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.