Weeks into NATO’s air campaign in Libya, Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy have reaffirmed the alliance’s commitment to ousting Qaddafi. They make no mention of introducing any ground operations, but in the grand scheme, that matters little. Indeed, air power is the essence of American power; Obama has thrown America’s symbolic weight behind the Libyan rebels.
In Jay Cantor’s excellent historical fiction, The Death of Che Guevara: A Novel, warplanes invariably stop the rebels in their tracks and feel powerless in a way that even government forces do not make them feel. Consider the following passage, describing a 1954 scene in Guatemala:
There was nothing to do. We argued about what to do. Outside we could hear the drone of the planes; the bombs dropped near the air base first; and then, like rolling thunder, they came forward. I lifted the corner of a newspaper page that we had pasted over the window, and saw the red spots, the fires. There weren’t any fire engines tonight. A large explosion shook the glass, and a giant column of fire with a corona of black smoke tongued the air on the edge of the city. They had hit an oil storage tank.
“We must act!” Nico implored us from the couch. There was a sobbing sound to his voice, a fear, a longing. “We can’t just sit here. We have to fight. We have to keep the idea of resistance alive.”
No one responded. He looked loony, banging his hands together; and his words seemed more pointless discharge, another heavy thwacking sound.
And the warplane, even if flown by the local government air force, always came from the North Americans. The warplane was a symbol of “government from above,” rather than from the people.
It was one of many ways in which the U.S. government supported Latin American strongmen, but it was the only way that really gave the rebels pause. Che and his crew could care less about sitting next to the North American “advisers” in the hotel bars, and they eventually went after U.S.-armed troops.
Air power is not only incredibly strong, but it is uniquely American. One could easily argue for the importance of our Navy, which dominates the world’s seas as much as our planes dominate the skies; and our planes largely depend on Navy carriers. But Great Britain had controlled the seas before we did. The airplane, on the other hand, is an American invention, and we have controlled the skies, with few exceptions, since its first application to war.
Think of the movie Black Hawk Down and consider why it made your heart beat so fast. By shooting down an American helicopter, the Somalis showed that our air power is not invincible. To an American audience, that notion is entirely unfamiliar and deeply unsettling.
Photo Credit: http://www.urrib2000.narod.ru/ArticChe-e.html