a carnage of some kind, there were always five or six different parties that had motives for doing it. Car bombing and urban terrorism opens up an occult dimension of politics. This is one of the reasons why far-sighted members of resistance and liberation movements have opposed the use (or at least the promiscuous use) of such weapons.
At one point you write that "the car bombers' incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism ... is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle." Could you sketch what form those mutations are taking now -- maybe making distinctions between changes abroad and in the U.S.?
It's brought about major mutations in urban form. Ranging from the new architecture of embassies to the creation of green zones and their equivalents to, perhaps most spectacularly, what's occurred in London, where you not only have thousands of surveillance cameras such that the average citizen is on camera several dozen times a day. But also Ken Livingston's famous traffic congestion plan allows the authorities to monitor and know each automobile that enters the center of the city. Likewise your Underground tickets monitor your presence in the Underground. So car bombs, far more than other threats, have had visible and dramatic consequences in urban life and public architecture, surveillance, and policing the state. Of course they also provide a major motive or rationale for reducing civil liberties -- for more draconian control of public space.
I also made that point to simply highlight the fact that, as always, the Bush administration wastes billions of dollars on the wrong priorities, doing nothing really to make Americans safer. Its bioterror initiative has thrown away hundreds of millions of dollars on anthrax and bubonic plague when it should have been worrying about avian flu or other more possible plagues. Likewise, we have lots of broke[n], and at the end of the day probably totally ineffective, security for mass transportation. But what's really striking is how little they've done around the problem of improvised explosives and particularly car bombs. They started very late in the day at giving this credence as a serious problem. And once they began to actually look at it, they quickly discovered that there isn't a whole lot you can do about it. Outside of the distance of high-value places that can be walled or gated or access-limited.
But some people might look at the list of places that you ticked off and see Belfast and Baghdad and Beirut and Bogota --
And London and Istanbul and New York and Oklahoma City.
So you think the last few years have permanently changed that situation?
What's changed is two things. One is the cheap, anonymous, stupid weapon that can be used with devastating effect by groups large and small -- even demented individuals. And a globalized world economy that presents innumerable new points of vulnerability, targets of opportunity. And it's an almost Darwinian process of selection and adaptation. Groups with the motives have fastened on the weak points. The Provisional IRA's greatest success was the discovery of the scale of economic damage they could do with these huge fertilizer bombs that were designed not to kill people -- although some were killed -- but just designed to create as much economic damage as possible. Damage to the extent that it shook the foundations of the world reinsurance industry. Or other groups, including Al Qaeda, who realized how vulnerable key tourist nodes are in poor countries and the Third World. And places that are extremely valuable to world and national economies but are extremely vulnerable to terrorist attack. Like the attack on the Red Sea or the attacks in Bali or the attacks on the Israeli resort in Kenya.
We're also beginning to see the emergence of more frequent attacks on crucial nodes of oil production and distribution around the world, all of which can be leveraged into enormous economic costs. This may be the most effective form of terrorism yet. So I think what's happened in this coincidence of a globalized world which produces more and more dramatic and poorly defended targets, and the availability of such incentives for a democratic weapon.
Some people have suggested that there are ways of making terrorism "manageable." They claim that in Israel, for instance, the wall might lessen the threat of terrorism there. Do you think there's any way car bombs can be made manageable?
No. Even in the most remote science-fiction future, if you could invent a device that could sniff a few molecules of ammonium nitrate or some other explosives in a moving vehicle, it wouldn't be applicable to most of the world. Most cities are too poor. Car ownership and traffic is growing almost exponentially in the Third World. You can fortify high-value places, create enclaves, but the majority of city dwellers have little hope of being secure from these kinds of weapons. And the Israelis are investing in a huge, self-destructive delusion at the end of the day. Terrorism is of course the world's least helpful term. It gets you absolutely nowhere. I make a big point in the book of saying that look, the worst kind of terrorism is the bombing of cities. And the worst lie and the most obscene term is this concept of collateral damage. "Oh, so sorry, we didn't mean to, but our smart bombs missed." You can't bomb cities even with laser-guided weapons and not kill innocents. Any debate about terrorism that presumes the moral superiority is just part of the current problem in the world.
I come close at times in the book, particularly talking about the Vietcong in Saigon, with almost justifying it. But then again any movement, no matter how righteous the cause, even the revolutionary movements I've supported in my own life, is not exempt from constant, fundamental moral re-examination of its tactics. More often than not these kinds of weapons inflict horrible moral wounds of the movements that use it. Not that that's particularly relevant to the present time, since most of the people using [car bombs] are getting exactly the kind of effect that they want, which is precisely to slaughter innocents.
