The Russians have been bombing Aleppo in pursuance of military objectives. That is hardly something that is unprecedented in warfare over the last century. But in the US and UK the consequences of that bombing are placed on the TV screens in a way that mirrors the absence of all such images of the bombing of the Western democracies and their allies.

James Petras has recently written in the Unz Review an article entitled ‘The Politics of Bombing’:

“The US and EU are the world’s foremost practitioners of ‘wholesale bombing’. They engage in serial attacks against multiple countries without declaring war or introducing their own citizen ground troops. They specialize in indiscriminant attacks on civilian populations – unarmed women, children, elders and non-combatant males. In other words, for the ‘wholesale bombers’, unleashing terror on societies is an everyday event.

“The US and EU practice ‘total war’ from the skies, not sparing a single sphere of everyday, civilian life. They bomb neighborhoods, markets, vital infrastructure, factories, schools and health facilities. The result of their daily, ‘ordinary’ bombing is the total erasure of the very structures necessary for civilized existence, leading to mass dispossession and the forced migration of millions in search of safety.

“It is not surprising that the refugees seek safety in the countries that have destroyed their means of normal existence. The wholesale bombers of the US-EU do not bomb their own cities and citizens – and so millions of the dispossessed are desperate to get in. Wholesale bomb policies have emerged because prolonged ground wars in the targeted countries evoke strong domestic opposition from their citizens unwilling to accept casualties among US and EU soldiers. Wholesale bombing draws less domestic opposition because the bombers suffer few losses.

“At the same time, while mass aerial bombing reduces the political risks of casualties at home, it expands and deepens violent hostility abroad. The mass flight of refugees to US-EU population centers allows the entry of violent combatants who will bring their own version of the total war strategies to the homes of their invaders.”

The concept of strategic area bombing (or ‘terror bombing’) which the RAF adopted in Britain’s Second World War on the Germans, and which it used par excellence in the Dresden massacre in February 1945, originated in the new form of warfare developed by England in 1917/8 and first implemented against German and Ottoman civilians.

Sir Charles Webster and Dr. Noble Frankland noted in their book, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (Vol. 1, p. 42) issued by H.M. Stationery Office, London, in 1961, that: “Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1929, had a decisive influence on the future of the R.A.F.” They explained that the essence of Trenchard’s policy was that “future wars would be won by producing such moral effect on the enemy civilian population that its government would have to sue for peace. The advantage of destroying military installations and factories was recognised but he maintained that it was easier to overcome the will to resist among the workers than to destroy the means to resist” (p. 86).

According to his biographer Lord Hugh Trenchard, the ‘father’ of the Royal Air Force, called for “fighting the Germans in Germany” from as early as June 1916 (Andrew Boyle, Trenchard, p.295). This was something the British Army was incapable of due to the defensive effectiveness of the Germans.

Trenchard’s main accomplice in the development of terror bombing was the Glasgow industrialist at Lloyd George’s Ministry of Munitions, William Weir. Weir’s “ambition was to build bombers by the hundred to carry the war into Germany.” (p.202) In the Spring of 1917 Weir put forward the idea of a long-range bombing campaign against Germany. Lord Weir was appointed Air Minister to the Lloyd George government in 1918.

During 1917 Trenchard implored the War Cabinet to let him “attack the industrial centres of Germany” (p.295). He declared himself unimpressed with any sporadic bombing the German air force had done over England and “the few occasions French machines raided the Rhineland cities, it was always emphasised that such attacks were in the nature of reprisals. Trenchard was against retaliation; his sole concern was to cripple Germany by means of a sustained air offensive.” (p.296)

Trenchard argued for a new form of aerial warfare – not the miserable, retaliatory sorties/raids of the German and French machines but a strategic campaign of terror and devastation of civilian areas. He authoritatively described the role that strategic bombers should play in war in a study prepared for the Allied Supreme War Council in 1918. He specified two main objectives for the his proposed force of strategic bombers – to destroy the enemy both morally and materially. In order to achieve this end, he argued for the need to attack enemy industrial centres where striking at the centres of production could do vital damage. This entailed precision bombing. But he also argued for achieving the maximum effect on the morale of the enemy by striking at what he saw as the most vulnerable part of the German population – the working class. This entailed saturation area bombing.

According to his biographer Lord Trenchard had a major effect on the developing United States Air Force and its philosophy of war from the skies. Apparently Trenchard “conceived and shaped, under the stress of war, the embryo of the future US Strategic Bombing Command; fed by British machines, nursed by British technicians, its first members were enrolled and initiated in Trenchard’s exacting school… He was thinking in terms of the future, of the destruction which would rain down on the industrial vitals of Germany the following Spring…” (p.297)

But the chief of the Allied military command, Foch, denied Trenchard the resources for his strategic air offensive in 1917/8, and his desired large, long-range bomber fleet. So Trenchard decided to spread terror to the general German population:

“Lacking the resources to concentrate attacks on one target at a time, Trenchard so spread his raids that no city within range could feel entirely safe. The bombers might cause little destruction; what counted was their impact on the spirit of the German people. The cumulative effect on morale would far exceed the actual toll of damage inflicted, providing the bombing went on, day and night, with few interruptions…” (p.304)

This was the blueprint for things to come when the RAF and USAF used sustained bombing over days to systematically pulverise German civilian centres and their occupants in the Second World War on Germany. Trenchard imagined it in 1917 and had planned it for 1918-19.

In June 1918 over 70 tons of bombs were dropped on German cities by Trenchard’s machines. In July 85 tons were dropped on Cologne, Coblenz, Mainz, Stuttgart and Saarbrucken. From August to November 75 of Trenchard’s long-range bombers were lost out of his fleet of 120 machines. But despite the enormous losses of his airmen Trenchard was encouraged by letters captured from German soldiers from their relatives in the Rhineland cities which “evoked the terror sown in the Rhineland and Saarland cities, a terror which indirectly affected husbands, sons and brothers in uniform as well.” (p.311)

Istanbul was also subjected to air raids. Between March and October 1918, a dozen air raids were made on the Ottoman capital. All air raids were night time attacks, maximising the chances of civilian casualties. Hundreds of people were killed, many of them Christians, in the indiscriminate attacks. The bombs did not discriminate between Turk, Jew, Greek or Armenian.

The Ottoman Harbiye Nezareti, (Ministry of War) communicated a request to the “Government of England” from Hariciye Nezareti, (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) stating that

“İstanbul is a city which enjoys a number of very valuable hospitals, whereas it has no military institutions of significant importance. Continuous air attacks on İstanbul are nothing but a violation of legal norms vis-à-vis civilians. In the event that these attacks will not cease, the Government of Turkey will be obliged to transfer all enemy aliens to internment camps regardless of their age and gender. This is due to the increasing tension among the public facing these air attacks and in the event that a public retaliation against the resident subjects of the governnments of Allies shall take place, the difficulty posed by the possible prevention of this should be duly taken into account of by the Government.”(Harbiye Nezareti to Hariciye Nezareti, August 28, 1918, File No: 7310/8959, [BOA HR.SYS 2456/27-3], Department of Ottoman Archives, Prime Ministry of the Republic of Turkey. I am grateful to Turan Cetiner for this information).

But the British ignored the request and the air raids continued and intensified. The threat embedded in the message of the Ottoman Ministry of War was not carried out.

Lord Trenchard’s biographer makes it clear that civilian casualties were of no concern of his:

“It was still only the experimental overture to a dreadful revolution in warfare. No squeamishness for the fate of civilians distracted Trenchard’s mind. His sole purpose was to weaken the enemy’s will to resist. It was for moralists and lawyers to argue whether a munitions’ plant and the workers’ houses about it should be struck off the list of legitimate war targets; it was for statesmen to act on their verdict… Trenchard consoled himself that his bombs were not aimed indiscriminately at civilians but at factories which supplied the armies and so prolonged the slaughter on the battlefield. He prided himself on strictly professional thinking unclouded by vindictiveness or mawkish sentimentality.

“Weir was less pernickety than Trenchard. ‘I would very much like if you could start a really big fire in one of the German towns,’ he wrote in September, suggesting that incendiary bombs could be used to spectacular advantage in older built-up districts where there were few ‘good, permanent, modern buildings.’ And again: ‘If I were you, I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness, and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.

“I do not think you need be anxious about our degree of accuracy when bombing stations in the middle of towns. The accuracy is not great at present, and all the pilots drop their eggs well into the middle of the town generally.” (p.312)

This represented an innovative blurring of the traditional difference between combatant and civilian in which civilian lives were treated in the same way as those of combatants. And it prepared the way for ‘accidents’ or ‘collateral damage’ as it is called today, so that aerial terrorism waged by states could be practiced on women and children without any moral remorse. In the years that followed British air war strategists almost completely abandoned the idea or pretence of precision bombing in favour of the strategy of anti-civilian bombing.

Carroll Quigley, the American geopolitics professor, in his 1348 page book ‘Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time’ concludes that strategic bombing was not, as the Irish Times concluded a number of years ago in a review of Frederick Taylor’s book, in the case of Dresden, a “masterstroke” that “went horribly right,” but actually a great failure in military terms:

“ the strategic bombing of Germany was mishandled from the beginning until almost the end of the war. Correctly, such strategic bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them concentrated. After the war German general Gotthard Heinrici said that the war would have ended the year earlier if the allied bombing had been concentrated on ammonia plants. Whether this is correct or not, the fact remains that strategic bombing was largely a failure, and was so from poor choice of targets and from long intervals between repeated attacks. Relentless daily bombardment, with heavy fighter escort, day after day, in spite of losses, with absolute refusal to be distracted to area or city bombing because of losses or shifting ideas might have made a weighty contribution to the defeat of Germany and shortened the war substantially. As it was, the contribution by strategic bombing to the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the terrible losses suffered in the effort.

“Indiscriminate bombing of urban areas… was justified with the wholly mistaken arguments that civilian morale was a German weak point and that the destruction of workers housing would break this morale. The evidence shows that the German war effort was not weakened in any way by lowering of civilian morale, in spite of the horrors heaped upon it… the British effort to break German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary working people in industrial cities. ” (pp.800-2.)

But was the extermination of the German working class a purely military matter? Perhaps it was a kind of racial cleansing motivated by the Social Darwinism in England that had seen the Naval Blockade of 1914-19 as an instrument designed to “degenerate the German racial stock” (as one Imperialist publication put it in the infamous article, The Huns of 1940) by destroying infants and producing sub-normal human specimens from the wombs of starving German women. The Royal Navy had not degenerated the German racial stock sufficiently in 1918-9 to disable the Hun by 1940, so a large proportion of the German masses needed to be eradicated by the Royal Air Force when the opportunity presented itself from 1942-45, before the Russians won the War.Perhaps that was what it was all about – casual Genocide.

Attacking German workers, destroying their morale, and also hopefully provoking them to revolt against their leaders was a widely held notion among the British military circles prior to the Great War – only then it was planned that the Royal Navy would do it through sea blockade. Trenchard took the Naval blockade strategy that England had planned against Germany from 1903, had used against the civilian population between 1914 and 1919, and applied it to air warfare, for the next war on Germany.

Trenchard’s belief in the awesome power of strategic area bombing was elaborately substantiated by the Italian Air Force general and military philosopher, Giulio Douhet, who encapsulated strategic bombing into a coherent theory of air power in his book, The Command Of The Air, published in 1921.

Douhet contended that the decision in future wars “must depend upon smashing the material and moral resources of a people caught up in a frightful cataclysm which haunts them everywhere without cease until the final collapse of all social organisation… the decisive blows will be directed at civilians, that element of the country at war least able to sustain them.” (p.54, English edition of 1943)

Douhet warned that Europe would have to reconsider its rules of warfare and institute a reversal of taken for granted historical principles of honour. A new principle of warfare was required:

“ this general principle of war…seems inhuman to us because of the traditional notion which must be changed. Everyone says, and is convinced of it, that war is no longer a clash between armies, but is a clash between nations, between whole populations. During the last war this clash took the form of a long process of attrition between armies, and that seemed natural and logical. Because of its direct action, the air arm pits populations directly against populations, and does away with the intervening armour which kept them apart during the past war. Now it is actually populations and nations which come to blows and sees each other’s throats.

“This fact sharpens that peculiar traditional notion which makes people weep to hear of a few women and children killed in an air raid, and leaves them unmoved to hear of thousands of soldiers killed in action. All human lives are equally valuable; but because tradition holds that the soldier is fated to die in battle, his death does not upset them much, despite the fact that the soldier, a robust young man, should be considered to have the maximum individual value in the general economy of humanity…

“Any distinction between belligerent and non-belligerent is no longer admissible today either in fact or theory.

“War is won by crushing the resistance of the enemy; and this can be done more easily, faster, more economically, and with less bloodshed by directly attacking the resistance at its weakest point. The more rapid and terrifying the arms are, the faster they will reach the vital centres and the more deeply they will affect moral resistance. “(p.158/9).

The first two British wars of the twentieth century – the conquest of South Africa and the Great War on Germany – changed the nature of war in Europe and the world, from limited wars with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national armies. This had far-reaching consequences. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants and between belligerents and neutrals became blurred and ultimately indistinguishable.

International law, which had grown up in the period of the limited dynasty wars, made a great deal of such distinctions. Previously, non-combatants had extensive rights which sought to protect their ways of life as much as possible during periods of warfare and neutrals had similar rights. In return, there were strict duties on noncombatants to remain non-participants in the fighting. All these distinctions broke down in 1914-1915, with the result that there were wholesale violations of existing international law and conventions of honour.

These violations were more extensive on the part of the Entente side than on the German/Austria-Hungarian side. That is a fact distorted by anti-German atrocity propagandists in the British press. But the British recognised it and understood the weakness of the Germans in possessing a sense of military honour that would disable them from competing with England in the eradication of civilians.

The Germans still maintained the older traditions of the professional army, and their geographical and strategic position, with limited manpower and economic resources, made it to their advantage to maintain the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant and between belligerent and neutral. By maintaining the distinction of former conflicts they would have had to fight just the enemy army and not the enemy civilian population, and, once the former was defeated, would have had little to fear from the latter, which could have been controlled by a minimum of troops. If they could have maintained a distinction between belligerent and neutral, it would have been impossible to blockade Germany, since basic supplies could have been imported through neutral countries.

The German plan of War – a defensive form of offence – called for a short, decisive war against the enemy armed forces, and they never expected nor desired a total economic mobilisation or even a total military mobilisation, since these might disrupt the existing social and political structure in Germany which was a very successful socialised economy. For these reasons, Germany made no plans for industrial or economic mobilisation, for a long war, or for withstanding a blockade, and hoped to mobilise a smaller proportion of its manpower than its immediate enemies to defend herself.

But ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium – where Belgian civilians were encouraged to blur the distinction between combatant and non-combatant by indulging in behind the lines terrorist attacks on German supply lines – were used by the British to justify their own planned violations of international law. As early as August 1914, the Royal navy was treating food as contraband and interfering with neutral shipments of it to Europe. In November 1914, Britain declared the whole sea from Scotland to Iceland a ‘war-zone’, covered it with fields of mines, and ordered ships going to the Baltic, Scandinavia, or to the Low Countries to go by way of the English Channel, where they were stopped, searched, and much of their cargo seized, even when these cargoes could not be declared contraband under existing international law. In reprisal the Germans on February 18, 1915, declared the English Channel a ‘war-zone,’ announced that their submarines would sink shipping in that area, and ordered shipping for the Baltic area to use the route north of Scotland.

And it was further declared by Liberal England and Redmondite Ireland that there could be no neutrals in the fight between Civilisation/Democracy and Barbarism/Prussianism. And so more and more of neutral Europe were sucked in to the conflict as Britain extended the war into a world conflict.

Italy was one of those countries that had been neutral at the start of the Great War but had been encouraged by British demonstrations of force in the Mediterranean and Dardanelles into seeing where its future interests lay and joining with the Entente. And the Italian officer, Douhet was one such – along with his compatriot Mussolini – who was impressed by this show of force and reorientation of Italian strategic thinking.

It was the Italians who first used bombing in warfare, to my knowledge, in the assault on the Ottoman territories in present day Libya in 1908. And of course, the bombers have returned to Libya recently to destroy a functional state, create ground for Jihadists and unleash a flood of migrants on the European mainland that the government of Libya had previously prevented.

Between 1918 and 1939 Douhet’s ideas on air warfare and Hugh Trenchard’s proposals were readily accepted and implemented by the British government which began to regard area bombing as a necessary part of warfare, no matter how immoral it was regarded by others – including even Hitler.

Douhet’s theory received support from the commander-in-chief of the USAAF, General Billy Mitchell. Trenchard, Douhet and Mitchell unanimously predicted that future wars could be won by airpower alone, and that terror attacks on cities by independent air forces with high explosive, incendiary bombs and gas, could destroy a nation’s will to resist. The view that “the bomber would always get through” to the enemy country, no matter what happened, was expressed by Stanley Baldwin, the British Prime Minister. It provided a boost to the air theorists’ arguments that the bomber would win wars for whichever country that possessed them.

Carroll Quigley noted the link between the ideas of Trenchard/Douhet and the 1930s policy of appeasement:

“Acceptance of Douhetism by civilian leaders in France and England was one of the key factors in appeasement and especially in the Munich surrender of September 1938… the Chamberlain government reflected these ideas and prepared the way to Munich by issuing 35 million gas masks to city dwellers… in spite of the erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, and the rest, the war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no plans, and no equipment for strategic bombing. The British, who had the intentions but still lacked the plans and equipment, also held back.” (Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time, pp. 799-800.)

This is the relationship between the policy of “appeasement” and terror bombing – a means by which the British believed they could win wars by terrorising the enemy’s civilian populations into submission and avoiding suffering military casualties on the scale of the Great War.

I am sure readers can see the relevance of this for today.

Appeasement is a dirty word these days. Bombing is very much the order of the day, from the White House to Westminster.

A spokesman for the BBC on Radio 4, when criticised for its minimal coverage of the recent massacre of 80 Syrian soldiers by US/UK bombing, which destabilised the Russian/US ceasefire plan, said that the BBC is not neutral. It is always on the side of “Democracy against authoritarian dictatorships”. Presumably this not only means that the BBC is always on the British side against those whom the British State marks out as an enemy, it also means that if Democracy slaughters civilians whilst governments which do not conform to the democratic standards set by the State which is secure in its island, defend themselves, the aggressors are always right, since they represent Democracy! So Democracy is with the Angels no matter how despicably it behaves in the world and the rest are the Devils. And accidents, as Hugh Trenchard said, will happen!

It should be understood that England, prior to the Great War, had always fought its wars using others – the Irish, mercenaries and foreign countries. The intention of the Liberal Imperialist coterie in 1914 was to fight the Great War in a similar fashion – albeit with a 100,000 strong expedition force to aid France and Russia’s encirclement of Germany. But the Great War did not turn out as planned. It was not over by Christmas because Germany was able to resist the armies of France and Russia and England had to commit much more of her population to the war to crush her. A negotiated peace was impossible since the fight had been declared to be one of Good against Evil and there was no settling or Pact to be had with the Devil. Conscription had to be introduced in England and it took years to break down the German defences at a very high cost – this time borne by the English middle class as well.

The English Middle Class War and the high level of respectable casualties (as opposed to Irish “scum of the earth” as Wellington called his men) had a serious effect on the British will to wage this kind of war again. And it was determined that it should be avoided, if at all possible. This was one part to the Appeasement policy of the 1930’s (the other part was the hope that Hitler could be encouraged to attack the Soviet Union to finish off the main enemy of Britain, or at least bleed each other dry). So what went hand in hand with the Appeasement policy was the terror bombing policy – a means to wage war against an enemy civilian population without committing large numbers of English manhood to the fields that had took so much of its blood in the Great War. And so the British World War was a pathetic thing. After some fighting for about a month in France the British Army scuttled off from Dunkirk to shelter on its island for the next 4 years until the US had joined the World War and the Russians had began advancing on Berlin.

Fifty million died in Britain’s Second World War on Germany and less than half a million of them were British! That statistic just about sums up the contribution of England to the fighting against Hitler. The British War largely consisted of terrorist/commando raids, prisoner of war escapes, defence of its trade by the Royal Navy and bombing.

Know-alls from Dublin have lately condemned the Provisional IRA for its “ungentlemanly warfare”. Where did this army learn about warfare as young boys but from the saturation of British war movies and the “ungentlemanly warfare” depicted on their TV screens.

Carroll Quigley makes the following comments on the British Appeasers and advocates of Douhet’s theories:

“The military advocates of such air bombardment concentrated their attention on what was called strategic bombing, that is, on the construction of long-range bombing planes for use against industrial targets and other civilian objectives and on very fast fighter planes for defence against such bombers. They generally belittled the effectiveness of anti-aircraft artillery and were generally warm advocates of an air force separately organised and commanded and not under direct control of army or naval commanders. These advocates were very influential in Britain and in the United States.

The upholders of strategic bombing received little encouragement in Germany, in Russia, or even in France, because of the dominant position held by traditional army officers in all three of these countries. In France, all kinds of air power was generally neglected, while in the other two country strategic bombing against civilian objectives was completely subordinated in favour of tactical bombing of military objectives immediately on the fighting front. Such tactical bombing demanded planes of a more flexible character, with shorter range than strategic bombers and less speed than defensive fighters, and under the close control of the local commanders of the ground forces so that their bombing efforts could be directed, like a kind of mobile and long range artillery, at those points of resistance, of supply, or of reserves which would help the ground offensive most effectively. Such dive-bombers or Stukas played a major role in the early German victories of 1939 to 41. Here, again, this superiority was based on quality and method of usage and not on numbers.” (Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time, p.665.)

The English, who based their plans for war on Germany on the destruction of German cities and the killing of their inhabitants, believed that Germany had similar plans for London. And they repeated the view that “the bomber will always get through” so that they could convince the general public that facilitating Hitler – in the hope he would go east against Soviet Russia – was a sound idea.

But the British worry about bombing was entirely self-induced. It was manufactured entirely by Trenchard and the RAF who signalled it would devastate German cities and their civilian populations given half a chance. If that was the case who could expect Mr. Hitler, a volatile chap, to turn the other cheek?

But whilst the British banked on aerial bombing of civilian populations to save its soldiers from trench warfare the Germans developed, within the confines of the Versailles restrictions on its military forces, the theory of fast mobile warfare supported from the skies – Blitzkrieg. And Hitler had no intention of attacking British cities until Churchill brought on the blitz by dropping bombs on Berlin in a series of provocative raids aimed at diverting Hitler from military targets. The Germans had not, unlike the British, constructed a long-range bomber fleet of 4-enginened machines designed to slaughter civilians. The Luftwaffe was built to support military objections in conjunction with the German Army.

Britain was ill equipped to deal with the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It had decided a land war could not be won without years of costly static land warfare. And its War Office and military planners had decided the way to avoid the killing of Great War proportions was to directly attack the enemy at his weakest point, its civilians, so that such a conflict could be shortened and British military casualties would be fewer as a result.

If warfare could be made humane in any way the German method was humane warfare. At the opening of conflict in 1939/40 Nazi Germany decided that if it were forced into a new European War it would fight a fast, decisive conflict, whilst democratic, Appeasing England would rely on terrorism from the air and sea. The German Army, even under Nazi direction, practiced Blitzkrieg using air power in support of distinct military objectives. And they achieved what they could not do in 4 years in 1914-8 by routing the Anglo-French armies in 4 weeks – with fantastically minimal casualties on both sides.

The traditional aim of European armies was to destroy the enemy combatants will to fight through the physical destruction of those on the enemy side who could defend themselves. And that is how the Nazis fought the Anglo-French forces. It was the Democracies who aimed to slaughter civilians by the million.

If war is defined as a conflict between two bodies equipped to fight and terrorism is military action against people who are not equipped to fight, it must be conceded that Britain was the pioneer of terrorism in the 20th century and the British State was the original state sponsor of terrorism. And Uncle Sam has learnt well from his Anglo-Saxon cousin, Bomber Bull, from whom he received his torch – to go about the world, bombing in the name of Democracy.