These words are written as American missiles rain down upon Baghdad and tanks race up from Kuwait into the desert. The American media claim that this is a war for the liberation of Iraqis; the rest of the world --- at least the people if not all regimes --- call it a war of arrogant aggression.
There are some very significant implications of this war and the way it is being presented by the media. First, it is a war which has made a mockery of the concept of international law. It was after thousands of years of considering war as a good thing --- the sport of kings --- that people had accepted the opposite view: that war is a crime against humanity. This view was not really accepted by governments, and especially by the military, because states are power projects. The military, all over the world, kept glorifying war as such and celebrating bravery even if it was used to kill innocent people. However, because war was officially called a crime, the League of Nations and the United Nations at least talked about their responsibility to bring about peace. War did not come to an end because of the idea of peace but lip service to the UN ideals did become the norm. However, in America’s case, though the lip-service remained, international law was violated again and again. Even during the Clinton era, force was used in Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo without referring to the Security Council. However, those were conflicts in which the world was asking for intervention and in the case of Kosovo Kofi Annan fully supported the use of force. The point I am trying to make, however, is that for the right reasons or the wrong ones, America shows little respect for international norms of legal and moral conduct. In a book called Rogue States published in 2000, before Nine Eleven, Noam Chomsky quotes the newsletter of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) as follows: ‘international law is today probably less highly regarded in our country than at any time’ in the century (p.1).
But this statement was from 1999. The real blow to the idea of international law is the war on Iraq. Here is an attack on a country in the face of opposition --- opposition which continues and has even intensified --- of the people of most of the important countries of the world. Moreover it is an action which would have been voted down in the Security Council and which Kofi Annan has condemned. Because of this clear violation of international law Iraq will become a watershed in world affairs. The era of open American hegemony seems to have begun. America has had a very strong military and economic presence all of the world but the will to empire-building by military force is now more blatant than ever.
In any case America spent US dollars 322 billion on defense in 2001 and is projected to spend as much as all other countries in the would put together. The U.S. has its bases in many places in the world. In Germany these are 71,400 troops; in Japan 39,700 and in South Korea 38,000. There are troops in Afghanistan and, of course, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have huge American bases. Indeed, as some analysts grimly point out, Americans seldom withdraw completely once they subjugate a country militarily. This being so, people wonder if the next major base will be Iraq. And if it is Iraq then the Arab world will be policed by bases within it. This seems to be a new kind of imperialism. Whereas the old imperialists settled colonies of soldiers and administrators, the American imperium extracts wealth and carries on a cultural and economic conversion of countries into its own image or in its own interests. Meanwhile the military presence, the bases, give the necessary muscle to keep the ‘empire’ in line and to reach out to the world.
But this is not the only fallout of this war one fears. The other one is the loss of sensitivity one picks up from the media. The way the media depicts the war makes it appear as a ‘war game’. The images used are ‘clean’ images in the sense that one sees buildings going up in flames but no apparent casualties. The only human beings one hears about as human casualties --- that is people who feel pain and bleed and whose families cry over them --- are American and British. The ‘other’ is dehumanized and this leads to a kind of callousness.
With these ‘clean’ images one has the language of war games. Strikes are ‘surgical’ and the killing of human beings is ‘collateral damage’ ---a phrase which earned notoriety in the 2001 Afghan War. People come on the Fox News Channel rubbing their hands in glee and saying how ‘excited’ they are. Indeed, some began by calling the war as a whole ‘exciting’.
Some would dismiss Fox as being extremist and, therefore, not a real representative of American media. That might be true but Fox has gained in popularity since Nine Eleven. Even more alarmingly some of its features are being picked up by the other channels. Fox does for the media what the free style wrestlers do for T.V audiences. They provide gratification of the most feral of longings and secret desires of human beings—the desire to give pain, to humiliate, to watch the domination of the powerful. The strong enjoy it because other strong men and forceful actions are their role models. The weak enjoy it as they project themselves in these strong men and become strong by proxy. This is exactly what Fox does. It creates a fantasy world in which America is great and good and right all the time.
All this is very alarming. For the last several decades American, and to a lesser extent European, media has shown excessive violence on the scene. Most social scientists now agree that this has created a kind of callousness among the youth. At the same time it has made the insecure feel even more insecure than before. This may or may not have increased violence --- and more people claim it has--- but it certainly has decreased peoples’ trust in, and desire for, tenderness, softness, sentiment, beauty and gentleness. And now that a real war comes on the screens before millions of viewers as an adventure, there is danger that war will be increasingly viewed by ordinary people --- as it is by the military war-game strategists --- as yet another game.
Whether Bush is a Christian fundamentalist as many writers point out would have been irrelevant had this war been fought against a non-Muslim country. Now that it is being fought against a Muslim country --- and Baghdad is a place very dear to South Asian Muslims because of its sufi shrines--- it is seen in the Muslim world (see the Pakistani Urdu press) as a crusade against Muslims. Despite the help given by France, Germany and Russia; despite the anti-war protests of so many non-Muslims; despite all these things the war is seen in Pakistan’s bazaars as America’s great strike at the heart of Islam. This, again, is a very dangerous fallout.
The most essential thing at the moment is that the war should come to an end. People should not be killed; their homes should not be destroyed; the air they breath should not be contaminated by the poisons released in the atmosphere. This is what humanity needs. And all wars do all these things in the modern world. If, however, the war continues killing thousands and causing the burning of more oil wells, this war will be both a human disaster and an environmental one. It will be remembered as the day when America turned its back on civilization.