Geopolitical positioning, winning the new postcolonial cold war, feeding the sty of the billionaires from the military industrial complex, drawing the line on nerve gas, the Brits and the French holding our coats and glasses while we press on again against the bullies, Putin on the prowl, Assad the new Saddam, jihadists and other wretched terrorists, Congressional war-making powers, the hypocrisy of the moral high ground, making war by executive order -- when I think of Syria, these are not where my mind goes first.
When I think of Syria. I think of Nadine.
I don’t know her last name. I met her when I was seven on a playground in Santa Monica. She told me she came from Syria. She had a beautiful smile and loved kickball. And her eyes were of the deepest brown and looked at me with what I felt was supreme kindness. She was sensitive and shy, but graceful and full of laughter. And she befriended kids who seemed to be alone. Obviously, I’ve never forgotten her. How could l?
She could still be alive. I pray she’s not in her homeland.
Her government is monstrous. The civil war that has erupted there has made a power vacuum that other forces of madness are filling as fast as they can. And there’s a good chance that the country she visited all those years ago will start sending missile bombs into her country, claiming moral outrage, and promising to make limited surgical strikes on nerve gas plants and depots.
But Desert Storm, Afghanistan, the second Gulf War with Iraq, have shown us all what Tim McVeigh’s dismissal of “collateral damage” in the Oklahoma Bombing really means. It means unconscionable, not quite “unintended consequences,” that everyone knows will happen, in fact must happen. There can be no such thing as a surgical bomb.
Even with all the spy satellites and multiple crosshairs guiding the Tomahawk cruise missiles, mistakes will be made, and old people and children will have another devilish evil to contend with, beyond the tyranny of their government, beyond the worst a civil war can bring, which is among the very most terrible things that human beings can do to each other. They’ll have bombs raining down on them and the motive of those bombs will be moral outrage at the obscenity of using nerve gas. And the motive to the dead and grieving won’t matter at all.
I think of the terror, the horror most Syrians already must feel. Imagine finding yourself one day in the middle of war like that, with no holds barred. When I think of their terror, I think of how it must have felt to be in those planes, and in those buildings on 9/11 or how it must feel to go shopping in a big marketplace when you know, any moment, someone might set off a bomb that kills and maims hundreds.
And when terrorist bombs, or moral outrage bombs maim you, you stay that way, maimed. There are no huge depots of morphine in the Middle East, no army of reconstructive surgeons. The lights are almost always out in their hospitals. And then you could have terrifying cruise missiles sailing in from battleships showering the neighborhood with shrapnel and other lethal debris … to make a point.
What point might that be? That the Great Powers are no different from the little monsters? That terror from the high ground is just as lethal as terror from the desperate and insane? What lessons do bombs teach? Only the lessons of hatred, only the lessons of revenge and the redacted warnings of its eternal futility.
I hope against hope Nadine never went back to Syria.
Syria is already ruined, like Iraq, like Egypt, like Afghanistan, all for different reasons, but all with the same human consequences – agony, sorrow beyond imagining, grief beyond endurance, the chance at a “normal” life gone, and probably gone for good.
“If you accept war, you have to accept cruelty,” Jorge Luis Borges said in one of his last interviews. War equals cruelty. That’s the undeniable equation. If you can’t accept cruelty you can’t accept war.
Borges went on to say, “And you have to accept slaughter and bloodshed and that kind of thing. And, after all, to be killed by a rifle, or to be killed by a stone thrown at you, or by somebody thrusting a knife at you, is essentially the same.”
I can’t agree with that last sentence, though some of it is true. How we die, why we die, and when we die, matter for each of us in the most intimate way. That we can be killed, and that there are infinite ways that can happen, is a matter for a lifetime of contemplation.
But surely all of us would rather die in bed, peacefully, in our sleep, perhaps, than be blown to smithereens in a jet plane crashing into a building, or by having our arm blown off when a cruise missile misses its mark just a bit, and we die in agony under rubble.
I’m grateful that New Mexico’s senior Senator Tom Udall, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “voted against the resolution to authorize military action in Syria,” as he said in a new release.
“I’m convinced we must learn from our past mistakes, “Udall said. “Escalating our engagement in Syria puts us on a dangerous path – one that we’ve been down before in Iraq. We cannot afford to walk down that road again unless it is our national interest, we are left with no other alternatives, and have completely exhausted all diplomatic options.”
Diplomacy doesn’t generally kill people, unless it fails. And one can always talk more, listen with greater attention, and try ever harder to work for compromise and consensus. A powerful nation can always continue to struggle with ever deeper and more heartfelt intent to refuse to step across the real line between the normal chaos of everyday human life into the demonic and unspeakable cruelty of war. That’s what a great nation would do.
If by accepting war, you have to accept cruelty, conscience can only bear that when war is truly forced upon it. And even then, conscience tears itself apart with remorse for doing what it genuinely had no other choice but to do. Anything short of that is unacceptable, unless you’re able to accept and overlook the abomination of cruelty itself.
September 09, 2013