Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThere are no good days in war.
Untimely death stalks every one of them.
Compared to many a given day during World War II, of course, all of the daily death combined, so far, and thank God for making this so, would barely ripple the tidal pools of blood that were, say, Iwo Jima or the Invasion of Normandy, not that the numbers matter to any aggrieved.
This morning, I thought I'd survey the states-of-immediate-affairs of the states hosting the most active militants.
Start in Pakistan, where Reuters reports the arrest of another two suspects in kidnapping and beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl. [1]
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Persig compared English empiricism to a tractor in the realm of epistemology: it grinds away at its problems, but it gets them in time. So it goes with efforts involving militants in the field--they do what they do, and then the forces of government respond, slowly, methodically.
It's a miserable struggle, but it creates justice of a sort, the police and their prisoners knowing one another with precision.
If Somalia were not known as a country, it would qualify as a frontier, so weak and thin have been both its external and internal security forces, its once again barely birthed government, and the cooperative resolve in total of its many warring parties, not just al Qaeda and the Islamic Courts Union effort, but also its many powerful tribal representatives.
However, whatever Somalia may be six months from now, it's performing like a champ as a western-backed, multipersonality (I'm not about to say "multi-party"), internationally cooperative and responsible government, and it too has found the reasoning and resolve to grind away at so much freelanced violence, as earlier today, Shabelle.Net reported that Mayor Mohammed Dheere of Mogadishu announced the seizure of several weapons caches from neighborhoods on the north side of the capital. [2]
As always by design--that's something to think about--mere military and paramilitary force cannot contain a decentralized guerrilla front that keeps its mouth shut. Whatever its other characteristics, secret-keeping relationships may define it best.
In fact, it's quite easy to set aside Islamic actors and replace them with personalities representing other causes--there's always a "red something" operating somewhere--small causes (in the spirit of Unibomber), or even just primarily themselves in the manner of Charles Manson, and realize that the chief defense--"freedom fighers", "terrorists", "criminals"--for all boils down to screens of privacy and silence.
Most of the time, we know what we know through language, the heart thriving on poetry, the reasoning part of the soul on observation.
Moving on to the Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon, which has been three-quarters abandoned by its residents as the Lebanese Army tightens its cordon--down to one-square kilometer today--around Fatah al-Islam, this quote comes from Naharnet [3]:
"Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Lebanon Abbas Zaki has said the Nahr al-Bared camp was like a "hijacked plane or ship. Our people have been hijacked by the Fatah al-Islam gang."
"Uprooting Fatah al-Islam, Zaki added, would guarantee future of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, estimated at about 400,000 people."
The news from Baghdad by Sinian Salaheddin reporting for the Associated Press [4] and picked up three hours ago by the Mercury News.com: "Alert guards gunned down a black-clad woman at a police recruiting station Tuesday, a would-be suicide bomber who then exploded before their eyes."
That's a hopeful as well as compelling lead.
However, the article goes on to note the death by car bomb of six policeman at a checkpoint. Farther down Salaheddin's report: "As the sun rose, reports also began filtering in of headless corpses and other bodies found dumped around Iraq, many presumed victims of the relentless Shiite-against-Sunni bloodshed."
Everyday violence in Iraq combines this relentless blood-for-blood, tit-for-tat, Hatfield-and-McCoy type Shiite vs. Sunni murder with some off to the side tactical or strategic Islam vs. West (or Everyone Else) action.
In Somalia, where environment and starvation oppose this thing called "Man" on top of the various interests at play, one may well understand the ascendence and perpetuation of civil chaos, political instability, and crime amid the country's otherwise natural beauty and remarkable location on Planet Earth.
Baghdad, by comparison, is a desert town with a river running through it--an oasis, in other words.
There's no excuse, not by way of the Koran (the country's Muslim--enough said) nor any tactical or strategic sensibility becoming a country, that justifies this cultivation of hate and prejudice in perpetuity.
Open your eyes, Baghdad.
Americans and Jews are not killing you.
1. "Pakistan arrests 2 suspects in Daniel Pearl case," Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSISL31341320070605?src=060507_0909_DOUBLEFEATURE_ .
2. "Weapons seized as Ethiopian premier pays a surprise visit to Mogadishu," Shabelle.Net: http://www.shabelle.net/news/ne3053.htm.
3. "Fatah al-Islam Militants Besieged in One Square kilometer of Nahr al-Bared," Naharnet: http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/getstory?openform&6413D2E6DEE6BC80C22572ED002BF905.
4. "Female suicide bomber foiled in Baghdad," Mercury News.com: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_6064612.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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