The Children’s Crusade
Kurt Vonnegut’s amazing Slaughter-House Five, the psuedo-novel, pseudo-metafictional memoir about the firebombing of Dresden, can be argued to have one, simple, overarching message: war is absurd. It’s inane, it makes no sense. The people best situated to survive, well-trained infantry scouts, die, while the misfit Billy Pilgrim lives. Edgar Derby is killed for no tangible reason–for stealing a teapot. And there’s something deeply chilling, in an absurd black-humor kind of way, about being captured, working in a slaughterhouse for your enemies, surviving through staying in said slaughterhouse during the bombings, and then being forced to dig through human slaughter-houses, to dig through the crumbled and burned buildings to remove the crumbled and burned bodies. It’s the punchline to an amazing joke, a joke on cosmic scale, leaving you unsure whether to laugh or cry.
So it goes.
We can look at the absurdity of war in a modern setting by the recent surge in the British investigating the “legality” of the Iraq war. Issues abound: the Dowling Street Memo, the fact that U.S. planners had talked about invasion for years before the war, the tenuous links between al-Qaeda and WMDs. Debating the legality of a war is like arguing over the definition of an abstract, and what makes it worse is that it happened over six years too late. It’s an exercise in bureaucracy, a moral standpoint made after the fact and still waddling through red tape to arrive at a standpoint in general. One of the most recent updates in this debate to pop up in my Google reader is the following from Mirror.co.uk:
The Iraq War was legal but not “legitimate” for a democratic country, Britain’s former UN ambassador said yesterday.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock told the Iraq inquiry that the 2003 invasion did not have the backing of the UN or the majority of British people, “so there was a failure to establish legitimacy”.
He said he believed the US and the UK could establish legality under UN resolutions if Iraq was shown to have breached disarmament rules. But a “final” verdict was never likely to be made.
And Sir Jeremy, Britain’s top diplomat at the UN from 1998 to 2003, added: “If you do something the majority of UN states think is wrong, illegitimate or politically unjustifiable, you are taking a risk.
“I regard our participation in Iraq in 2003 as legal but of questionable legitimacy in that it didn’t have the backing of the majority of member states.”
Several years back, I met an Iraq war vet in one of my English classes, who claimed he had been in Army Intelligence. He said that when he moved into Baghdad, his unit’s first and ongoing job was to pick up the documents fromIraqi intelligence agencies, and continue their work weeding out Al-Qaeda cells within Iraq. Apparently Al-Qaeda was about as fond of the Iraqi government as they were of the U.S. And it makes a certain degree of sense: Iraq is the only Arab state in recent memory to war on other Arab states, a big no-go for conservative Islam, and Saddam’s history of one-man totalitarian rule makes me think that he wouldn’t look kindly on any kind of challenge to his rule.
After the war, this guy used the GI Bill and was getting his degree in English and Education, was real active in politics, said the war made him an active Democrat. He seemed like a stand-up kinda guy. I’m not sure if he really was with Intelligence, or even served in the army. At this point I don’t even remember his name, so it goes back into the “friend of a friend” category of reliable information. But there’s something deeply absurd about toppling another government under pretenses of dealing with terrorists, only to pick up their pieces and continue their same damn job, fighting their same damn enemy, in a chilling, absurd black-humor kind of way. So it goes.
So it goes.
Iraq War was legal but not ‘legitimate’
mirror.co.uk
