That's the title of a fascinating, if grisly, study of the unsophisticated, yet powerful weapon that drove America out of Lebanon and changed the course of world history starting in the second half of the 20th century.
Written by author Mike Davis, the two-part article can be found at Tomdispatch.
It starts with the first known car bomb -- Buda's Wagon -- a horse-drawn wagon detonated at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in Manhattan on September 11, 1920, by anarchist Mario Buda in protest of the arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The blast killed 40 and wounded more than 200.
Mario Buda
Father of the car bomb
Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target.
The essay then explores the history of car bombs from their use by Zionist terrorists in British-occupied Palestine, through Vietnam, as the primary weapon in a Sicilian Mafia war waged with Alfa Romeo Giuliettas and by the IRA, which introduced a deadly upgrade.
Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically -- producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) -- but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.
The effectiveness of the car/truck bomb is derived from its ability to be produced from commonly obtainable ingredients packed into a vehicle that can blend into the urban landscape without arousing suspicion. That plus the relatively low cost.
40 or 50 people can be massacred with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and bootlegged electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive outlay was in long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-foot-long Ryder van. In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the classic American riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost $1.1 million each.
A car bomb also obliterates much of the evidence of its makers, though Ramzi Yousef might disagree with that since the FBI has made some improvements since the 1920s.
car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed the FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead after another for a decade.
Two key developments, though, seemed to propel the car bomb to the forefront of modern guerilla warfare -- the car-bomb campaign employed in Lebanon by Hezbollah and the CIA-sponsored terror training schools set up for Afghan mujahedin to use against occupying Soviet troops. Two graduates of that program -- authorized by President Reagan in NSDD-166 and run by the Pakistani ISI secret service -- were Yousef and his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Hezbollah's campaign in Lebanon prompted CIA Director William Casey to wage a terror campaign of his own:
It was Casey on his own, saying, `I`m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon -- the car bomb.'"
The CIA's own operatives, however, proved incapable of carrying out the bombing, so Casey subcontracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS officer and financed by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 50 yards from Sheikh Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut. The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80 innocent neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded. Fadlallah immediately had a huge "MADE IN USA" banner hung across the shattered street...
Of course, the use of car bombs is not without danger to the movements that deploy them, as the IRA learned:
What was less well understood outside of Ireland, however, was the enormity of the wound that the IRA's car bombs inflicted on the Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday destroyed much of the IRA's heroic-underdog popular image, produced deep revulsion amongst ordinary Catholics, and gave the British government an unexpected reprieve from the worldwide condemnation it had earned for the Blood Sunday massacre in Derry and internment without trial.
The essay explores the use of the car bomb by Sendero Luminoso -- the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas of Peru -- and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil in Sri Lanka.
The Shining Path and its leader -- Abimael Guzman -- upped the ante by attempting to take out an entire neighborhood, damaging at least 180 homes in the process.

Abimael Guzman
The Tamil Tigers refined and expanded the use of suicide drivers to deliver their deadly payloads.
The Tigers also provided governments with a hard lesson: Be careful who you train to do your dirty work, because blowback is a bitch.
The Tamil Tigers are a mass nationalist movement with "liberated territory," a full-scale army and even a tiny navy; moreover, 20,000 Tiger cadres received secret paramilitary training in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu from 1983 to 1987, courtesy of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and India's CIA -- the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But such sponsorship literally blew up in the face of the Indian Congress Party leadership when Indira's son and successor Rajiv was killed by a female Tiger suicide bomber in 1993. Indeed, the all-too-frequent pattern of surrogate terrorism, whether sponsored by the CIA, RAW, or the KGB, has been "return to sender" -- most notoriously in the cases of those former CIA "assets," blind Sheik Rahman and Osama bin Laden.
And, of course, the essay relates the story of homegrown American terrorist Tim McVeigh:
Experts were amazed at the radius of destruction: "Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building up to a half-mile away." Distant seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.
Car bombings prompted the development of zones of security to try to keep the bombs at bay. Compounds with blast walls costing millions and millions were thrown up.
The City's response was a more sophisticated version of the "ring of steel" (concrete barriers, high iron fences, and impregnable gates) that had been built around Belfast's city center after Bloody Friday in 1972. Following Bishopsgate, the financial press clamored for similar protection: "The City should be turned into a medieval-style walled enclave to prevent terrorist attacks."
The best example of this, of course, is the Green Zone of Baghdad, a virtual castle surrounded by moats of concrete, steel and wire.
In this kingdom of the car bomb, the occupiers have withdrawn almost completely into their own forbidden city, the "Green Zone," and their well-fortified and protected military bases. This is not the high-tech City of London with sensors taking the place of snipers, but a totally medievalized enclave surrounded by concrete walls and defended by M1 Abrams tanks and helicopter gunships as well as an exotic corps of corporate mercenaries (including Gurkhas, ex-Rhodesian commandos, former British SAS, and amnestied Colombian paramilitaries).

Places like the Green Zone provide protection but they further the goals of terrorists by isolating the U.S. from the Iraqi population, as globalsecurity.org points out:
In an analysis on 01 September 2003 ["After Najaf: The Emerging Patterns of Combat in the Iraq War"] Anthony H. Cordesman stated that "a critical mistake [was] made by ORHA and carried on by the CPA by creating US security zones around US headquarters in central Baghdad. This has created a no go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a fortress that tends to separate U.S. personnel from the Iraqis. This follows a broader pattern where terrorist know that attacks tend to push the US into locating in "force protection" enclaves and cut Americans off from the local population."
Iraq is now the kingdom of the car bomb. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi employs a limitless supply of cars and suicide drivers. His targeting of civilians turns standard guerrilla warfare theory -- that guerrillas must not alienate the local population -- on its head. His goal appears to be genocide, according to the essay:
Toward this end, he - or those invoking his name -- seems to have access to an almost limitless supply of bomb vehicles (some of them apparently stolen in California and Texas, then shipped to the Middle East) as well as Saudi and other volunteers eager to martyr themselves in flame and molten metal for the sake of taking a few Shiite school kids, market venders, or foreign "crusaders" with them. Indeed the supply of suicidal madrassa graduates seems to far exceed what the logic of suicide bombing (as perfected by Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers) actually demands: Many of the explosions in Iraq could just as easily be detonated by remote control. But the car bomb -- at least in Al-Zarqawi's relentless vision -- is evidently a stairway to heaven as well as the chosen weapon of genocide.
Outside the Green Zone -- far from being the Kaloogian fantasy of tranquility spun by the Bush Administration -- Baghdad is a living hell:
A population that has endured Saddam's secret police, U.N. sanctions, and American cruise missiles, now steels itself to survive the car bombers who prowl poor Shiite neighborhoods looking for grisly martyrdom. For the most selfish reasons, let us hope that Baghdad is not a metaphor for our collective future.
A long essay well worth reading. It is said to be "a preliminary sketch for a book-length study -- will appear next year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State." The book should be a fascinating read.
And, no, I have no financial interest in the book, nor do I even know the author.