The casualties of war

The casualties of war

B. Herry-Priyono, Lecturer, Driyarkara School of Philosophy,
Jakarta

Last Sunday, March 30, I joined the flow of people coming from
the eight directions of the wind, all flocking into the Jakarta
streets of Jl. M.H. Thamrin and Jl. Sudirman. In Indonesia, it
was the greatest convergence of demonstrations protesting the
bellicose adventure of the warring parties in Iraq.

The final destination was the gate of the U.S. Embassy. As
expected, the protesting banners, clamor and speeches were all
directed at the way the Bush cabal and its allies have run their
Rambo-like rampage in Iraq. So, that is how global consciousness
is manifest these days. As someone more inculcated in empirical
matters than the art of philosophizing, I am by no means unaware
of the realpolitik of this war. Being a participant of the Sunday
demonstration, however, I could not help but go beyond the
realpolitik of war.

War is about winning and losing. But the way it is won or lost
is more than a matter of legal justification or military
technology. The emerging global consciousness, when humanitarian
reason calls, has gone beyond the fascination for technology.
Here comes a forgotten cardinal truth: Technology is made for the
sacrosanct nature of life, not life for technology.

The first casualty of war, rather than truth, is life. The
human race, in its genius, invented law as a device to sustain
life. The original objective of the law to safeguard life gave
rise to the invention of a "lesser evil", the just war.

At present, the problem with the current notion of a just war
is that the prime motive for its "justness" has been bastardized
into the technical pursuit of "warfare" itself. In other words,
it is not justice but war itself that drives the bellicose
adventure. And history is littered with examples of how we have
the pervasive tendency to mistake the means for the end.

It is here that the frenzy of the empirical shows its madness
in various forms: From the narrow-mindedness of Bush-like regimes
to the commercial pursuit of oil; from the appearance of
"religious-civilization" clashes to the blinkered outlook that
human life beyond the boundary of one's nation-state can be
regarded as lesser life.

No matter how hard the likes of President George W. Bush
portrays the seemingly lofty purposes of this war, at the end of
the day we are left with the emptiness of his words. Even a
British corporal, Steven Gerard, expected to be an ally in the
war, expressed his grudge over the reckless attitude of some
American pilots in the notorious "friendly shootings": "He (the
American pilot) doesn't care about life at all. He is a cowboy.
He came here only to indulge himself."

The claim that, by waging war, Bush expects the Iraqi people
to greet his troops as liberators is either hollow words or a
lunatic image portrayed by his media apparatus. The progress of
civilization is painstakingly built upon the link between actions
and noble words. But what we have now is a collapse of such a
link at the global level.

Thruth would be the second casualty of war Without entering
into the philosophical debate about truth, what we see is the
conflicting images of media reporting. Already, war protesters
have held up posters saying "Don't lie to me!" and "Shame on
corporate media scum!" in front of the San Francisco office of
CNN.

The realpolitik of media reporting will never settle the
elusive problem of truth. And the more elusive is the truth from
the realpolitik of media reporting, the more urgent it is to
equip ourselves with the criteria of humanitarian concern.

This means that the question of the ultimate judge for this
war is neither military technology nor economic costs, but the
human disaster that is caused by this war. In the prelude to this
war, there was a diplomatic "duel" between foreign ministers
Colin Powell of the U.S. and Dominique de Villepin of France in
the UN Security Council. The former stated the Rambo-like
justification for war, whereas the latter advanced one of the
most brilliant rebuttals: "We all know that Saddam cheats, but
the real question is whether the cheating warrants a war." C'est
magnifique, monsieur Villepin!

Of course, such refined rhetoric should not be taken wholly at
face value. As The Economist has rightly put it, France seems to
be more interested in clipping the wings of the U.S. than in
solving the problem posed by Saddam. As we know, France, quite
like Britain, is also desperate to grab lucrative contracts from
the oil business in Iraq. Nor has France been a paragon of
pacifism in international relations, either.

As always, the truth, embroiled in the Hobbesian model of
international relations, remains elusive. But at least Villepin's
wit has reminded us that war is never waged in pursuit of truth.

The third casualty of war is precision. Watching the horrors
of this war on BBC, CNN or Al-Jazeera, I cannot but have a
strange feeling of how the justifiability of war cannot be
maintained once the modus operandi is no longer one of King
Arthur-like gallantry.

Advancement in military technology is no substitute for such
gallantry, and it has even reinforced the idea that the
bastardization of the classical "just war" doctrine has been
brought about by the advancement in war technology.

This seems to point to the naked fact that the latest war
technology in the hands of global cabals is not intended to serve
the lofty rationale for the justness of war. Precision is an
illusion. Evidence from "friendly fire" incidents or from the
misery that has befallen noncombatants all points to such an
illusion.

The war is raging in a year when the justness of the American
model of political economy imposed on the world is also being
fundamentally questioned; now comes its Rambo-styled military
cabalism. Do not be surprised, then, if the U.S. comes out of
this war as a self-defeated winner.

If the American model of doing things still fascinates us, the
problem perhaps lies in our Nietzschean worship for an ogre whose
chief characteristic is violence.