7 posts tagged “war”

One of my projects in the last few weeks has been to read the Middle East and Islamic World Reader edited by Marvin Getterman and Stuart Shaar. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to discuss each and every primary source in this anthology (Just the question guide I created yesterday was seven pages). I could, I suppose make a brilliant attempt to solve the various conflicts in the Middle East myself. One idea I had was to take all the people who feel like they have been deprived of hearth and home in some Middle Eastern War in the last 2000 years and let them put up a homestead somewhere in the Green Mountain National Forest. Not that I have anything against the Green Mountain National Forest but ... if it can save the world a bloody nuke job, I am willing to make a sacrifice. I would love to have them solve their problems by themselves but, as Catbert says "It would be nice to eat candy and poop emeralds". It just seems like the Middle East cannot seem to escape its tribalism (can any of us?) Whether it expresses itself in religious forms, national forms, ethnic forms, or economic forms there is this fierce identification with tribe that assumes a limited supply of whatever it takes to survive and a commitment to solidarity.

One excerpt from a speech by Richard Falk comes to mind:

“America badly needs another kind of patriotism, what I will call cosmopolitan or worldly patriotism, a sense of country that blurs the boundaries between the self and others and that is aware that in an era of globalization, all of us have multiple identities based on nationality, race, religion, gender, age, and professional and vocational activities.  The physical boundaries of the state never were, and are less and less the source of meaning for our collective selves.  To adapt to a world of the Internet in the global market and media, we need to soften the exclusivity of our tribal attachments to a single national narrative.  We need to adjust to increasingly post-sovereignty world that is richly diverse and grossly uneven in wealth and influence, and we need to address the injustice is that this unevenness of wealth and power has produced over the centuries, and recognized the dangers of these widening disparities between rich and poor.  We cannot dispense with patriotism in such an emergent world, but what is needed are collective attachments that are not tightly tied to an outmoded and myopic national ethos.”

Richard A. Falk, “patriotism and dissent after 911, The Frederick Ewen Memorial Lecture, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, November 7, 2001. Found in the Middle East and Islamic World rRader, edited by Marvin Gettleman and Stuart Schaar.

My question is ... "WHY?" Why do we "need" to change the way we identify ourselves? Why do we need to "soften the exclusivity" of our various tribes? Why do we need to address the injustice that we regard as injustice only when we change the way we think about tribes? The following comes from something H.G. Wells wrote in the early part of WWI:

“Mars [the god of war] will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and thespeech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all:

‘Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptuously. Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps my way.

‘But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your “rights”, stick to your “claims” each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct the fresh harvest of live I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will squeeze it into red pulp in my hands. I will mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnable than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities.” -  H.G. Wells, What Is Coming

But Americans by and large avoided that whole experience. We sent soldiers to Europe but its been sometime sinse we lived with War on our own turf. Maybe that is why we are still fans of it as a solution to global problems? And maybe that is why we are slow to move away from the sort of patriotic tribalism that has seeminly served us well.

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself agreeing with H.G. Wells and Richard Falk? Even if it means a reduction in the privileges that you enjoy as a member of a successful "tribe" in the world stage? Or is there something greater to be gained by thinking of ourselves as part of a human family?

A little more from the Aeneid today. Aeneas meets Dido on his way through hell to see his father:

"Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood,
Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood;
Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew,
Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view,
(Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night,
Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,)
With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade;
And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said:
"Unhappy queen! then is the common breath
Of rumor true, in your reported death,
And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow,
And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below,
Unwilling I forsook your friendly state,
Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate-
Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might
Have sent me to these regions void of light,
Thro' the vast empire of eternal night.
Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief,
My flight should urge you to this dire relief.
Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows:
'Tis the last interview that fate allows!"
In vain he thus attempts her mind to move
With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love.
Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round,
But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground,
And what he says and swears, regards no more
Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar;
But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight,
Hid in the forest and the shades of night;
Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove,
Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love.
Some pious tears the pitying hero paid,
And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade,
Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd,
And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd,"

The question is of course, should Dido listen to him? Can this man be regarded as sincere? He claims that just as the Gods REQUIRED him, forced him, compelled him to make this trip through hell where he has accidentally come upon her, so was he forced to leave her to travel to Rome and found his city. Well ... what is the actual case? Was Aeneid FORCED to make this trip to hades? Or, to the contrary, had he ASKED to be allowed to come? Indeed, had he not gone out of his way and taken risks IN SPITE OF A CAUTION NOT TO?

My son refers to "free will" as "free won't". I tend to think Dido is right to ignore him. "Better a dead husband in hell that reciprocates something than a lying lover in Carthage" is the moral of that story.

I also enjoyed the part where Juno, seeing that she cannot keep Aeneas from founding Rome determines to make it difficult for him:

"If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny,
Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply.
Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree,
The Trojan race to reign in Italy;
At least I can defer the nuptial day,
And with protracted wars the peace delay:"

She plans thus to make Aerneas' marriage to the local king's daughter fraught with complications. She heads off to the underworld to hire a professional sower of discord, Alecta.

"This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose;
One who delights in wars and human woes. . . .
'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state,
Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate,
And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate.
Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays,
And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways.
Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds
Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds:
Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare
Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood,
The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood;
And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night,
She to the Latian palace took her flight:"

She begins to work her "magic on her intended target, the mother of Aeneas' chosen bride:

"Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs;
His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides,
Now like a chain around her neck he rides,
Now like a fillet to her head repairs,
And with his circling volumes folds her hairs.
At first the silent venom slid with ease,
And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees;
Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far,
In plaintive accents she began the war"

... and so she works up the conflict be various means, beginning with the family and moving on into the community till everyone is killing each other.

Question for Comment: Have you ever been part of a  conflict that seemed to come from outside the circle of the people who were fighting it?

Movie of the Day was Blood of My Brother, an insiders look into the fight for Sadr City. On the whole, it wa s afairly apolitical movie that just basically went into the mosques, the funerals, the night raids, the families, and the heart of the conflict and then let you as a viewer make up your mind. The American position obviously is that the elected government of Iraq was the legitimate government of Iraq and that Muqrada Al sadr's Mahdi militia was therefore A) unnecessary and B) dangerous. He clearly was both anti-American and anti-Israeli, and anti-coalition government. In the eyes of his followers, he clearly was the leader Allah wanted them to have and if an election was the means, that would be fine but I can't see any good coming from an Iraqi state that adopted a sectarian government controlled so entirely by one sect's "televangelist".

Muqtada Al Sadr is not Al Qaeda but from listening to him preach, it is hard not to see him coming out of the same batch of cookie dough. He believes in the need to forsake this world for the next and the need for Muslims to dissolve their national borders and unite into one unified Islamo-fascist state with black robed clerics listening to Allah for State policy. He would certainly not be good for Israel and in so far as he defines America as a disunifying force in Islam, he would be no friend. This video was enlightening in that regard.

Still, I couldn't help but watch these house raids looking for weapons without thinking about Lexington and Concord. Apparently Iraqi law allowed each family a machine gun but that's all. The only difference between what was going on in Sadr City and Lexington and Concord is that Iraq HAS a democratically elected government and the minutemen are following a deputized Ayatollah. Further, the minutemen, to my knowledge were not hiding their weapon's caches in their homes.

Unmistakably, innocent people are being hurt and kids are  getting the crap scared out of them in these house raids. I just have a hard time visualizing my hiding weapon stashes in my kids' bedroom. The thematic resemblance to the episodes of Battlestar Galactica that the boys and I have been watching is unmistakable though. These are not easy issues.  I don;t mind praying for Iraq's peace and saftey. I hope I can be forgiven for doubting that it would come in the form of a Muqtada al-Sadr government. Just calling it like I see it. don;t anyone shoot me.

Question for Comment: When you see large crowds of people chanting for a leader who they associate with the will of God (be it G.W. Bush or Muqtada al-Sadr, what reaction does it evoke in you?

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

Tonight's movie was Goya's Ghosts. I will just say with a critic at Rotten Tomatoes that it is a movie that should have been "put to the question" before being released. The sets are cool. The art is cool. The inquisition reminds one of the bumper sticker "Mean People Suck", and the moral of the story may well be, unlike Goya's art, too obvious to be artistic: Karma works only once in a while but if you find it working on you, the effect can be quite arresting. You just never know when that wheel of fortune will turn.

I also learned that Goya, when he did portraits, could be "visually undiplomatic" - In short, sometimes he painted powerful people somewhat too much as they are for his own good.

All criticisms aside, one cannot watch this movie without an awareness that it is a movie that is about more than a period and place in time. It is about Nazi Germany and it is about Abu Ghraib. It is as much about Guantanamo as it is about Madrid. It is as much about the Patriot Act as it is about the Inquisition and the French invasion of Spain under the guise of liberte'. The opening scene  shows us the Inquisition determining that "desperate times demand desperate measures" so to speak ... and it is a reminder that anyone who is going to be the sort to take a job torturing people, is going to be the sort of person that is not going to care about the morality of going beyond what is permitted.

For all sorts of reasons, torture and brutality in the cause of some sort of "good" is just a bad idea and artists like Goya (and no doubt this film director) did the right thing when they exposed it in all its ugliness.

"Goya's causes for discouragement were not confined to personal misfortunes [He had lost his wife and his hearing]. In 1808 his beloved country was overrun by the hordes of what was possibly the most ruthless invading army of modern history. He has left notes in letters, and in his works, of the scenes of which he was an eye-witness-murder, and rape, and cruelty to children. "I saw this," he writes on the margin of his sketches. He saw his fellow citizens shot down, unarmed, without trial-by platoons, one crowd after another. He saw the mutilation of the dead. He saw the heroic and desperate resistance of his people, "ferocious and admirable," beyond all telling, where women fought as savagely as men and died resisting. And his soul was filled with despair, and pity, and with horrible, demoniac laughter at the senselessness of war-and of mankind."

A Self-Portrait by Goya

Alfred Vance Churchill
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 1. (Mar., 1931), pp. 4-11

Question for Comment: Why is it that some movies simply do not fool you - that that you see actors playing parts - not characters when you watch them?

Tonights movie was Gunner Palace. It is not my place really to critically analyze a movie made in a place and time that I have not been present for. It captures soldiers lives like the soldiers in it capture Iraqi insurgents (I suppose). It seems to tell its tale well, neither hiding nor romanticizing the personalities and work being done by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers in Iraq.

Here is the chart of U.S. casualties as of this month;

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2003	0	0	65	74	37	30	48	35	31	44	82	40
2004	47	20	52	135	80	42	54	66	80	64	137	72
2005	107	58	35	52	80	78	54	85	49	96	84	68
2006	62	55	31	76	69	61	43	65	72	106	70	112
2007	83	81	81	104	126	101	78	84	65	38	37	23
2008	40	29	15	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

http://icasualties.org/oif/

The chart listing the Iraqi casualties in the same time period can be found below. I find myself compassionately confused by this war. I think some people compare the costs of it with an image of a costless alternative. Others do not feel the cost of it and can't see what we have lost ... what we might have done instead. as of this date, 84 soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far this year. According to the Officer down website, 28 police officers have been killed in the U.S. during the same stretch of time, down 185 from last year.  ( http://www.odmp.org/  )  Are either of these casualty lists worth it? Should we remove police officers from duty before they get hurt and American soldiers from Iraq before Iraqi soldiers take over? I will just ask the question. What is it for? Often the soldiers do not know.

	Period	Total
	Mar-08	442
	Feb-08	674
	Jan-08	554
	Dec-07	548
	Nov-07	560
	Oct-07	679
	Sep-07	848
	Aug-07	1,674
	Jul-07	1,690
	Jun-07	1,345
	May-07	1,980
	Apr-07	1,821
	Mar-07	2,977
	Feb-07	3,014
	Jan-07	1,802
	Dec-06	1,752
	Nov-06	1,864
	Oct-06	1,539
	Sep-06	3,539
	Aug-06	2,966
	Jul-06	1,280
	Jun-06	870
	May-06	1,119
	Apr-06	1,009
	Mar-06	1,092
	Feb-06	846
	Jan-06	779

Today's documentary was Death in Gaza, appropriately named because so many people die in Gaza, because the living so often must think of death in Gaza, and because the person who made the movie died in Gaza on the last night of filming there.

Its another sad piece of the puzzle.

HBO: What would you like for viewers to take away from this film?

SAIRA: These kids are not monsters. They are living in unacceptable conditions. Human beings are human beings the world over and the circumstances they live in have a profound impact upon their behavior. There is a cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where every killing creates a martyr, which creates more killing. Injustice breeds injustice.

HBO: Was there anything unexpected that you learned in course of making this film? What challenged your initial expectations?

SAIRA: Yes, a lot, because everything you read or see about this conflict in particular is sifted through a filter of politics. It is hard to get away from the concept that there are "goodies" and "baddies". We found kids who were being exploited by both sides in a conflict they did not understand.

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/death_in_gaza/interview.html

One day militants are talking about how perfect young boys are for scouts and grenade throwers. "They are just boys." The next day they are killed and they are martyrs. A boy is asked what it would feel like to be shot. He wonders why they would shoot him. He is just a boy. But he and his friend make bombs in their free time, throw rocks at the armored bulldozers, practice shooting at tanks, and plan their own martyrdoms.

If there were a line between children and soldiers and terrorists and freedom fighters and  heroes and exploited children, I am not sure where you would draw it.

Given that their goals cannot or will not be compromised, and cannot or will not be conceded by the Israelis ... and given that the animosity is institutionalized into the families, the social networks, the education system, the political system, the literature, and every friendship and memory ... I can't see a way out.  Not until people come to believe that the messiah would blow up the Temple Mount to save a Palestinian kid and Muhammad would blow up Al Quds to save an Israeli settler's life. Maybe a snowball's chance in hell, you say? 

This week in the global Module, we are discussing with Jordanian Students Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses.

'Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory, after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.'"

600,000 some odd Americans died figuring out Lincoln was right.

Question for Comment: Would it be possible for god to make two Holy Lands for these two people ... so that one could have their Temple Mount to themselves and the other could have their Al Quds.  Would that be so difficult for a God that created the universe?