 |
 |
Rumsfeld proclaiming piously that setting fire to Iraqi oil wells was a crime against the Iraqi people, whose natural wealth they were; Bush saying the the post-war reconstruction of Iraq might provide the UN with an opportunity to "find its legs of responsibility again". One assumes they don't mean what they're saying; the performance is jawdroppingly brazen. Rumsfeld even manages to sound bored while he's doing it. The megaphone speaker by the clock tower I passed on my way home, having enumerated the evils of colonialism and empire since year dot, wound up with "...and the third argument I would like to make is, REMEMBER PALESTINE!". Urge to shout obscenities never greater. The Arab-Israeli conflict was an immense, entangled and intractable horror even back in the 1960s; now it has hardened into bitter and desperate farce, Israel squandering her last remnants of moral capital in a self-defeating travesty of nationhood. There is nothing in the whole vicious calamity that supports anybody's arguments for anything; it has no place as a referent in anybody's scheme of justification, except as a living instance of the worst, of the political degraded to the last extreme of hopelessness. "The adiaphorisation of moral action" - Zygmunt Bauman's phrase, originally concerned with the Shoah. War brings the consequences of policy nearer to home: a decision is made, missiles are launched, people die. The policy enacted prior to war also entailed the deaths of untold thousands, but over a longer period of time and by a much longer series of indirections. Responsibility is deferred; the multitudes who died under a policy of containment and isolation of a dictator apparently were not killed "in our name". Why does anybody think that the war is a new and dreadful sort of crime? I want to say that it is the same "crime" as before, that it has been going on for all of what it has pleased me to think of as my adult life. Apparently a Scud has actually been shot down by a Patriot missile. That'd be a first, then. Dominic