This article originally appeared in EIR Online, Oct. 28, 2003 (vol. 2, no. 43). We are reposting it this week because of the growing threat of preemptive war—possibily even nuclear war against Iran—posed by Beast-man Dick Cheney and his mentally deficient sidekick George W. Bush.

For more information on Bush and Cheney's drive for war, see EIR Online #31 (Aug. 2), Need To Know This Week: "Warning from Lyndon LaRouche: Cheney's 'Guns of August' Threaten the World."

'Shock and Awe': Terror Bombing, from Wells and Russell to Cheney

by Edward Spannaus

1. Shock and Awe Today

In the run-up to last March's [2003] attack on Iraq, there was much talk in the news media of "shock and awe," combined with pre-war propaganda leaks predicting that Iraq would be hit with many hundreds of cruise-missile strikes in the first hours of the war. The intention of this propaganda was to obtain a specified psychological effect—to terrify the Iraqis, and everyone else, into the conviction that resistance to the U.S. imperial war machine was futile, and that they should capitulate at the first missile, if not before.

The term "shock and awe" began to be used so loosely, that it even became a staple of jokes on late-night TV. Obviously, few of those bandying the term about, understood how evil, and how un-American, the actual "shock and awe" strategic doctrine actually is.

Listen to Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Jr., the authors of the 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance: "One recalls from old photographs and movie or television screens, the comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I and the attendant horrors and death of trench warfare." The authors are blunt, and repeatedly so: what they aim to achieve, is "a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese."

"The military posture and capability of the United States of America are, today, dominant," they write. "Simply put, there is no external adversary in the world that can successfully challenge the extraordinary power of the American military in either regional conflict or in 'conventional' war as we know it, once the United States makes the commitment to take whatever action may be needed."

In traditional military doctrine, the objective is not pure destruction, but to eliminate the adversary's ability to fight by disabling or destroying his military capability, while laying the groundwork to "win the peace."

The "shock and awe" authors are explicit that their objective is psychological—to destroy an adversary's will to resist the power of the United States; not simply to destroy his military capability. They pose as one of the questions undergirding their study, "can Rapid Dominance lead to a form of political deterrence in which the capacity to make impotent, or 'shut down' an adversary, can actually control behavior?"...