Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIt's unfair to single out Somalia today for this lesson in the Islamic Small Wars (and probably others), but the news is so atrocious that it will do as a whipping post for this most gentle of remonstrance:
- War is Personal for Its Leaders and Their Buddies
- War is Deeply Impersonal for Those Who Don't Care Much For It
While Somalia's powers that want to be--government officials, warlords, "Islamists", also brigands, pirates, and youth gangs--find mission joy in the staccato bursts of Kalashnikov fire, The People suffer and die in every miserable circumstance and situation possible.
Of course there's no news in that.
All outside the maelstrom, including, one might suggest, more comfortable government officials, warlords, Islamists, brigands, pirates, and youth gangs, must wonder at the ego, fear, and vanity that energizes so many combatants in ways that guaranty their own ruin through whatever version of "winning" they have in their heads.
These wars destroy value--and define "value" any way you wish: economic, political, spiritual.
Not to bloggerbate too much on Somalia this morning--I've got some book reports (Peter Arnett, Ann Jones, Sarah Chayes) coming up quick--the true and only battleground in Somalia resides in the heads of men with guns--all of them, Ethiopians and AU peacekeepers included--and peace between them may not be forged piecemeal.
If one could idealistically and romantically get to the Next Beginning today, it would feature one of each caricature of an exhausted criminal or warrior meeting amid the smoking ruins and acknowledging that whatever they had been up to just plain hadn't worked out so well.
That's not going to happen for a while yet.
Empathy may be universal among the writerly classes, but it sure is not among the political and warrior ones. Let's count the negative ways:
- Ethiopian troops seem to take being fired upon personally; shooting back turns out much less of a problem. My first note in that vein involved the immediate vicinity hunt for perpetrators in the wake of a roadside bombing of a transport vehicle and the summary house-to-house search leading to the selection and execution of two brothers. This morning's AlertNet report tells of troops stopping a bus, receiving fire from a single pistolero within it, and hammering back full force.
- Whever the Islamists go, the forces of the Transitional National Federal Government have been sure to follow, and the incessant contention about showing The Local People what could be called The Way, divine or profane, inevitably means showing them death first. In Somalia, the armory itself has become a dreaded character, a villain set loose by many trigger fingers and always to devestating effect. According to Aweys Yusuf, Reuters, the Islamists have promised to engage more closely with government forces to spare civilian lives, but, but, but . . . there they travel hither and yon to enforce God's will, as they perceive it, with bombs, rockets, and Kalashnikovs always inviting others to exercise the same privilege using similar means (plus drones).
- Did I mention armed drones? The U.S. has found a way to wiggle--more like yaw and roll--across international boundaries without setting a known uniformed foot, alive or dead, on the other guy's turf: just send out a radio controlled and not-far-from model airplane with interesting electronics and munitions aboard. The more business like, professional, sterile, the better.
The Combined Air & Space Operations Center, about which Mark Benjamin has written for Salon [3] may do a fine job with the Predator drone but would, really, the military and everyone else understand the minds of combatant targets and change them, influence them, transform their codes to more progressive interests, say producing food, medicine, and shelter for whole regional populations, and then, I guess, building the sophisticated communications systems, hospitals, and roads that support agriculture, education, and environmental health in general--but then all of that would threaten to invite resentment leading to something like the Mugabe Effect, that is the rejection of positive outcomes in trade for the grown up's version of "Mother, I'd rather do it myself" (and my immediate people--cronies, family, like-minded if not similarly colored associates), and that all the way back to impressing others with arms, intimidation, and violence without end.
While the humanitarians and UN envoys bleat about the depth of the crisis in Somalia, the peacocks who have fouled the countryside for gore and glory have become exactly what they intended: The Power--that is, all of the boys with toys together representing War to the exclusion of all else.
There's not a "force majeur" on the planet capable of reversing the damage done by armies, however small or large, or civic, criminal, or religious, grinding toward one another through death and suffering and absent of compassion.
2. Yusuf, Aweys. "Somali Islamists plot more hit-and-run raids." Reuters AlertNet, March 27, 2008.
3. Benjamin, Mark. "Killing 'Bubba' from the skies." Salon, February 15, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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