Re: Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

Interesting.

It isn't hard to see how and why it's tempting to hypostatize concepts 
like "war" and "city," but it'd be wise to treat each one skeptically,
and even more so in relation to each other. And one needn't reach very
far back in history at all to come up with absolute contrasts. These 
contrasts have many origins: the actual and theorized relationships 
between cities and their surroundings, the need for invading forces to
establish strongholds close enough to support command and logistics
needs, the various technical capacities of forces in conflict (of which 
there are, as often as not, many), styles of warfare that are much more 
complex than the simplistic dichotomy of a/symmetrical warfare, efforts 
to manipulate media (regional, global, sympathetic, etc), and so on.

Take, for example, the Vietnam War. Films of American bombers dropping
bombs in pairs seemingly at random across the Viet countryside have 
become a generic symbol of a futile effort to "bomb them back into the
stone age" or "turn the country into a parking lot" -- two strikingly
different historical vectors, yes? But this bombing wasn't random in 
some euphemistic sense of the term akin to "random violence," rather, 
it was *systematically random*: the purpose of this approach to bombing,
which left deep craters, was to disrupt rural water tables and thereby 
drain rice paddies. This, in conjunction with chemical warfare (Agent 
Orange is well-known, Agent Blue, Agent White and others less so) and 
armored bulldozers formed the doctrine of "Landscape Management": an 
effort to deny the Viet Cong any and every form of cover -- physical, 
social, nutritional -- *in order to urbanize them*. (If you're doing 
serious research on this, I recommend reading the pithy works of Viet 
strategists, like Vo Nguyen Giap's _People's War Against U.S. Aeronaval 
War_, which the Viets, being communists, thoughtfully translated into