Section 26 Entry 0001. 2003 March 17 Monday.
(diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Gee, so much to write about. Let me break it down:-

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

1. War - when?

Soon. Very soon now. An e-mail from England tells me that the BBC is saying "Tuesday". On TV today I saw George Bush saying about how the time has arrived for the international community to demonstrate its commitment to "peace," by which I think he meant "war".

(George was speaking pretty confidently. But someone should tell him that if you're trying to masquerade as the President of the United States of America then it's an error to slump over to one side and lean on the podium with your elbow.)

---

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

2. Are the Jews to blame?

Forward to 2003 April 09 "the relationship between Israel and America seems to be symptomatic of the gap between American propaganda and American actions"

SCENE: COURT OF UNIVERSAL JUSTICE

PROSECUTOR: Woody Allen, you stand accused of fomenting war and inspiring American military carnage by writing intellectual sex comedies, thereby manipulating Global Consciousness in such a manner as to grant Humanity to the citizens of New York, while simulaneously, through a grievous Sin of Omission, failing to grant to the inhabitants of Baghdad an equal Humanity ....

Are the Jews to blame? This question popped up in the news a couple of days ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

My first thought was "No," for one simple reason. The one simple reason is that all through my life America has been making war on places which have absolutely nothing to do with Israel.

When I was growing up, America was bombing Vietnam for various virtuous reasons too complicated to explain here. (If you really want an explanation, ask Henry Kissinger, who also happens to be the bright guy who decided that America should give Indonesia the nod to go ahead and invade East Timor.) A full list of America's wars (about on a year, on average) would take up too much space, but the one that stands out in my mind was the invasion of Panama in 1989.

America invaded Panama in order to get Panama's head of state, General Mañuel Noriega, to show up in court in Miami on narcotics charges. ("Sorry, Mañuel, old buddy, you're not our buddy any longer.") Thanks to American military might, Mañuel finally did show up in court, and was convicted and thrown in the slammer.

The public rationale for this little war was to end the flow of drugs into America. (It may have worked, but I'm too busy to research the subject. If I did, maybe I'd discover headlines saying "Cops Suffer Boredom Crisis - Six Months No Drugs Busts." Or, then again, maybe not.)

America's brief little war with Panama, like most of America's other wars, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jews, Jewishness, Israel, America's funding of Israel, American arms sales to Israel, Palestine, the Palestinians, the West Bank, Yom Kippur, Hitler's Holocaust, Jordan, Lebanon, Beirut, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon and so on and so forth.

So that was my first thought, a couple of days back, was that America's war addiction cannot be laid at the feet of American Jews. Or in fact of any Jews anywhere. "America and Israel" is one issue and "America and Iraq" is a completely different issue.

Substantial reinforcement of this first thought came last night, when I was watching an old movie about Lawrence of Arabia, called (I think) "Lawrence of Arabia".

Actually, I had only about ten percent of my attention on this movie, which I'd seen before (either in Bangkok with Greek subtitles or in Athens with Thai subtitles). However, last night, as I sat in the room with the TV going, now and then something would cut through my concentration (ninety percent of which was focused on the inner mysteries of HTML) and I'd think, "Yeah, that's interesting."

The guts of the movie (a true story) is this: a British army officer called Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) fights alongside the Arabs who are in revolt against the Turks. We're talking here about the period from 1916 through 1918, which overlaps with that of the First World War (1914-1918).

Lawrence (a romantic) thinks (or allows himself to imagine) that he's fighting for Arab liberty. He's later disillusioned to find that British and French politicians plan to carve up the Arab lands between Britain and France.

All this was going on, of course, long before the foundation of the state of Israel (1948).

For the purposes of the present moment, world history, in a nutshell, seems to run like this:-

Step One: Small tribe based in Rome expands to conquer world, forms Roman Empire, feeds Christians to lions. Rome burns, Nero fiddles. Caligula inspires movie. Roman empire dissolves, and some centuries pass as fragments of said empire fight each other monotonously.

Step Two: Small Turkish-based tribe, the Ottomans (watch out for small tribes!) conquers Turkey, Iran, Arabia, Egypt and just about anything else which is conquerable in and around the Middle East, forming Ottoman Empire.

Step Three: British (in hot competition with France and the Netherlands) establishes a global empire, funding this with opium (said opium grown in India and sold to China). The various imperial powers start tearing apart the Ottoman Empire (in the 1800s.)

Step Four: World War One, 1914-1918, sees France, Britain, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Japan and others at war with Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, although for some reason the reference books name "the Ottoman Empire" as "Turkey" for the purposes of this conflict. (Note that in this war the British, the Italians and the Japanese were on the same side. History is stranger than you think.)

Step Five: the Ottoman Empire is chopped up by the victorious powers, notably Britain and France. For example, Iraq (a province of the Ottoman Empire), having been occupied by the British in 1915, is governed by Britain after World War One (under the terms of a mandate from the League of Nations, an outfit similar to the United Nations).



Jump forward to mention of Treaty of Sevres on 2003 March 19 Thursday

the Treaty of Sevres

Step Six: the Treaty of Sèvres, 1920. This is one of the key events in modern history, particularly for the purposes of understanding what's going on right now, so naturally I didn't know anything about it until yesterday. (I was educated in New Zealand, and history was not a part of the core curriculum. In fact, the subject was not even offered at my school.)

Sevres Syndrome

Nicholas D. Kristof explains the importance of Treaty of Sèvres in the International Herald Tribune:-

How could a warm and friendly country like Turkey, which has made genuine progress on human rights and deserves a place in the European Union, be so harsh to its Kurds? Turkey's horror of a flourishing Kurdistan derives from its "Sèvres syndrome," named for the French city where Western powers tried to dismember Turkey after World War I. Ever since then, Turkey has seen accomodation as a slippery slope toward national disintegration. There has been progress toward reconciliation in recent years, but now the prospect of war in Iraq has revived old suspicions and hatreds.

That from an article headlined "Kurds are about to be betrayed - again" on page 8 of the IHT for 2003 March 15-16 (as published in Japan).

(link to a later mention of the same article, with reference to Turkey and the torture of Kurds.)

Scratching just beneath the topsoil, I discover that the British and other victors decided to chop the Ottoman state right back until it was no more than the size of a handkerchief - to reduce it to a fragment of northern Anatolia.

(Which raises the question - where's Anatolia? Maybe ten years from now we'll find ourselves on the edge of the Great Anatolian War, and we'll realize we should have all gone and educated ourselves about Anatolia long before. But life is short and history is distressingly long.)

Step Seven: enter Kemal Ataturk, Turkish military hero, who establishes modern Turkey by force of arms. The rest of the world recognizes the reality on the ground - the existence of Turkey - with the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923. (This is the year in which Turkey is proclaimed a republic, so, by this time, if not earlier, the Ottoman Empire seems to have definitely morphed into modern Turkey.)

Step Eight: World War Two, the main consequence of which is that the global empires of France, the Netherlands and (above all) Britain are replaced by a global American Empire, which (like McDonald's) is run on a franchise system.

Step Nine: the oil in Iran gets nationalized by a gentleman named Mohammed Mossadegh, so the British and Americans get together and organize a military coup which displaces Mossadegh in 1953. Thereafter, the Shah of Iran runs the American Empire franchise in Iran. (The British seem to fade from history somewhere round about this point, although, even now, Tony Blair doesn't seem to have quite got the message that Britain's global role is over.)

Step Ten: the Shah of Iran is popular with the urban elite (because business is good) but unpopular with the poor. His secret police do quite a bit of torturing, but that's okay because he's on our side (and business is good). Reasonably enough (because, after all, Iran is now a franchise of the American Empire) hatred of the Shah generates hatred of America.

Step Eleven: the Shah is overthrown in 1979 and militants seize the American embassy, taking hostages. Iran is now America's enemy.

Step Twelve: Iran and Iraq go to war in 1980, and in this war Iraq is America's friend. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - right? There is finally a ceasefire between Iran and Iraq in September 1988.

Step Thirteen: in the autumn of 1988, Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad starts using poison gas against the Kurds of north-eastern Iraq, who are in rebellion. However, at this stage, Saddam is not the Butcher of Baghdad. He is just a businessman who sells oil. So America goes on doing business with the guy.

Here in Japan, yesterday, on NHK, there was what looked like a balanced and objective documentary on Iraq (a dispassionate "just the facts thanks" production) which featured a document from 1988, the Prevention of Genocide Act passed by the Senate of the United States.

I didn't follow the details of the Japanese commentary, so today I've been on the Internet trying to hunt down details of this Prevention of Genocide Act. How does it fit into the picture? The history turns out to be this:-

In the United States of America, the Senate passes the Prevention of Genocide Act in 1988, by a vote of 99-0, in response to Saddam's acts of genocide against the Kurds. This bill is designed to (amongst other things) punish Saddam by killing America's oil trade with Iraq.

This is the stage at which something can be done about Saddam Hussein short of war. However, this is 1988, and Iraq is selling 123 million barrels of oil a year to American companies. Cheaply. Cheap oil! Millions and millions of barrels of it!

Money talks. Money lobbies furiously, and the Senate's bill dies a horrible death in the House of Representatives.

And Saddam remains America's good buddy right up until 1990 August 2, the day he invades Kuwait, threatening the security of the oil in the Middle East.

Now where do the Jews fit into the pattern above? I don't see that they do. If I really thought this war was going to take place because Woody Allen and other notorious warmongers were leading George Bush down the road to destruction, then I'd say so. But my guess is that the war would still be going to happen even if Israel had never existed.

George Bush obviously thinks there's a connection between Israel and the war on Iraq, since he thinks (and says that he thinks) that a successful war in Iraq will form the basis for a peaceful resolution of the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But, although I happen to believe that George Bush is both sane and stone cold sober, at this point his ideation demonstrates a disconcerting disconnect between George Bush and the world of cause and effect as we know it.

---

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

3. Salam in Baghdad

Salam, who is in Baghdad, the city which is the target for three thousand American warheads, writes in his blog:-

The entities that call themselves “the international community” should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as excuses for war five minutes before midnight.

Salam goes on to ask how "support democracy in Iraq" could have come to mean "bomb the hell out of Iraq". Then he writes:-

The situation in Iraq could have been solved in other ways than what the world will be going thru the next couple of weeks. It can’t have been that impossible. Look at the northern parts of Iraq, that is a model that has worked quite well, why wasn’t anybody interested in doing that in the south. Just like the US/UK UN created a protected area there why couldn’t the model be tried in the south. It would have cut off the regimes arms and legs. And once the people see what they have been deprived off they will not be willing to go back, just ask any Iraqi from the Kurdish areas. Instead the world watched while after the war the Shias were crushed by Saddam’s army in a manner that really didn’t happen before the Gulf War.

---

4. The Doctrine of Absolute War

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

What Salam says (above) is logical. There are other options, short of absolute war. There exists (now) a de facto state of Kurdistan which has been brought into existence by the airpower of the UK and the USA, and the same military power could be used to bring into existence a protected Shi'a community in the south.

The presiding deity of the first Gulf War was Dubya's dad, George H. Bush. After the war was won, George H. Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up in revolt against Saddam Hussein. In calling for this revolt, George H. Bush was pretty convincing. (Yesterday, I saw him on Japanese TV, doing his "rise up and revolt" act - the historical footage was part of a dispassionate documentary which was showing on NHK.)

So the people in the south of Iraq rose up in revolt, seizing cities, and then Saddam struck back - and America did nothing.

That is the point at which the application of a little American military power could have led to the establishment of a self-governing south. But that was not the course that America chose to take.

As I've noted before, I am not a pacifist, and I believe that the measured application of military force has its place. But it works best (most rationally) on a carrot and stick basis, as in the de facto Kurdish state in the north of Iraq.

Carrot: we won't attack Baghdad. Stick: if you fly your planes to the north, we will shoot them down.

One of the problems with the Bush effort in Iraq is that there's no attempt to carrot the bad guys. It's just stick stick stick - an appallingly violent spasm of absolute war.

The Bush team seems to be taking a similar zero-carrot approach to North Korea. Rewards? Hell, no! We're not giving those guys in Pyongyang anything. Not even a bit of paper saying they're entitled to exist. It's just going to be "sit back and do nothing" right up until the moment when we're ready to stick them ....

---

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads

Thursday, a small earthquake rocked through when I was alone in a classroom eating my sandwiches. If there had been students in the room, I would probably have stayed cool. But, without that restraining influence, I did what comes naturally, and got under the table, complete with my laptop. (What persuaded me was an emphatic creaking sound from the building's framework.)

One little earthquake and I was under the table, clutching my laptop and wondering if the roof was going to fall in. So it's pretty easy to imagine how I'd feel if I was sitting at home with three thousand American warheads about to plow into the neighborhood. Particularly if I had six cans of kerosene in the kitchen and a big stack of gasoline buried in the back yard. Which brings me to the subject of John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, who has stepped forward to explain why it's okay to go ahead and launch the three thousand warheads.

Speaking of the critics of the projected war, McCain says that one reason they object is:-

because our weapons do not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Did the much less discriminating bombs dropped on Berlin and Tokyo in World War II make that conflict unjust? Despite advances in our weaponry intended to minimize the loss of innocent life, some civilian casualties are inevitable. But far fewer will perish than in past wars. Far fewer will perish than are killed every year by an Iraqi regime that keeps power through the constant use of violence. Far fewer will perish than might otherwise because American combatants will accept greater risk to their own lives to prevent civilian deaths.

Source: International Herald Tribune, as published in Japan, 2003 March 13, page 6, in an opinion piece with a small headline "The U.S. and Iraq" and a larger headline "Right war, right reasons".

I read that on Thursday, the day of the earthquake, and I've been mulling over it ever since, trying to figure out the best way to get a grip on the shiny surfaces of the rhetoric.

So here goes:-

A good cause is not a license to kill. If you're a cop, you can't go round shooting bystanders in the face just because you're in pursuit of a bad guy. Even if the cause is just, the exercise of lethal force nevertheless has to be conditioned by a doctrine of necessity. Nobody is entitled to a White Knight license, a license which says "I'm a White Knight, so it doesn't matter how many people I kill. My cause is just!"

Furthermore, if you're a bad cop, and you mug people, take bribes, or look the other way while people get pulped, you're not really entitled to a White Knight Certificate (not even the Class III Certificate on the bronze-colored paper) just because you shoot the bad guy in the final reel of the movie.

In the case of the neighborhood in which Saddam Hussein lives, America is guilty of a mugging (the coup against Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh which gave America Iran's oil), of taking bribes (Saddam Hussein's 123 million barrels of oil a year, which persuaded the House of Representatives to look the other way while Saddam gassed the Kurds) and of looking the other way while people get pulped (right now, in Turkey, where the Kurds have been systematically oppressed by the Turks for quite some considerable time now.)

So it's understandable that quite a few people have reservations about America's policy toward Iraq, these reservations being based on what happened in the past (when Saddam Hussein was America's good buddy), on what is happening right now (when the White House finds it convenient to overlook the question of Turkey's behavior toward the Kurds), and on what is likely to happen in the future (which, in a nutshell, is that a bunch of people kill a bunch of other people.)

But McCain has a trump card to play, and it's the arithmetic card, the same card that Britain's Tony Blair has been playing. In the projected war with Iraq, "Far fewer will perish than are killed every year by an Iraqi regime that keeps power through the constant use of violence."

However, if we're going to move into a bleakly Utilitarian mode, and reorganize the world in an effort to vanquish unnecessary death, then, from a strictly arithmetical point of view, the George Bush war looks like a step in the wrong direction.

If the management of the world is to be reduced to an exercise in arithmetic (and McCain, like Tony Blair, implies that this is so) then the George Bush war looks like a horrific waste of money.

Looking at the planet as a whole, on a planet which has 42 million people infected with AIDS, there are better ways to spend money than to spend between US $50 billion (the conservative low-range estimate) and US $200 billion (the high estimate) to kill the Butcher.

(And, incidentally, the Bush team would be just so much more convincing if a little more of that money had been spent preparing for the aftermath. George Bush has spoken proudly of the three million emergency rations with which he plans to feed the twenty-five million Iraqi people, and I guess one meal between eight is at least a start. But the preparations being made to help the survivors of the coming catastrophe are pathetically anemic compared to the vastly more lavish preparations being made to cause the catastrophe.)

But McCain doesn't do the global arithmetic. Instead, he switches into heroic vision mode. Sure, some innocent civilians will die. However:-

Far fewer will perish than might otherwise because American combatants will accept greater risk to their own lives to prevent civilian deaths.

It's not quite clear to me exactly what this is supposed to mean, given that the three thousand warheads which America will be directing at Baghdad will be launched from a distance. However, for the purposes of argument, let's take these words at face value, and look at the subtext.

The subtext seems to be that virtue can flow from killing, in the old Crusader tradition. The subtext seems to be that if your cause is just, and if you are a valorous warrior prepared to risk your life in that cause, then you can achieve merit by the appropriate application of ultra-violence.

And one reason why I've been wrestling with McCain's words ever since Thursday is because this subtext speaks to me, to a very deep part of my being. I am very much a child of my culture, and my culture is a war culture.

That being so, I'd like to be able to buy into the McCain version of the George Bush vision, and to believe that the White Knights will ride forth and put down evil, and that something new and bright and visionary will rise from the ashes. But common sense, and the weight of history, is telling me that it just ain't so.

---

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

6. The Morality of Starving Civilian Populations to Death

Salam, in the course of his (self-described) "rant" about the war, gets exercised about the issue of sanctions.

Now that Iraq has been thru a decade of these sanctions I can only hope that their effects are clear enough for them not to be tried upon another nation. Sanctions which allegedly should have kept a potentially dangerous situation in Iraq in check brought a whole nation to its knees instead. And who ultimately benefited from the sanctions? Neither the international community nor the Iraqi people, he who was in power and control still is. These sanctions made the Iraqi people hostages in the hands of this regime, tightened an already tight noose around our necks.

I'm sure this is correct, because news reports indicate that a great many of the Iraqi people (in some areas, if not in all areas, the majority) are dependent on the government for rations, and if the government controls your food then it controls you.

I agree with what Salam says, and in fact I've come to the conclusion that sanctions are a criminal error, because they punish the innocent while leaving the guilty untouched.

I'd planned to write about this at quite some length, but I'm not going to, for two reasons. The first is that it's now 1500, and the day is starting to look shorter than it did. The second is that a voice (which I believe to be the cold clear voice of sanity) has just spoken up to say "What makes you think you have to exert yourself to demonstrate that White Knights do not starve little kids to death?"

(I just punched "Iraq malnutrition" into the search box of Google News and got 310 hits. As usual, there's a choice of statistics, and no way to tell which one might be accurate. But, regardless of who is doing the arithmetic, the end result seems to be that sanctions = dead kids.)

---

2003 March 17 Monday - On the Edge of War  top  diary  contents

1. War - when?
2. Are the Jews to blame?
3. Salam in Baghdad.
4. The doctrine of Absolute War.
5. John McCain and the Three Thousand Warheads.
6. The morality of starving civilian populations to death.
7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

7. Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War

I have now formally dedicated this site to Gilboskalubba, God of Carnage, Lord of War.

A couple of years back, I thought I'd outgrown the "gods of war" phase, and I thought the world had outgrown it with me. Me and the world, we were settling comfortably into middle age. The Cold War was well over, history had pretty much ended, nobody was talking seriously about nuking anybody else any more, and I was thinking, "Well, let's write something literary about the Death of Dot Com or something like that."

And then Osama bin Laden flew some planes into some American landmarks, and George Bush reacted by ripping up the world as we knew it and replacing it with this garish, cartoonish place featuring war with Afghanistan (over and done with), war with Iraq (maybe the day after tomorrow), war with North Korea (quite probably, either this year or next), war with Iran (maybe) and war with Syria (not out of the question).

(And don't forget that Pakistan has nukes, so what happens if President Musharraf gets overthrown by Islamic radicals? Or if Saudi Arabia destabilizes and the radicals take over there? Or if George Bush decides that geopolitical considerations not unrelated to oil mean that the United States has to go stabilize the increasingly uncertain future in Venezuela?)

And, as the tutelary deity of the new age in which I find myself living, Gilboskalubba seems about right.

---

(diary)    (previous)   (top)   (next)   (topics)  (contents)

---