The Spoils of War
In pre-modern society wars were frequently small-scale affairs in which one tribe or clan would do battle with another and the victor would ritually humiliate the vanquished, often by raping the loser’s women, and then march home with as much of the loser’s wealth and possessions as they could carry, the spoils of war. While the scale of warfare in our day has altered dramatically, the other features seem to have remained pretty much the same.
For those of us opposed to the war in Iraq, the catalogue of deceit and disaster seems endless: the faulty intelligence on which the US and its coalition partners justified going to war; the arrogance of their not bothering to secure United Nations support for the venture; the adoption of the moral high ground by morally bankrupt people; the failure to find amongst Saddam Hussein’s armaments a single weapon of mass destruction; the inordinate number of civilian casualties among the Iraqi population; the large-scale abandonment of the principles of the Geneva Convention; the dehumanising and violent cultures of US managed prisoner facilities in occupied territories at Abu Ghraid in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; the use of white phosphorus gas against a predominantly civilian population in northern Iraq; the practice of ‘rendition’ – flying suspects via European communities without the latter’s knowledge, to foreign prisons where torture is permissible; the imposition of US instruments of democratic government upon a region and culture to which these are alien; and many, many more.
In our day, the concept of dividing up the spoils of war is equally complex. We witnessed the spectacle of governments supporting the Coalition bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts, and we saw those governments jockeying to secure favourable positions in respect to the ‘safeguarding’, for which we should read ‘control of’ Iraq’s vast oil reserves. We learnt that one of the biggest players and beneficiaries in this field was the American firm Halliburton, long associated with Vice-President Cheney, another morally bankrupt action which confirmed for many that the primary motivation of the war was less the removal of one tyrant amongst many for the sake of world peace and prosperity, than the energy requirements to fuel the American industrial economy. And probably the most lucrative contracts of all will prove to be the re-arming of the new Iraqi forces, many of the weapons previously sold to the Saddam regime by the Americans having been destroyed by the Americans. When in the eighteenth century, at a time when the shape of warfare in Europe was shifting from private militias to national armies, William Blake declared that ‘war is the health of the state’, he was pointing out the political and economic benefits of warfare. Four centuries later it can be justifiably be argued that the economies of a significant number of industrialised nations are dependent upon the manufacture and sale of increasingly sophisticated weaponry – another aspect of the spoils of war.
Is there no crumb of comfort to be gleaned from this disastrous venture? Perhaps there is. We know that modern warfare is a complex phenomenon, with the battle being as much ideological as it is physical, and that in these circumstances the tools of propaganda become crucial. We are equally aware that in order to discover the truth of what is really happening on the ground, we need to look beyond the statist media which peddles official press releases and statistics, to alternative media organisations. Initially for many of us this proved to be al-Jazeera , the Qatar based Arabic organisation, which beamed to the world images of the war which the US and European media were not permitted to show us. This service, exposing the contrived nature of the Coalition’s propaganda, became such a thorn in the side of the Americans that as soon as the initial democratic Iraqi puppet government was set up, they had Al-Jazeera excluded from filming or reporting from Iraq. And it is now being reported in the media that President Bush even had plans to bomb al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, notwithstanding the fact that Qatar is an American ally, and notwithstanding the oft-proclaimed democratic principle of the freedom of the press.
It is often said that the Internet has democratised information. Anybody can say anything they like, and anyone can have access to it. This is perhaps less true than it was five years ago in that autocratic regimes are discovering ways of limiting or inhibiting citizen access to the World Wide Web. But certainly I am free to express my views about the war and to consult the numberless websites, personal and corporate, which also do so. Amongst these are the two hundred or so websites which US serving soldiers have set up as blogs or internet diaries and which they update directly from the battlefield via the Internet cafes which have been provided in virtually every American military camp. Whereas in previous wars soldiers would have their letters home censored and families would have to wait many months to receive them, now soldiers can address us directly and speak about their experiences and their hopes and fears for the war. Some of the soldiers record the details of incidents when they were under fire, others speak of a growing resistance in some quarters to the US operation.
Independent journalists are now able to scour these sources for stories. In fact the journalist who first aired claims that the US had used white phosphorus in the attack against insurgents in Fallujah is said to have discovered this information on a serviceman’s blog. The journalist also recorded that subsequently his source had been ordered to close his blog and not to send or reply to e-mails, and the army is becoming more strict in insisting on compliance with its policy memorandum on websites which requires soldiers to have official approval before starting internet postings. But such is the anarchic nature and the power of the Internet that some are willing to risk punishment in order to tell their truth.
So one good thing to emerge from this war may be the fact that war propaganda and media control can no longer prevent us from learning immediately and at first hand what is happening on the ground. This has to be good for humanity and for democracy in that propagandists can no longer treat us as if we do not deserve to know the truth, and we now have access to accounts of human experience which can usefully inform our personal and political views and actions. And one of the ironies of this must surely be that one of the side-effects of the development of ever more sophisticated computers to control our weaponry has been the increasing ability of our desktops and laptops to allow us to freely access information and to network with one another in creating and maintaining an opposition movement.
For those of us opposed to the war in Iraq, the catalogue of deceit and disaster seems endless: the faulty intelligence on which the US and its coalition partners justified going to war; the arrogance of their not bothering to secure United Nations support for the venture; the adoption of the moral high ground by morally bankrupt people; the failure to find amongst Saddam Hussein’s armaments a single weapon of mass destruction; the inordinate number of civilian casualties among the Iraqi population; the large-scale abandonment of the principles of the Geneva Convention; the dehumanising and violent cultures of US managed prisoner facilities in occupied territories at Abu Ghraid in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; the use of white phosphorus gas against a predominantly civilian population in northern Iraq; the practice of ‘rendition’ – flying suspects via European communities without the latter’s knowledge, to foreign prisons where torture is permissible; the imposition of US instruments of democratic government upon a region and culture to which these are alien; and many, many more.
In our day, the concept of dividing up the spoils of war is equally complex. We witnessed the spectacle of governments supporting the Coalition bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts, and we saw those governments jockeying to secure favourable positions in respect to the ‘safeguarding’, for which we should read ‘control of’ Iraq’s vast oil reserves. We learnt that one of the biggest players and beneficiaries in this field was the American firm Halliburton, long associated with Vice-President Cheney, another morally bankrupt action which confirmed for many that the primary motivation of the war was less the removal of one tyrant amongst many for the sake of world peace and prosperity, than the energy requirements to fuel the American industrial economy. And probably the most lucrative contracts of all will prove to be the re-arming of the new Iraqi forces, many of the weapons previously sold to the Saddam regime by the Americans having been destroyed by the Americans. When in the eighteenth century, at a time when the shape of warfare in Europe was shifting from private militias to national armies, William Blake declared that ‘war is the health of the state’, he was pointing out the political and economic benefits of warfare. Four centuries later it can be justifiably be argued that the economies of a significant number of industrialised nations are dependent upon the manufacture and sale of increasingly sophisticated weaponry – another aspect of the spoils of war.
Is there no crumb of comfort to be gleaned from this disastrous venture? Perhaps there is. We know that modern warfare is a complex phenomenon, with the battle being as much ideological as it is physical, and that in these circumstances the tools of propaganda become crucial. We are equally aware that in order to discover the truth of what is really happening on the ground, we need to look beyond the statist media which peddles official press releases and statistics, to alternative media organisations. Initially for many of us this proved to be al-Jazeera , the Qatar based Arabic organisation, which beamed to the world images of the war which the US and European media were not permitted to show us. This service, exposing the contrived nature of the Coalition’s propaganda, became such a thorn in the side of the Americans that as soon as the initial democratic Iraqi puppet government was set up, they had Al-Jazeera excluded from filming or reporting from Iraq. And it is now being reported in the media that President Bush even had plans to bomb al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, notwithstanding the fact that Qatar is an American ally, and notwithstanding the oft-proclaimed democratic principle of the freedom of the press.
It is often said that the Internet has democratised information. Anybody can say anything they like, and anyone can have access to it. This is perhaps less true than it was five years ago in that autocratic regimes are discovering ways of limiting or inhibiting citizen access to the World Wide Web. But certainly I am free to express my views about the war and to consult the numberless websites, personal and corporate, which also do so. Amongst these are the two hundred or so websites which US serving soldiers have set up as blogs or internet diaries and which they update directly from the battlefield via the Internet cafes which have been provided in virtually every American military camp. Whereas in previous wars soldiers would have their letters home censored and families would have to wait many months to receive them, now soldiers can address us directly and speak about their experiences and their hopes and fears for the war. Some of the soldiers record the details of incidents when they were under fire, others speak of a growing resistance in some quarters to the US operation.
Independent journalists are now able to scour these sources for stories. In fact the journalist who first aired claims that the US had used white phosphorus in the attack against insurgents in Fallujah is said to have discovered this information on a serviceman’s blog. The journalist also recorded that subsequently his source had been ordered to close his blog and not to send or reply to e-mails, and the army is becoming more strict in insisting on compliance with its policy memorandum on websites which requires soldiers to have official approval before starting internet postings. But such is the anarchic nature and the power of the Internet that some are willing to risk punishment in order to tell their truth.
So one good thing to emerge from this war may be the fact that war propaganda and media control can no longer prevent us from learning immediately and at first hand what is happening on the ground. This has to be good for humanity and for democracy in that propagandists can no longer treat us as if we do not deserve to know the truth, and we now have access to accounts of human experience which can usefully inform our personal and political views and actions. And one of the ironies of this must surely be that one of the side-effects of the development of ever more sophisticated computers to control our weaponry has been the increasing ability of our desktops and laptops to allow us to freely access information and to network with one another in creating and maintaining an opposition movement.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 12:04 AM
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