Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIt wasn't Helen's face that launched the thousand ships.
It was her abduction.
And it wasn't that old time religion that flew jets into the Twin Towers.
It was rape.
Whatever else may be gotten from war correspondent Paul Watson's memoir, Where War Lives [1], the note will ring clear on just how deeply personal the matter is for those who make it--i.e., who literally manufacture its violence with deep disregard for the hapless and disinterested victims who will be caught in its maelstrom.
"After U.S.-backed mujahideen forced Soviet troops to end their almost decade-long occupation in 1989, Washington turned its back on Afghanistan as it collapsed into a ferocious civil war. Five years later, as local legend has it, members of a warlord's militia kidnapped and gang-raped two teenaged girls at a checkpoint in this home villave of Singesar, in the dust-blown badlands an hour's drive from the southern city of Kandahar" (p. 167-8).
Determine to redress that grievance, Mullah Mohammed Omar, "an obscure country cleric", not only returned to the scene of the crime with a war party and "hanged the militia commander from a tank barrel," he fled into Pakistani Baluchistan to recruit "fighters fired up for a new jihad by the puritianical Wahabi theology"--and there's the birth of the Taleban with the blessings of Pakistan's madrassas and military.
In Paul Watson's journies through conflicts and on to those who make it happen, there's always a story more specific to personalities than to ideas about what wars would otherwise be about.
I may be confusing my own thoughts on war with Watson's observations here, but it's hard to escape the oil executive who stays in Mogadishu to do business, facilitate U.S. State Department matters, and pay rent to the lieutenant of a notorious warlord after the world has slouched out of town; no one who reads the book will soon forget Bosnia's KLA rebel leader Adem Jashari who, after building an army, sat in wait with his family to be massacred by Serbian forces because he thought doing so would spark a larger war and spill bad ink all over the Serbs, which it did.
"Jashari and his lieutenants," writers Watson, "had obviously learned one of the main lessons of war in the 1990s: Western politicians were moved into action by images of civilian suffering. The KLA needed foreign intervention against the Serbs, so they decided to generate the right pictures. Milosevic's forces obliged with a three-day assault by helicopter gunships and ground forces that killed Jashari and his family along with thirty-six relatives and neighbours, some of whom were shot at close range as they tried to flee" (p. 194).
If there were a war on those who make war, the effort would be well armed, for sure.
The opening stunner by Nicholas Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, in Lord of War, "There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do you arm the other eleven?" finds its mirror, perhaps its answer as well, in the looting of Iraqi arms stores shortly after the U.S. invasion: In Mosul at the Iraqi army's 5th Corps base, the journalist witnesses guys in shirtsleaves making off with Kalashnikovs and RPG's by the arm load.
Why?
We have seen "why" in scores of retributive murders and the actions of sectarian militias.
Men fight some for ideals but more so out of fear for themselves coupled with faith in their own ascending to power and states of affairs secured by arms.
1. Watson, Paul. Where War Lives. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 2007, p. 167-8.
2. Lord of War. Andrew Niccol, writer and director; Nicholas Cage, principal actor. Lions Gate Films, September 2005. Wikipedia reference: "Lord of War".
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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