Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

Car bombs are an interesting topic, especially recently. But they have made headlines for almost the last hundred years. From New York to Oklahoma City to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Israel and Iraq. It should have been a fascinating history and it would have been had the author not decided that he had to inject his personal political and petty hatreds into the topic. After recounting many car bombings, the book then descends into a diatribe against the American and British governments, claiming that the CIA personally is responsible not only for car-bombings in Lebanon and Afghanistan, but that the CIA trained all the people who then went on to influence all those who now do car bombings elsewhere. This is pretty far fetched. Where was the CIA in 1920? This is like all those books that have as their central thesis a claim that every problem in the world must be the fault of America. But it was Afghan insurgents who detonated the car bombs when fighting the Soviets. It was "Casey's hirelings". Imagine if this book had just been written about car bombs, about their use, their influence, their affect, their death tolls and most interesting, their technological development. That would have been interesting. Oddly enough the terrorists who have masterminded car-bombing campaigns in Iraq and caused thousands of casualties don't come in for the criticism of the CIA, and that is because of bias, rather than honesty. If the author abhored death in general then blame would be equally spread and castigation and high minded language and abuse hurled at all those who blow up civilians, rather than pretending that all car bombing in the world was developed by the CIA and Bill Casey. A simplistic and biased book, a true tragedy for ruining an interesting subject. Its almost as if it was written first with the idea of 'how can we blame America' and only secondly with the attempt to find a subject that might fit and a bunch of accusations that are unsubstantiated and grossly fabricated. Seth J. Frantzman

Mike Davis writes books that are difficult to read: he takes on subjects nobody else will touch and analyzes them with an unrelenting, scientific eye (see his recent Planet of Slums). The history of car bombing--like the startling rise of urban slums--is not a pleasant thesis. One reviewer on this site stated that car bombing is a "good topic for a `microhistory' (like the ones that are about wood, coal, salt, etc.)". But I can hardly recommend BUDA'S WAGON to a reader merely because they enjoyed Kurlansky's SALT or McPhee's ORANGES. Rather this is the sort of work you give to a dear friend with the caveat "It will make you sick to your stomach, furious, and terrified for your children's future." Professor Davis' political affiliations have nothing to do with this work. He is more misanthrope than "lefty." There are no heroes in the despicable annals of car bombing. Davis points out over and over again how bombers (from the Stern Gang in pre-Israel Palestine to Casey's operatives in Lebanon to Iraqi "insurgents") almost ALWAYS go after civilian targets--usually women and children. The purpose of the car bomb is to rip out the souls of one's enemy. They are absurdly cheap to make (the blast power of a $5,000 car bomb is often superior to a million dollar ballistic missile). They are incredibly effective (Ronald Reagan pulling us out of Beirut after the Marine barrack bombing; UN forces leaving Iraq). And a few well-placed bombs can create economic catastrophe (e.g. the IRA bombings of London's financial center in the early nineties causing billions of dollars in damage). I pray this book is not a prescient glimpse into a grim future for America. I hope specialists in the FBI and CIA as well as Homeland Security have well-read copies of Davis' work sitting on their desks. And every time you read about a new car bombing in Iraq (nearly every day now) you, dear reader, will think of this joyless yet important book.

"Any history of technology risks self absorption and exaggeration," writes Mike Davis. It is a good reminder, as books about the history of gunpowder or computers or telegraphy roll out. Davis's new book avoids those risks; _Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb_ (Verso) is a frightening book about a threat that needs no exaggeration to inspire fear. Davis has written scary books before, about slums and about Victorian holocausts, books with irony and grim humor that are not present in his new work. Car bombs, the "poor man's air force", are too loud and sad for such treatment. From their first use by anarchists, they have spread like viruses to all the battlefields of the world, and to the domestic areas where battles are not to be waged. In Davis's history, links are made between such disparate forces using car bombs as the CIA, the IRA, Tamil Tigers, and a host of "liberation" forces with Arabic names, and some of the chapters are mind-numbing with accounts of violence, attack and counterattack, or explanations of increases in technological sophistication while even the basic bicycle bomb is still being deployed with dismaying effectiveness. You probably never heard of the bomber who gives his name to the book. Mario Buda was an anarchist who "with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse," and a wagon managed to bring terror to Wall Street in 1920. That he was not caught is due to one of the characteristics of car bombs that make them such a successful weapon: they are anonymous and leave little forensic evidence. Davis lists other advantages of car bombs. They can be of huge destructive force, and bombmakers are improving their power all the time. Their consequences cannot be denied or covered up by the governments who are their victims. They are cheap; bootlegged electronics and $500 of fertilizer will do the trick. They can be assembled by individuals who can find the information on-line or in manuals descended from CIA-sponsored training camps. They can be targeted on one particular site, but they can be counted upon to wreak the sort indiscriminate havoc that will demoralize a society. They can give to a small, marginalized group enormous and dramatic power, promiscuously equalizing the powerful and the weak. In this story there are so many bad guys, sometimes connected in more-or-less formal chains of command, sometimes staging car bomb duels against each other, sometimes adopting tactics of previous car bombers, sometimes just repeating such history independently, that it is often difficult to keep them straight, especially as within the short chapters the scenes shift from Vietnam to Beirut to Latin America to Oklahoma City, and of course to Iraq. The American who seems to have played the biggest role in promoting car bombs was Reagan's CIA Director William Casey, who in reply to disastrous car-bombings in Lebanon promoted response attacks on Hezbollah and schooled Afghanis to do so, wit