War - What is it good for?

From Democracy Now:

In other Iraq news, an unarmed Iraqi man was killed by US forces in Fallujah Wednesday after throwing his shoe at their convoy. The military says the soldiers opened fire thinking the shoe was a grenade. The shooting came one day after the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi was released from prison after a nine-month term for throwing his shoes at former President George W. Bush.

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to have a military, especially one that is sent to fight as many wars as ours is, you need to desensitize soldiers to the value of human life, so that they will kill without hesitation or reflection.

The military must work against something very powerful. There is a very strong, intrinsically human revulsion to killing our fellow humans. You can talk all day about “it’s ok because it’s war” and “it was you or them” or any of the other nonsense Mother Culture tells you about killing in the particular instance of war, but unless you are a sociopath, the reality of what war actually is -- hellish, brutal, murderous, senseless and soul-destroying -- always trumps that, somewhere inside.

Sending young men to commit warfare is a monstrously evil thing to do, when you peel away the rationalizations, legalisms and veneer of nationalist triumphalism.

And then the Greek language comes out with another word; it is the word agape. Now agape is more than romantic love. Agape is more than friendship. Now agape is understanding creative redemptive goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love, which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. And when one rises to love on this level, he is able to love the person who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. And he is able to love those persons that he even finds it difficult to like for he begins to look beneath the surface and he discovers that that individual who may be brutal toward him and who may be prejudiced was taught that way—was a child of his culture.

-Martin Luther King

War and deep, agape love cannot coexist together: you can either do one thing or the other, never both.

There was a saying half a century ago in the protests against Vietnam: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In other words, if you have the world’s most powerful military, then it will tend to be the card you reach for first: it is your strongest suit.

I don’t ultimately blame the soldier who blew away that civilian: I’m sure he was a frightened kid who reacted instinctively (but tragically) to a perceived threat to his life. I ultimately blame the power structures that put him there; a power structure that uses violence to maintain its power in the world.

I have a hard time with folks who try and wave it off with some explanation like “Well, what is one to do? In a fallen world, war will always be a fact of life...”

Well, no.

War is there because we either support it, at least tacitly, or else we don't do enough to stop it.

So now we see how it is
This fist begets the spear
Weapons of war
Symptoms of madness
Don't let your eyes refuse to see
Don't let your ears refuse to hear
Or you ain't never going to shake this sense of sadness
I could hold you in my arms
I could hold on forever
And I could hold you in my arms
I could hold on forever

Ray Lamontagne, Hold You In My Arms

Whose Side are we on?

I am on the side of the people who are being burned, cut to pieces, tortured, held as hostages, gassed, ruined, destroyed. They are the victims of both sides. To take sides with massive power is to take sides against the innocent. The side I take is then the side of the people who are sick of war and want peace in order to rebuild their country.

Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence

My First Youtube: Miserere Nobis

The Music is from the Missa de Beata Virgine by Palestrina.

Nine Eleven Nine Eleven Nine Eleven

Americans act as if that day’s events were practically the worst thing to happen to any nation anywhere, ever. Well, sorry, but no, it wasn’t. To be sure, that day sucked, and I’d rather not go through that again; but more Americans died on D Day and Pearl Harbor than died on 9/11. More Americans are murdered in 3 months than were killed on that day. Twelve times as many civilians were incinerated alive in one night in Dresden Germany in World War II. Up to thirty times as many were incinerated in one night in Tokyo.

Has it ever occurred to the hawks in this country that by sending armies into the middle east, the US has given Osama Bin Laden exactly what he wanted?

Nuri al-Maliki Endorses Obama Plan to End US Involvement In Iraq

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."
Asked if he supported Obama's ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.

"Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems."

War and its Consequences

To me, the most devastating thing about war is the spiritual devastation wrought in its participants - the soldiers themselves.

You cannot simultaneously love a man (in the Agapē sense) and kill him; a precondition of being able to kill a man is that you must dehumanize him first. Acknowledge the brotherhood in him, and you are incapable of really harming him.

The thing is, a deeper part of you is intrinsically incapable of denying the brotherhood of the “enemy” and thus recognizes the appalling nature of what you have done: you have wounded or killed your brother.

Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way

The right wing’s whole narrative that “the treasonous liberals want to pull out of Iraq just when we’re on the verge of final victory!!!!11!1!" strikes me as just crass, disingenuous posturing: doing pre-spin on the inevitable withdrawal that must, given the math and the deteriorating state of our military, take place.

So, let’s get real. Using the right’s own (in my view, hubris-addled) metrics, let’s define “achieving victory in Iraq” as:

* Violence reduced to, at a minimum, Pre-March-2003 levels;
* A stable, secular, united central government in Baghdad;
* Infrastructure and services (power, water, food distribution, sewage treatment, etc.) exceeding standards that obtained in pre-war Iraq.

…thus providing the example of prosperous freedom that would be (highly debatably…) attractive to Arab populations living under dictatorships in the region.

How could the United States (and, given the level of support the United States could realistically expect from the rest of the world, it would be virtually the United States alone doing this) get there from here? What would it really, actually take to completely pacify Iraq? (Note that I’m just going to discard any considerations of the morality of the enterprise here, and argue from a position of cold, amoral pragmatism.)

Step one is troops. Lots and lots and LOTS of troops. Bush’s “surge” is comically inadequate to the task. You’d have to absolutely flood the non-Kurdish parts of Iraq with American troops, who could clear of insurgents, and then seal off to weapons smuggling, the whole of Iraq, village by village, city by city, region by region. You’d also have to effectively seal off, or at least monitor in fine-grained, very intrusive detail, the borders of the country, especially the ones with Syria and Iran - to the point that a ball-point pen couldn’t enter the country without American say-so.

This means anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of combat troops…in each large city in Iraq. Baghdad alone would probably need something in the neighborhood of 200,000 troops, just for the city itself. Plus, every road into Baghdad (and every other city in Iraq) would need to be under 24-hour patrols and surveillance, to prevent insurgents and weapons from moving from place to place. Not to mention saturating every border crossing of any size with American troops, and regular, pervasive patrols of every mile of the border.

The entire population would need to be disarmed: the military would need to just say something like, “you have six weeks to turn in any weaponry. Any Iraqi civilian found to be in possession of a weapon after that time will be presumed to be an insurgent, and will be subject to imprisonment.”

In other words, the American Military would need to effectively run Iraq in the short- to mid-term. The total American forces in the country at any moment would probably total somewhere between one and two million troops.

Step two: Once the violence was quelled (and, with sufficient troops, there is virtually no doubt it would be): “turn the lights back on.”

Prime targets of insurgents are electrical lines, to keep the population uncomfortable and inconvenienced, and thus resentful. So, rebuilding existing generating capacity, building new capacity as needed, and then putting power stations, and every mile of power line, under 24-hour guard, is essential to undermining support for the insurgents.

Next, restore basic services: Water, sewage, garbage collection.

Garbage collection especially would improve quality of life life measurably for the population, in a highly visible way, and would almost certainly be rewarded with lots of goodwill. Garbage collectors are prime targets of insurgents, because garbage piles by the side of the road make good hiding places for IEDs.

Step 3: Send the vast, vast majority of the American contractors in Iraq home, and hire Iraqi companies for all future rebuilding projects, and pay them in dollars. Iraqi unemployment is pervasive, and unemployed men (especially former Iraqi Army soldiers) are ripe for recruiting by insurgents. Employing them would dry up this particular resource for insurgents, and also give Iraqis a sense of ownership of the projects they would be building. Even people not involved directly in building schools, post offices, etc., would see them being built, and have a clear sense that everyday life is getting incrementally better.

All this would, of course, be hideously expensive - hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. There would probably also be another sharp spike in American casualties, but the insurgency would probably hugely diminish in the face of pervasive American troops, so the spike would be significant but temporary.

Of course, some of those casualties would be draftees, because summoning the level of troops required for all this would require a draft (and a big one) without question: a level of mobilization not seen since World War II. I expect the war fetishists at Little Green Footballs would get awfully quiet if they were faced with the prospect of having to actually, you know, risk their own worthless necks fighting in the war they masturbate to.

Once some semblance of stability was achieved, some sort of conference amongst the various factions in Iraq could probably hammer out an agreement that would be acceptable to all parties, or at least one that everyone would be equally dissatisfied with.

This whole project would all take a level of consensus in the United States that clearly does not obtain. A large majority of Americans oppose the occupation as it is currently being conducted. If large numbers of their children were being drafted for, and their taxes raised to pay for, an even bigger occupation, Washington D.C. would undoubtedly be overrun with citizens chasing their congressmen and senators around with torches and pitchforks.

And, it may not even work: what happens if Americans start withdrawing troops, and violence increases? What then?