the war in the middle-east

[miriam_e]

If just months ago someone had told me that I would begin to feel that perhaps the war in Iraq was the right thing to do, I'd have laughed at them. I've always been a passionate pacifist.

Lately I've been listening to a number of lectures by Christopher Hitchens and I have to say that he makes a lot of sense. If the jihadists are deeply evil people who dream of bringing about the death of all non-moslems, and this certainly seems to be so, at least judging by what they themselves say, then we have an obligation to human civilisation to stand against them. When they kill people whose doubts cause them to leave islam then this murder must be resisted. When they oppress women, treating them as little more than possessions, to be kept or dispensed with or killed at masculine whim then they must be stopped. When they wish to force their horrendous theocracy upon us all then they must be prevented from doing so. Religion is immoral. Fundamentalist religion compounds that with insanity. Fundamentalist islam is currently the most dangerous form of that insanity.

I find myself being pulled unwillingly toward the conclusion that we should be doing all we can to crush the fundamentalists in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere that they infect humanity.

Unwillingly? Yes. I can't help feeling that the cycle of violence is just that: a cycle, an endless treadmill. If not stopped it repeats, over and over again. However I am very aware that Germany is now an extremely peaceful country, which it would not be, had its desire to enslave the rest of the planet not been stopped in its tracks. Japan is now one of the great exponents of peace, which it undoubtedly owes to being crushed in its efforts to violently subjugate the world. So war doesn't always bring war. It can bring peace. Peaceful resistance against the nazis or imperial Japan would have simply shed more blood, not less. The mullas and clerics in the middle-east are gleefully celebrating what they see as western decadence in our desire for peace. They have no patience for half measures. There is no place for negotiating. They want bloody ruin. That is what a fanatic is.

What scares me is that the religious push in the western nations (mostly USA) could simply end up pitting one fevered, crazy religion against another. In that case nobody wins; we all lose no matter which way it goes. Everybody gets a radioactive hell.

Also it bothers me that wars now have reverted to an older, deeply immoral biblical or koranic form where the civilians are the ones who suffer the most. The moslem fighters deliberately target civilians and use them as shields against the western forces. The western forces use laughably named surgical strikes against the people and infrastructure and use mercenaries to rape and murder in order to avoid the repercussions of their legitimate troops so offending.

I wish there was a peaceful way of dealing with this, but, depressingly, I can't help feeling that there simply isn't.

----

Additional: I just now listened to a quite uplifting talk by Katha Pollitt in which she argued from what is my more usual optimistic, pacifist position. She said, "Keep from creating a clash of civilisations. That way lies disaster. Every country that has a fundamentalist government has lots of people that don't go along with it." She points out that corruption, exploitation, and poor living conditions must take a lot of the blame for the ignorance. "If the only place you had to send your kid to learn was a madrasah then you'd be grateful for the madrasah, but if you had a choice of sending them to a school where they could learn real knowledge that would be better." She wound up with the caution, "We have to resist the idea that there are one billion muslims out there wanting to kill us. If we think that way we can make it true."

Perhaps I should stop listening to Hitchens for a while and pause in my researching the Dark Ages (christianity's greatest and most depressing gift to the world: a thousand years of ignorance and lack of progress).

Comments

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

Your historical analysis is flawed, since you didn't bring in economy into the equation. Germany got economic help after the war, thus Germany fared better than for instance Poland, a country that didn't start any war. Germany's war mongering was partially due to poverty, etc etc. Japan's place among the world's prominent nations is also largely due to means. Wealthiness in a civilization plays an important part in its civility, not the only one, but it's one key component.

While I agree that other countries shouldn't lean back and silently observe "fascism with a muslim face" (Hitchen's quote), a hard interventionist policy (and by hard I mean other countries attacking without clear cause) we are creating far worse problems.

I used to like Hitchen a great deal, but now I think he's lost a few vital screws in his argumentative bulk. Although, no doubt, lots of people right and center, listen to him, particularly to the fear he is spreading.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I must bow to your analysis of history as mine is almost guaranteed to be flawed. Having spent most of my time learning physical and biological sciences I am not much authority on human history. Currently I'm trying to remedy that.

It is, as you point out, imperative that those beaten by war be helped up to prosperity. This seems to be the best way to stop resentment festering and war breaking out again. (Germany was crippled after the first world war and this appears to have been a factor in the growth of nazism.) Hopefully the pillaging by western corporations can be restrained somewhat and Iraqi resources handed back to the people living there after the religious despots are defeated (if they can be defeated).

I absolutely agree that prosperity, or rather, standard of living, plays an important part in a country's civility. (USA is very prosperous, but has a quite low standard of living for a first-world nation, and seems to be accordingly dangerous.)

From what I understand, many of the problems in the middle-east have been made worse by constant interference and mishandling of the region for decades. That nasty creep Saddam Hussein should never have been given the reins of power by the west, and we should never have starved and squeezed the Iraqi people with sanctions. The corrupt royalty in Arabia should not have been propped up by the west to rob their citizenry blind. Western leaders should not have been allowed to lie in order to trump up a fake war. However it is useless for me to say this with hindsight. I wasn't smart enough or aware enough to work against any of those, so I can't really blame others for failing too, and in any case we don't have the luxury of changing the past.

None of those things affects the stand of fundamentalist islam either. To gain some perspective of that truly schizophrenic religion read the koran. It is a surprisingly small book. You can download it from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) It constantly reiterates that god is good, just, and merciful, and rabidly goes on about how he delights in the brutal deaths of non-moslems. It is a horrible book, as murderous as the old testament, but far more obsessive.

[(Anonymous)]

The only problem I have with your point is that Iraq was one of the most secular countries in that area. Saudi Arabia, one of our supposed allies, is much more religiously intolerant. For that matter, most of the funding for 9/11 and for the terrorist camps in Afghanistan can be traced back there. That kind of makes the attack on Iraq kinda counterproductive.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more. It feels like the whole area is a quagmire of bad and corrupt decisions compounding and complicating other bad decisions.

But whatever the history we are now faced with a force that is happy to take us all to armageddon. How do we deal with that? It is clear that we can't simply ask them to respect our desire to live our own separate, peaceful, atheist life.

What is scary is that they are not the only ones hoping for armageddon. There are plenty of christian nutcakes who want it and some jewish ones too. It seems, at times, that we are surrounded by religions that want to see us all in hell.

I'd love a peaceful solution, but I can't for the life of me see how it will be possible.

IMHO

[hestia.livejournal.com]

I totally sympathise. I was against this war from the beginnng for two reasons:
1) war is letting the mass murder geni out of the bottle,
and
2) the politicians/leaders told blatant lies about why they wanted this war.

They never gave a shit about what the Taliban were doing. It was an empty excuse used to get ordinary people to support the war. They should have given a shit but they really didn't. It was all about money and never about morality.

But it seems that the propaganda has ignited a self-fulfilling prophesy.

War creates psychopaths. Psychopaths like war. They get to do exactly what they can't help themselves from doing, and they get respect and power amongst their community at the same time. They do what they do because they just want to watch the world burn. (Yes, Dark Knight quote.) Projection of immorality onto others is their excuse. But these psychopaths were created by a prolonged bombing campaign (war) kept out of the news during the years previous to 9/11, and by economic sanctions. The psychopathic personality is created by an unrelenting sense of personal danger and traumatic and horrific experiences during childhood. Frequent bombings, scarcity of nurturing within families headed by traumatised parents, and the actual or threatened loss of care givers upon whom the child depends for survival (especially if witnessed) would make for a generation disconnected from reality and full of the sort of rage that they cannot consciously physically endure feeling.

So yeah, our lying two faced leaders made this mess in the first place, and we are stuck with the hate of horrified, terrified, violence-worshipping little boys.

Re: IMHO

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have to say I agree very strongly with what you say. I should add that I knew some wonderful people who escaped from Iran when it was taken over by the religious nutters. They are well educated sensible people. Who knows how many of them have been crushed or killed inside Iran since the rise of religious power. But even that can be traced back partly to western interference. The Shah of Iran was by the accounts I've read, a secularising force in Iran, but shamelessly corrupt too, using the opportunity to amass a vast fortune, stealing it from the people. He was, I believe, placed and kept in power by the west.

Also I wonder how much of the horrors in the middle-east are the responsibility of faceless, remote, sociopathic, think-tank members who think it is a game and decide that "destabilising" a country or region makes it easier to exploit.

Re: IMHO

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I should also remind that the ones who bombed London, Bali, and flew planes into the World Trade Center were not victims of western oppression. They were well-educated, middle class, religious people. That isn't to lessen the part that broken, war-crippled people play in being some of the rationale for such rotten actions, but I kind of wonder if the war-torn regions which have been so mishandled by the west (and the middle-east people themselves), if they were instead left to their own devices, would they still be awfully broken? Would crazy jihadists still want our blood? I guess we'll never know. But from my reading of the koran, yes, they would still want us dead. It is right there in their book. Admittedly the christian bible promotes mass murder in a similar way, but most christians never realise this because they never read the bible. The difference with islam is that the koran is meant to be recited, not read. There is a much greater chance that muslims know what is in their koran.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Who would you rather be stuck in a lift with: Hitchens or Gandhi?

Let's not even go near the whole "Iraq = Taliban" lie.

And remember that Bush has turned out to be about 1000 times better at slaughtering Iraqis than Saddam Hussein (actually, must recalculate that figure one of these days, too).

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Either would suit me... though it would be infinitely more relaxing to chat with Gandhi. (Oops. Just re-reading noticed I'd left his name off that reply.)

The other two points I agree with totally. (I must recalculate those numbers too.)

Further to Bush's propensity for mass murder in Iraq, I heard mentioned today that the best evidence that USA is not an agent of peace is that for every one of the past 50 years they have taken up war with someone. This is one of the reasons for my reluctance in giving any kind of consent to the war. It would appear to lend credence to the actions of horrible specimens like Bush and his gleeful headlong plunge into war.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

First and formost, I believe USAnia is an agent for USAnia, and USAnian interests, and to their credit they've seldom pretended otherwise.

I think it is to the world's sometime-benefit that USAnians are as a whole well-disposed towards the rest of the world (at least, the rest of the world in general), and so it has had political worth to reflect that attitude in actions.

Of course, it's to the world's often-detriment that USAnia has so repeatedly engaged in warfare with parts of the world as well, overwhelmingly in "defence" of USAnian business interests.

Ah well. Thus, Nature balances itself.