burnt babies in their beds. It killed a bride buying her trousseau in a lingerie shop. It blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque and it left a 9-year-old girl permanently disabled with a chunk of shrapnel in her brain that cannot be removed.

Alumni of the ISI camps include the bomb-maker extraordinaire Ramzi Yousef (architect of the 1993 World Trade Center car bombings) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly the brain behind the “car bomb with wings” attacks on September 11, 2001.

Fresh from the successes against the Soviets, the CIA sponsored Dr. Iyad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and current head of the Iraqi National Accord, in his car-bombing campaign against targets in Saddam’s Iraq during the 1990s. A former CIA official described one bombing during this period that “blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed.”

But some weapons lend themselves to a variety of political objectives. The very factors that give the car bomb such utility incovert ops and counterinsurgency campaigns—its ease of delivery, the operational simplicity of organizing a bombing, the difficulty in tracing a bombing to the specific perpetrators, and the relatively inexpensive and easily obtainable supplies needed for a bombing—make it the weapon of choice for guerrillas, resistance movements, and troublemakers the world over.

In the hands of state intelligence agencies, the car bomb is a complement to multi-pronged interventions into foreign affairs. In the hands of insurgents, it becomes the main weapon of an asymmetric battle. Hezbollah’s 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was so devastating, both militarily and politically, that it forced the Americans’ eventual retreat—delivering the largest U.S. defeat up to that time since Vietnam.

Car bombs also featured prominently in the provisional Irish Republican Army’s repertoire, both in Belfast and London.
If car bombs are deadly, they are also, as Davis puts it, “loud.” The weapons yield the maximum bang for the buck, allowing the assailants to kill large numbers indiscriminately. In this, Davis christens car bombs the “poor man’s air force.” The Basque independence group (ETA) in Spain, for example, focused on “soft targets” such as shopping malls in its car-bombing campaign, in the hopes of sowing terror in Spanish hearts and turning the public against the government. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka—whose secularism shatters any notion that suicide bombings are solely the province of crazed religious zealots—became the world leader in suicide bombings and car bombs in their fight against the government.

It may seem surprising that a veteran apocalyptician like Davis would turn his attentions away from impending ecological disasters and urban catastrophes toward the car bomb. As Iraq is being smothered by the flames of daily car bombings, however, and all the major actors play by “Old Testament rules,” Davis contends that “every laser-guided missile falling on an apartment house in southern Beirut…is a future suicide truck bomb headed for the center of Tel Aviv or perhaps downtown Los Angeles.” Car bombs, for Davis, have become “the hot rod of the apocalypse.”

Buda’s Wagon could therefore not be a more timely or urgent history, one that seeks to understand this ruinous weapon, but only through the context in which the weapon is employed. There is no “senseless violence” or “freedom hating” in Davis’s understanding, only the dispossessed and delegitimized reacting to their social conditions (often in a barbarous way), or the powers-that-be seeking to protect and extend their power. All this also makes Buda’s Wagon a difficult work. Page after blood-soaked page is filled with the details of severed limbs, burned faces, destroyed buildings, and shattered lives. But this also makes Buda’s Wagon all the more immediate, for if the car bomb’s history is depressing, its future is truly terrifying.