War and peace

War is provoked by a few even as most of us clamor for peace. With this simple formula truthfully reflecting sentiments worldwide, why should it be difficult now to castigate the few and acclaim the many? After all, having and sharing peace is a catholic wish, wistfully echoed in the languages and faiths of people everywhere. War, on the other hand, appears to be the exhortation of a handful, be these the ever-scheming politicians, the vulgar dogs of war or the few seeking what might be honorable as knights and samurais occasionally did in the past.

The answer probably lies in the fact that war and peace are compromised by the motivations perceived to effectively guide them. Those who would live by the sword and other weapons of mass destruction (among the arsenals of war, wasn’t the simple sword a radical technological development too that once threatened mass destruction?) ritualistically profess nothing but just wars – armed conflicts that seek, secularly, to free, democratize and civilize tyrannized populations. At the very least, they invoke the war’s alternative objective of disarming a popularly acknowledged tyrant and ridding the world of the threat that the tyrant embodies as he builds up his regime’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Where this professed rationale gains credibility, even those who would reforge swords into plowshares moderate their criticism of armed responses to conflict resolution. At times, as in the First Gulf War of 1991, many peace-oriented people may even extend active support for those who take to war, their nagging consciences perhaps subsequently stilled by the surgical swiftness and dramatic success of a superpower’s military operations.

Conditions are different in March 2003. The former rhetoric no longer rings as true. Enough people worldwide suspect a more imperial design in the United States move to invade Iraq and oust Saddam. The politics of oil appears to ooze out of every seam of American foreign policy in the Middle East and the nobility of a Camelot-like undertaking in the region is confounded by the apparent American bias for Israel in the latter’s long and historically violent struggle with its Arab neighbors. To a lot of people – not all of them Arabs – freedom, democracy and civilization appear to have a flawed context as American foreign policy orients itself to this commendable trilogy. To these critical people, universalistic goals cannot be pursued with particularistic, ethnically-biased policies.

Oil and water do not easily mix. Even the impressive capabilities of a superpower cannot generate the pressure needed to make such disparate elements to forcefully integrate and so American initiatives in the Middle East fail to assure enough people – Arabs and non-Arabs alike – that they serve anything more than narrow American self-interest. Too many people worldwide refuse to believe that the present war’s agenda in Iraq sincerely concern itself with liberating an oppressed people and exorcising the world of Saddam’s WMD. On, the contrary, far too many are inclined to believe that the war in Iraq is a deceptive attempt to permanently embed American hegemony in the Middle East.

If this were the only calculus in figuring out the situation in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole, many of those for peace would not find it difficult to excoriate the perceived warmongers – Bush, Jr., Blair and the more active characters among those who comprise the coalition of the willing. Likewise, such critics would be uncompromisingly generous in praising those who work unceasingly for peace.

But there is indeed another dimension to the current conflict. There is a near-universal recognition that the Iraqi nation is truly despotically ruled by a tyrant who has probably committed genocidal acts in the course of his long career. There is much suspicion that the tyrant’s inventory of WMD – partially destroyed in the First Gulf War and probably clandestinely restocked since then – is not simply a convenient figment of American policymakers’ resourceful imagination; many people believe that Iraq’s WMD actually exist and are effectively controlled by a most unstable mind – Saddam Insane – the whole world rightly has reason to fear.

Thus, even when people suspect the American government’s motivations for war and are prone to be critical of its extremely hawkish propensities, there lurks the fear that a war in Iraq might indeed be necessary to dispose of the perceived greater evil, Saddam. Additionally, for many who prefer peace and more diplomatic means of conflict resolution and the specific challenge of disarming Iraq’s fearsome ruler, a terrible pragmatism takes over. Since the United States and its allies cannot be dissuaded by the United Nations or any conceivable human agency from undertaking a war against Iraq, the war’s operational motivations might be glossed over and one might best hope that ultimately some good is served by what one cannot prevent.

Among the more literate peacelovers, consolation might be situated in Goethe’s Faust where the devil proclaims himself to be "He, who while ever conspiring to do evil, somehow manage to do good." To the less literate and perhaps the outrightly vulgar, the consolation is much simpler, of course much more immediate – handed lemons, why not make lemonades?

Neither the devil nor lemonades helps people view the war In Iraq with sufficient clarity. There is now so much haze enveloping people trying to make sense of Iraq and its message of war and peace for the world. This haze does not spring from the torched oilfields alone, but mostly from our horribly torched souls.