> [Hi all, > I came across the text below by Zygmunt Bauman, written in 2000. It may be
> useful for some in thinking about war, technology and where it looks like
> we are currently headed. Full reference below. John.]
====================================================================
[Extract from Zygmunt Bauman, "Violence, old and new"]
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> "The aim of the new type of global war is not territorial aggrandizement,
> but throwing any remaining closed doors wide open for the free flow of
> global capital. To paraphrase Clausewitz, we may say that this war is
> primarily the 'promotion of free global trade by other means'. For this
> reason, the aims of such a war could hardly be served by such
> old-fashioned measures as confrontation, engagement and combat, which
> inevitably imply entering commitments and bearing the consequences.
> Ideally, one would leave the selection of targets entirely to computers
> and smart, self-guiding missiles. Short of that ideal, the war planners
> tried to reduce the tasks of the army professionals to running the
> software programs and monitoring the computer screens. The new, global era
> wars are wars at a distance, hit-and-run wars: the bombers leave the scene
> before the enemy can manage any response and before the carnage can be
> seen.
>           Richard Falk has compared this new war with torture: like the
> torturer, the attacker is fully in charge and free to select any violent
> methods of pain infliction which he deemed effective and so 'rational'.
> Such a comparison is not fully correct: torture, unlike the new war of the
> globalization era, made and encounter and, indeed, interaction between the
> torturer and the victim both unavoidable and 'productive'. The new global
> wars, unthinkable without the electronic technology which renders time
> instantaneous and annihilates the resistance of space, are won by the
> avoidance of encounter and by denying the adversary any chance of
> responding. This difference, to be sure, only magnifies the privileges
> which the attackers in a hit-and-run global war share with the torturer.
> Their freedom of manoeuvre is nearly absolute and so is their impunity.
> Casualties are counted only 'down there' on the ground - but the attackers
> never touch the ground if they are lucky; and all the odds are that luck
> will be on their side.
>           In this, I suggest, lies the most sinister potential of wars
> which the military arm of the globalizing forces is able and willing to
> launch. The prospect of utter impunity, coupled with the redundancy of
> time-consuming, costly and risk-fraught ideological mobilization and the
> irrelevance of 'patriotic capital', as well as with freedom from the need
> to clean up the mess and devastation caused by the assault, combine into a
> temptation which may be not just difficult to resist but all too easy
> (indeed, 'rational') to surrender to. All those who pursue the politics of
> global free trade and global capital flow find that this particular 'other
> means' has a lot to recommend it, and there is very little to advise them
> against taking this option, let alone to prevent them from taking it once
> that is what they have resolved to do.
>           A century likely to go down in history as one of violence
> perpetrated by nation-states on its subjects has come to a close. Another
> violent century - this time a century of violence prompted by the
> progressive disablement of the nation-states by free-flowing global powers
> - is likely to succeed it.
>
> Zygmunt Bauman, "Violence, old and new" in his _The Individualized
> Society_ (2001), Polity Press.:Cambridge. Pages 218-219.
>

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