Iraq: Violence--The Pure Measure

Reporting for Reuters, Deborah Lutterbeck notes the relationship between cessation of violence in Iraq and the Bush Administration's weighing the potential for troop reductions based on that [1].

It must be strange for any mind that keeps score and wants always to even or better it to find in the clinical metrics of America's military an impartial measurement meaningless to personal investment.

 

Assessing "level of violence"--within quotes here to set it off as an empirical variable--in a war zone would be like counting hits and strike-outs at a baseball game without credit to one team or another.  Although ascription surely exists in the field records, it would seem the level of violence, without fingerpointing, has been made the one pure variable by which to measure coalition progress in Iraq.

 

The cessation of violence in conflict may open the way to more robust and more widely distributed humanitarian aide, resettlement, and development--an abundance of good and necessary things separated from association with dueling (and scorekeeping and score settling) camps.

 

In a war on a behavior, which is the "War on Terror", violence itself may become more the target of intelligence and military effort than enemy affiliation.  Shutting down the means to and allaying the results of violence migrates the platform for conflict back to struggle through language, literature, and psychology: better violence in the head, which may be ascribed to and abetted by cultural systems and technologies, than blood in the streets.

 

Were the same index applied in Mogadishu, it would be evident, probably, that Somalia's anarchic violence has most to do with the adventure into competitive aggression and related states of mind.  The "Islamic Small Wars" often involve youthful and romantic battle groups--the students at Lal Masjid all dressed up to thrill (one another) and kill (with wood-stocked Kalashnikov); the vigorous landing party at Nahr al-Bared; the Sha'bob pulling off raids (but not quite hanging around and putting down roots) in Somalia--and they are in their preparations and talk beautiful and glorious for that. 

 

It's what happens next to old men, women, and children, to an audience at a cinema, brothers watching a soccer match, passersby on a street corner, aide workers risking their lives (tautological, that) to dole out food and medicine to strangers that spells what violence accomplishes.  Those murdered in the name of Allah lay in many places throughout Islam, and not one competing party has much, if anything, of permanence to brag for it.

 

They--whoever--took the town, but then the army (name any) took it back.

 

The bomb destroyed a hundred lives, but cars and pedestrians pass by on the same street corner a day later, more worried about the change in odds and not much, if at all, about their perception of The All or their place in relation to the Divine. 

 

With each passing day, violence in conflicted cultures proves less a prod and more a distraction: truth to tell, it may be enough for anyone just getting between home, market, and work without incident--for that, one may rightfully thank an Almighty.

 

Reference

 

1. Lutterbeck, Deborah.  "Bush keeps troop cuts open."  Reuters, August 1, 2008.