Maybe half a million dead, half a country – 10 million people – displaced from
their homes, jettisoned onto the mercy of the world.
Welcome to war. Welcome to Syria.
This is a conflict apparently too complex to understand. The U.S. brokered
a ceasefire with Russia, then proceeded to lead a bombing strike that killed
62 Syrian troops, injured another hundred – and gave tactical aid to ISIS. Later
it apologized . . . uh, sort of.
“Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding
and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something
we negotiated in good faith with them.”
These are the words of U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, as reported by Reuters,
who went on to point out, with exasperation, that the US, was investigating
the air strikes and “if we determine that we did indeed strike Syrian military
personnel, that was not our intention and we of course regret the loss of life.”
And. We. Of. Course. Regret. The. Loss. Of. Life.
Oh, the afterthought! I could almost hear the “yada, yada” hovering in the
air. Come on, this is geopolitics. We implement policy and make crucial adjustments
to the state of the world by dropping bombs – but the bombing isn’t the point
(except maybe to those who get hit). The point is that we’re playing complex,
multidimensional chess, with, of course, peace as our ultimate goal, unlike
our enemies. Peace takes bombs.
But just for a moment, I would like to step back into the middle of that quote
by Samantha Power and point out that, in the wake, let us say, of 9/11, no one
in the United States, speaking in any capacity, official or unofficial, would
have spoken thus about the victims: with cursory regret. The fact that their
deaths occurred in a complex global context didn’t somehow minimize the horror
of the event.
No. Their deaths cut to the national soul. Their deaths were our deaths.
But not so with the dead of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan – not so with the victims
of our bombs and bullets, the victims of our strategic vision. Suddenly the
dead become part of some larger, more complex picture, and thus not our business
to stop. The “regret” we express is for PR purposes only; it’s part of the strategy.
So I give thanks to Jimmy
Carter who, in a recent op-ed published in the New York Times,
took a moment to look beyond the moral unintelligence of our militarized worldview.
Speaking of the fragile Syrian “ceasefire” brokered by the United States and
Russia, he wrote: “The agreement can be salvaged if all sides unite, for now,
around a simple and undeniably important goal: Stop the killing.”
He presented this not as a moral imperative but a strategically smart plan:
“When talks resume in Geneva later this month, the primary focus should be
stopping the killing. Discussions about the…