To understand Gaddafi's power, we need to delve deeper into the cultural memory of a once colonised country
·
o
It's not on most people's list of anniversaries to remember but it should be. Almost exactly one hundred years ago, the world's first aerial bombing campaign took place – in Libya. In September 1911, desperate for an empire of their own, the Italians invaded. The Ottoman backwater had scarcely mattered to the sultans; for years it had been used chiefly as a place of exile for unfortunate political prisoners. But war propelled Libya into the headlines, the Italians' colonial foray, triggering a chain of events that led inexorably to the first world war.
When the airman Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades from his Taube monoplane on to the enemy outside Tripoli, little damage was done: indeed the practice of priming and then dropping live bombs by hand was nearly as hazardous to the Italian pilots as it was to the Turkish troops below. Nevertheless, a staff officer, Major Giulio Douhet, had seen enough to formulate the arguments that would make him the century's foremost advocate of war from the skies. A decade later, Douhet argued in his classic study The Command of the Air that the sheer terror induced by mass bombing of civilian targets would shorten conflicts and save lives; outrage was thus misplaced, for total war was humane. The western way of war had been born in the north African desert.
Few remembered the Libyan victims. Indeed, the Italians had gone to war assuming the Arab population would greet them as liberators from the Ottoman yoke. By the time they realised their mistake, it was too late, and they were pinned back to the coast. Faced with a popular insurrection, they retaliated through the deliberate destruction of villages, wells and herds with force. Nearly 100,000 people were interned or deported, and thousands died of disease or malnutrition in labour camps. Italian planes once again bombed the country, this time dropping mustard gas in defiance of the 1925 Geneva protocol.
