1-Year Plan
Post 30: 7/22/06
Thinking of War at a Distance: Proxy
Violence and Real Victims in Lebanon
Think of war a distance over flat water. The weekend traffic slows.
—"Paralleles" (1979)
When I wrote the above lines in 1979, I was unsure which war was meant. It could have been the Vietnam War, concluded in 1975, or it could have been any number of other proxy conflicts in the period—Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan—where great power politics had chosen an arena far from home in which to test their intelligence estimates and new weapons. On the other side of the large body of water separating such a war from those who might bear witness to it are the mediations of consumer society: the weekend traffic we are caught up in, trying to get out of the city or back into it. The most heinous crimes committed in the name of the proxy war cause a barely perceptible slowing of weekend traffic, but that's about it.
We are witnesses once again to a war being fought by proxy powers over the land and lives of others separated by a great distance, a body of water. The weekend traffic barely slowed. In the same week that demonstrators marched in Dearborn in support of the Lebanese victims, the New York Times added one approving revelation after another of the coordination of the attacks with American policy, and the Detroit Tigers played to sell-out crowds while the business of the dismantling of the auto industry continued unabated. In New Orleans, power outages were frequent, as in St. Louis or Queens and now California, but as long as these infrastructural issues were only local there would be no disruption to the larger delivery of goods and services.
This is in stark contrast to the means and ends of the current campaign against Lebanon. Here the goal is systematic terror of a civilian population in support of military ends. These ends will likely include an invasion of southern Lebanon to begin next week. Only a few months ago, the American president was videotaped congratulating his Lebanese counterpart over the pseudo-democratic "Cedar Revolution" that led to the withdrawal of proxy troops. Cut from the blueprint of numerous clichéd versions of democratic revolution after the model of 1989, this was more likely the result of subterranean workings of diplomatic pressure, intelligence operatives, and cash pay-offs, as we will come to find out later. Meanwhile, results achieved, the foreign troops withdraw, the power vacuum is filled by a grassroots militia, the time is right, provocations occur, leading to invasion and a wider war. The entire operation went by the American playbook, each proxy state bought off in the currency of security needs.
There are really two horrors here. The first is the extent of injury—to all living in the region—brought on by decades of misuse of the Middle East as staging ground for great power proxy wars. Increasingly, the target of these proxy wars is the "infrastructure" that supports the livelihood and well being of a people as a whole—the mirror image of the weekend traffic that scarcely inhibits the flow of consumer goods and services. Modern warfare, as we know, has included the massive destruction of infrastructure and the displacement of peoples at least since Napoleon's invasion of Russia or Sherman's March to the Sea, but the total war of infrastructure destruction occurs generally in the final stages of a modern war, as the result of its systemic logic rather than as its initial aim. If the bombing of Dresden or Nagasaki occurred at the end of war in its modern formulation, the destruction of the Jews that preceded these moments must be the first moment of postmodern war, in which the infrastructure of the people is destroyed first, leading to their displacement and ultimate elimination. Subsequent campaigns that begin with the infrastructure and which intend the displacement and destruction of peoples follow on that blueprint, not as the result of an inevitable logic that, in its reinforcement, creates that result. There are many examples of such warfare in the last twenty years, from the use of refugees in Rwanda and Congo to forced immigration in Kosovo and the present campaign. Rocket attacks across the border are only the needle pricks that set in motion a larger logic of taking civilian populations hostage. For the great powers, the rockets are only proxies for the implementation of policy; for the people on the ground, they are systematic destruction.
The second great horror is on the other side of flat water: no response. As systematic destruction continues unabated, systematic distortion of information neutralizes any perception of its reality and its consequences. Many aspects of the violence are simply kept out of public view, or delayed in their transmission; where it is not possible to completely restrict information, nonstop spin doctors create the most distorted scenarios imaginable to manipulate or eradicate entirely the vestiges of public consent. The most flagrant misuses of logic and non sequitur, the creation of vocabularies of obstruction and displacement, characterize the waging of war in the information flow of consumer society. "If you go to sleep with rockets under your bed, you may wake up to rockets that you did not expect": this statement was reported from one proxy spokesperson without comment. The number of logical and categorical travesties here are almost too many to name: the civilian population is compared to the figure of a woman sleeping with the enemy, and is thus a collaborator; the proxy she is sleeping with is really a rocket, or synecdoche for the rockets targeting Israel; the rockets the Israelis are targeting Lebanon with are simply a result of the bad sex the collaborator is having with the synecdoche or stand-in for the larger threat behind it (Syria or Iran); there is a mechanical, cause-and-effect relation between the Lebanese people being in bed with rockets and the rockets now raining down on them. It takes time to unpack this nonsense, and time is exactly what the Lebanese do not have. While we pause to process our cognitive dissonance, hundreds of thousands are on the road, displaced, without food, shelter, water, or electricity, on their way to a situation they cannot imagine and in which they may be consigned for longer than they know. In modern terms, this is simply softening up the target for invasion; in the real world, it is the systematic destruction of a people as the goal-less goal of postmodern warfare.
Across the distance of flat water from the war, language is the question. The mechanisms of consumer society and its political reinforcement continue unabated. We have been convinced that, unless we have a good Christmas, it's all over for us. One or two percentage points of profit can lead to the displacement of thousands through the rationalizations of the economy in its perennially threatened decline. This is the manipulation of profit and loss as our political economy, to neutralize any dissent. This structure of violence, in language, is systematic and continuous, parallel to but never identical to the real violence real people are suffering now. Language fails, is failing, in its ability to account for the systematic destruction of a people elsewhere.
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[Text copyright © Barrett Watten 2006. Images from internet-circulated sources. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]
Links:
"Attacks Qualify as War Crimes, Officials Say," New York Times, 20 July 2006
The United Nations’ top human rights official said Wednesday that the killing and maiming of civilians under attack in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza and the West Bank could constitute war crimes. “The scale of killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control,” said Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights. [. . .] “International humanitarian law is clear on the supreme obligations to protect civilians during hostilities,’’ she said. That same obligation exists, she added, in international criminal law, which defines war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians,” she said in a statement released by her Geneva office. “Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged innocent civilians is unjustifiable.” The Swiss-based International Red Cross, the recognized guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, said Wednesday that Israel had violated the principle of proportionality provided for in the Conventions and their protocols. It also noted that Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel. “Hezbollah fighters too are bound by the rules of international humanitarian law, and they must not target civilian areas,” it said. At the United Nations, there was support for the view that the only way to spare more victims was to halt the fighting, but there was also evidence that the United States would continue to dispute it.
Mazen Kerbaj, Kerblog