A History of the car bomb: part I, part II

/ vehicles / lethal /
Mike Davis writes about the history of the "poor man's airforce", the car bomb, from its origins at the hands of an Italian-American armed Anarchist, through its use in Palestine, Vietnam, Ireland, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sri-Lanka all the way to today's Iraq. The cheapest WMD around, equally deadly in the hands of a rightwing kook in Oklahoma city, the Italian Mafia, the Hezbollah, The IRA, or the CIA and Al Qaeda. Excerpt (though it's hard to pick only one):

Twenty-first century hindsight makes it clear that the defeat of the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1983-84, followed by the CIA's dirty war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent geopolitical repercussions than the loss of Saigon in 1975. The Vietnam War was, of course, an epic struggle whose imprint upon domestic American politics remains profound, but it belonged to the era of the Cold War's bipolar superpower rivalry. Hezbollah's war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the other hand, prefigured (and even inspired) the "asymmetric" conflicts that characterize the millennium. Moreover, unlike peoples' war on the scale sustained by the NLF and the North Vietnamese for more than a generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are easily franchised and gruesomely applicable in a variety of scenarios. Although rural guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts like Kashmir, the Khyber Pass, and the Andes, the center of gravity of global insurgency has moved from the countryside back to the cities and their slum peripheries. In this post-Cold-War urban context, the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks has become the gold standard of terrorism; the 9/11 attacks, it can be argued, were only an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide truck bomb to airliners.