B.K. Bangash/AP Photo
As seen on a computer screen from a DVD prepared by al-Qaeda’s media arm, Ayman al-Zawahiri speaks in Islamabad, Pakistan, on June 20, 2006.
Precision aerial bombing has come a long way.
During World War II, a number of Allied bombing raids over Germany missed, and bombed Switzerland instead.
This past weekend, by contrast, a CIA-controlled drone killed al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri while he was standing on the balcony of his safe house in Kabul, apparently without harming anyone in or around the house—quite possibly, without doing damage to any part of the house save, presumably, the balcony.
As such, the execution of al-Zawahiri stands in sharp contrast to that of Osama bin Laden, which was carried out by SEAL Team Six. That was the stuff of movies, and if Zero Dark Thirty focused on the intelligence-gathering required to establish where bin Laden was hiding, it also had the raid itself as a climax, in accord with Aristotle’s strictures on how dramas should conclude.
The actual execution of al-Zawahiri, by contrast, required no SEALs at all—just some anonymous drone operator whose superiors had given the “fire when ready” order, with no risk whatever to that operator. To be sure, that mode of killing had been necessitated by our withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, but it had also been made possible by advances in surveillance and precision weaponry, as President Biden had made clear when he ordered the withdrawal.
In that sense, this weekend’s successful attack marked one more advance in what is perhaps the most unsettling prospect looming over our century: the cumulative reduction and eventual elimination of manual labor.
The mechanization of warfare—which mechanizes the violence, even as the victims remain human, of course—is just one small aspect of this larger tendency. Does anyone doubt that Amazon will entirely replace its warehouse workers with robots as soon as it becomes possible? Or that mechanization has already reduced the number of workers it takes to build a house? (One California building trades union leader has told me that it took 20 electricians to wire a new school in 1980; it takes just four today.) Or the number of workers it takes to produce the steel that goes into a car or a bridge? (The CEO of U.S. Steel has told me that it takes just two steelworkers to produce the same amount of steel that required ten steelworkers in the 1970s.)
Our fantasies have already adapted to this change. G.I. Joe toys come complete with robotized arms; superheroes with extra-human powers clog movie screens while the human heroes of yesteryear are all on the cutting-room floor. There is no 21st-century John Wayne or Gary Cooper.
Even if many of the manual workers of the past century were reduced to cogs on factory assembly lines, a lot of them at least had the collective power of unions behind them, compelling their bosses to pay them adequately for a day’s work. Now, most of them don’t even have that. Their diminished present and their even bleaker future feed into what is variously termed the crisis of masculinity or the problems of boys, into rage at a socioeconomic elite whose definitions of meritocracy usually degrade or dismiss manual work altogether. Mix this economic degradation and cultural irrelevance with factors like racism and voila! You can’t bring back John Wayne, but you can back Donald Trump.
No John Waynes required to take out a jihadist mass murderer, and they sure don’t need that many of you to build an electric car. Send not to know on whom the bomb bursts …
