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COMMENTARY
November 12, 2003
Something new
Armistice or Remembrance or Veterans' Day -- it is the same moment in Western experience the bond between many old allies. We understand that peace is good. But until recently we seemed to understand that our freedom is also good therefore war is sometimes necessary; and through war victory. The Armistice we signed 85 years ago as the agreements we signed after another World War were not mere truces. They were surrenders we were accepting. The two ideas are closely entwined -- war with peace and freedom with victory over forces that would enslave us. Whereas a truce is not an end to hostilities. It is only a break from them. The truce that for instance ended the Korean War settled nothing. It is a war that could at any moment be fought all over again with still more horrendous weapons. The dragon in that war wasn't slain we left it to fight another day. And yet it was a comprehensible dragon an organized enemy with its own will to live. We begin to understand today that the world of the poppy has been left behind us and the future presents a world in which the role of the soldier is much changed from what it has been. One sees this in the town of Fallujah Iraq. The U.S. military had no great difficulty occupying the town and could if it wanted have easily erased it. Instead in obedience to Western norms of humanitarianism it plays sentry against an enemy that does not accept that it has been defeated. The Americans pump money into welfare and schools rebuild infrastructure appoint a mayor and train local police (who must then immediately bunker down). They give candy to the children as after former wars. They are in continuous conversation with every acknowledged figure of authority in the town all of whom at least pretend to co-operate. Most of the rest of Iraq is "pacified" -- but in Fallujah and similar towns in the Sunni Triangle it is like Afghanistan. The traditional tribal chiefs or "warlords" seem willing to co-operate when fear does not silence them. But they were rendered powerless by the old regime (Saddam in Iraq; the Taliban in Afghanistan). The real power no longer belongs to them but to nameless people beyond the reach of any kind of negotiation or intimidation. This is the new enemy -- the one which the Israelis previously encountered in Jenin Hebron Jerusalem; the dis-order or anti-order which Yasser Arafat was able to establish in West Bank and Gaza. An enemy once created who can 't be called back; who does not recognize any norms of tribe or state; and whose way of life is almost purely psychopathic. Yet an enemy that may be able to penetrate immigrant communities in the West almost as easily as he can penetrate the destabilized societies from which he came. Like many other Western countries Canada remains only an indirect participant in the new war that still does not have a name though it is apparent through daily newspaper headlines. Yet our "peacekeeping" troops in Afghanistan are acquiring a taste of the new reality which our politicians and people have not yet assimilated. Not even the Romans faced such an enemy through centuries of patrolling their most distant frontiers; and probably no other people previously encountered nihilism in so extreme a form. An enemy for whom the "suicide bomb" is not even a weapon but an aesthetic gesture. Whose only purpose is to advance Armageddon. And who captures the imagination of the young. We couldn't surrender even if we wanted to. We must instead find new ways to fight. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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