Helmut Walser Smith – Associate Professor of History

A poem from Regensburg, February 2002
“Shock and Awe”—an American Battle Plan

Shock and awe is how they’ll respond
To eight hundred cruise missiles
By day two,
To Half a Hiroshima,
Dresden on a dead dry day,
To “moral bombing” (as Harris called it),
To killing the Anglo-American way.
“And the bombs are bursting in air,” we’ll sing
In order to disimagine the destruction they bring
To
Ahim, a shoemaker with a shop near Zawra Park,*
And Rashid, who scratches by, selling water and sweeping
sand, And Samitha al Shammeri, whose crime it was to blush
at a man She shouldn’t have.
They’ll respond with shock and awe,
As if to an apparition of the Lord.

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*On 2/6/03 I search on google for a city map of Baghdad. I want to know the names of streets and parks and museums. I want to know if there is a promenade along the Tigris that you can walk along. I find one very indistinct map, and many, many maps with military targets.