For
the New Year's Eve fireplace
of Bush and Blair
A sermon against war
By
Jonathan
Power
December 27, 2002
LONDON - War in February now looks very likely. The die
is almost cast. It will be a bitter, hard fought war,
baring little comparison to the easy run of ten years
ago. With his back to the wall Saddam Hussein will fight
in the toughest, cruellest way imaginable, luring the
American and British invaders into the Iraqi cities where
they will be butchered one by one and they in turn will
wreck vengeance, intended or not, on the innocent, the
trapped city dwellers.
"And there is this earth, this mud where the flesh
rots, where eyes decompose. These arms, these legs that
crunch in the jaws of the boars. The souls ulcerated and
foul from killing, the bodies so starved for tenderness
they haunt stables in search of pleasure. There is this
gangrene that eats at the heart…." President George
Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, two men who in their
own personal life have avoided war, should read Duong Thu
Huong's searing novel set in Vietnam where she as a young
woman fought on the side of the Vietcong. Not only is it
the most beautifully written novel I have read this year,
it tells you about war word by word, until you feel your
own eyes have been gouged out, your own corpse hung from
a branch, and the "dizzying sense of carrion and
gunpowder".
Bush and Blair talk of how a liberated Iraq will be,
with a new democracy, human rights for all and the end of
the horrific torture of Saddam's opponents and their
children (which was first brought to the world's
attention by Amnesty International fourteen years ago and
ignored by the British and U.S. governments which then
sold Saddam arms). But the worst of human wrongs is to
kill 10,000 people (one Pentagon estimate). No human
wrong of that proportion can justify some wildly
optimistic scenario for improving human rights. And this
is to put it mildly if in the end the U.S. decides to use
nuclear weapons, a proposition now seriously considered
in the Pentagon and one that is, according to a new poll,
apparently supported by 60% of the U.S. electorate.
Since it is nearly New Year, I will mention a new book
for the fireside, "War
is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (1), by Chris
Hedges, a star war correspondent of the New York Times.
Hedges made his reputation by covering wars in Central
America, Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is a reporter who admits
the closer he was to the action and the slaughter a
greater high he got. Apparently fearless he lived for the
next fight. "At certain moments" he wrote, "I would
rather die like this than go back to the routine of
life." He imbibed the narcotic of war as happily as any
soldier seduced by the unlimited power to destroy.
War, he admits "gives a sense that we can rise above
our smallness and divisiveness…In every society,
including ours, is the passionate yearning for a
nationalist cause that exalts us, that war alone is able
to deliver". But as time went on he realized he had made
a great spiritual mistake, although Hedges is not a
religious man. As the French philosopher Simone Weil
wrote, "Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it,
or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it
crushes, the first it intoxicates".
He has watched war leaders and their fighting machines
and the journalists who hang out with them become
corrupted by war. Even President Ronald Reagan, an
upright man in many ways, called Jonas Savimbi, the rebel
leader in Angola, the Abraham Lincoln of Africa, although
he littered the country with mines, once bombed a Red
Cross factory making artificial limbs and pummelled a
rival's wife and children to death.
Hedges, who seems to have spent his precious spare
moments as a war reporter reading the great works of
western civilization, recalls of how, unable to sleep
during the war in El Salvador, he picked up Shakespeare's
Macbeth. "It was not a calculated decision. I had come
that day from a village where about a dozen people had
been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied
behind their backs with wire and their throats slit". He
opened the play at the speech of Macduff's wife made when
the murderers sent by Macbeth arrive to kill her and her
small children. "Whither should I fly?" she asks. "I have
done no harm. But I remember now/I am in this earthly
world- where to do harm/is often laudable, to do good
sometime/Accounted dangerous folly."
Those words "seized me like furies" Hedges wrote. It
drove him to write this unusual and searing book, deeply
researched but its most precious insights culled from
personal experience and his rich knowledge of our great
literature in which he excels. If for a moment I thought
Bush and Blair would give it time I would happily send
them a copy to read in front of the fire.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
(1) Follow this link to read about and order Chris
Hedges' book from Amazon.co.uk "War
is a Force That Gives Us Meaning".
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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