Thursday, November 19, 2015
'Shock... Awe': The Aftermath of
Paris
The 'shock and awe' bombing of Iraq in 2003. 'The news is that
terror wins,' writes Koehler in the wake of Paris attacks. 'Indeed, terror is
the cornerstone of civilization.' (Photo: File)
I’m sitting in the aftermath of Paris, feeling emotions tear me
apart. One of the emotions is joy. My daughter, who lives there, is safe.
Has “joy” ever felt so troubling?
The aftermath of Paris seems likely to be intensified
(“pitiless”) bombing raids in Syria, closed borders, heightened fear-based
security and the deletion of “the gray zones of coexistence” across the planet.
Oh, it’s so nice to have an enemy who is truly evil! And the
logic of war is so seductive. It simplifies all these complex emotions. Just
watch the news.
The news is that terror wins. Indeed, terror is the cornerstone
of civilization.
I couldn’t get that notion out of my head. That’s because I
couldn’t stop thinking about an act of extraordinary terror that took place
just over a dozen years ago, and its relevance to the world’s current state of
shock and chaos. Doing so made it impossible to contemplate the raw savagery of
the ISIS killings in Paris and Beirut and everywhere else — the “my God!” of it
all, as innocent lives are cut short with such indifference — in a simplistic
context of us vs. them.
In March of 2003, the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq with a
bombing campaign called “shock and awe,” consisting of some 1,700 air sorties
over the country that killed, according to Iraq Body Count, over 7,400 civilians.
Thinking about that number simply in the context of the 129
confirmed dead and 300-plus injured in Paris, let’s consider, one more
time, the words of Harlan K. Ullman and James
P. Wade, whose 1996 publication, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance,
provided the strategic rationale for the 2003 bombing campaign:
“The intent here is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through
delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction
directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public,
rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives. . . .
“The employment of this capability against society and its
values, called ‘counter-value’ … is massively destructive strikes directly at
the public will of the adversary to resist. . . .
“One recalls from old photographs,” they wrote, “. . . the
comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World
War I and the attendant horrors and death of trench warfare. These images and
expressions of shock transcend race, culture, and history. Indeed, TV coverage
of Desert Storm” — referring to the 1991 U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq —
“vividly portrayed Iraqi soldiers registering these effects of battlefield
Shock and Awe.”
We launched our war on Iraq with the intent to commit terror on
a scale ISIS could only dream of. The relevance of this is inescapable, not
simply because it makes the United States and NATO brothers in terror with
ISIS, but also because the war shattered Iraq and caused the death and
displacement of millions more people and, ultimately, created the conditions in
which ISIS was able to come to power.
What’s haunting to me is the absence of this shockingly relevant
recent history from most mainstream coverage of the Paris killings — or more to
the point, the absence of almost any sort of trans-war consciousness, you might
say, from the discussion of what we ought to do next.
Considering that bombing campaigns, and war itself, are not only
the equivalent of terror (“writ large”), but also wildly ineffective and
counterproductive, producing, in the long term, pretty much the opposite of
what rational, non-war-mongers crave, the failure of politicians and mainstream
media types to reach beyond a riled militarism in their reaction to the
medieval terror in which ISIS specializes bodes poorly, I fear, for the future
of humanity.
My daughter, who last Friday night had been at a rehearsal for
an upcoming poetry event, found herself, at 10 p.m., as she was leaving a
tavern called Les Caves St.-Sabin, in the middle of the chaos. As she and her
friends stepped into the street, someone came running past warning people to
get back inside. They only learned, in bits and pieces, the enormity of what
was still happening in their city. She spent the night at the tavern, a
decorated basement that felt, she said, like a “medieval fallout shelter.” In
the morning, the metro was running again and she returned to her apartment.
Only then did the horror hit her with full ferocity. She sat and cried, then
got up and went to work.
But the tears continue, if only in silence. These are tears writ
large. They swell beyond Paris and beyond Europe and the West to the broken,
bombed, war-ravaged nations of the Third and Fourth World, the source of the
planet’s 60 million refugees. This is the world of ISIS. Instead of continuing
to bomb this world, in our fear and anger, we could try to understand it.
“ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men
a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.”
So wrote Lydia Wilson, a research fellow at the Centre
for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, in a recent
piece for The Nation. She and her colleagues, in an attempt to do just that —
understand those who have given over their lives to ISIS — recently interviewed
ISIS prisoners of war in Iraq and, in the process, found their humanity. Mostly
they were young men in their 20s who grew up in the wake of the American
occupation of Iraq, that is to say, in the midst of brutal civil war.
“The Americans came,” one of them told her. “They took away
Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were
starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil
war started.”
Violence begets violence, war begets war. Knowing this is the
starting place. It’s time to start over.
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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