Slideshow: Cherry Season in Aleppo — The Struggle For Normalcy Amid Civil War

Foreign Policy has another great but sobering slideshow, this time showcasing the plight of Syria’s beleaguered civilians, namely those in its largest and most contested cities, Aleppo. While we’ve heard much about the back-and-forth between the various warring factions, as usual, the fate of those in the middle is somewhat understated (which in some sense is to be expected, given that they’re passive elements in the grand scheme of the war, at least for the time being).

The article’s introduction puts it pretty well:

Aleppo has been under siege for over nine months — ever since the Free Syrian Army (FSA) stormed the city limits in mid-July. More than 94,000have died throughout Syria, and close to 11,000 have died in Aleppo alone. While the international community dawdles and deliberates, while each side fights for the survival of its reality, civilians here must grapple with the fact that their old lives are gone and their future lives are unknown, and that life must somehow go on between now and then.

So people adapt and cope. The blasts of mortars and artillery fire blend into the background, the threat of snipers becomes a reality to grit your teeth through as you walk home, and dark humor seeps into the daily milieu, calming nerves with a white-knuckled laughter that holds tears at bay. Groceries must be bought, money must be made, bellies must be filled, and days must have some sort of meaning.

The reality of a civilian in war is that life must be risked in order to live. Day-to-day acts can become small feats of rebellion. Risking sniper fire on the walk to work becomes not only a testament to human resilience and our ability to adapt, but sometimes a statement: You can take my life, but you can’t take my choice to live it.

I hope this vicious bloodletting ends soon, and to the benefit of the Syrian people. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely for now: the intractable nature of this grinding war of attrition, as well as the growing sectarianism, makes it difficult to imagine that even a relatively pacified Syria will be stable for long.

Number 1 Gun Runner

In constant 1990 U.S. dollars. Source: 2012 SIPRI Arms Transfers Database.

In a recent report for International Studies Quarterly, political scientists Paul Midford and Indra de Soysa looked at U.S. and Chinese arms transfers to Africa from 1989 to 2006, using data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They found no statistical correlation between China and the types of regimes it supplied with weapons, while U.S. arms shipments were slightly negatively correlated with democracy. In plain English, China actually turned out to be less likely to sell weapons to dictators than America was.

“It isn’t that China is there to do good; they’re pursuing their national interest,” Midford says. “But we didn’t find any evidence that they’re trying to spread a ‘Beijing consensus’ or promote regimes that are specifically autocratic.”

The report focuses on Africa, but similar human rights concerns have been raised about U.S. weapons transfers to Persian Gulf autocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, which collectively helped drive a more than 300 percent jump in U.S. arms sales in 2011 amid rising tensions with Iran.

Midford emphasizes that the report is not meant to suggest the United States prefers to sell weapons to dictators. “The U.S. is choosing to support autocrats based on a geopolitical rationale,” Midford says, “as is China.”

Source: Joshua Keating, Foreign Policy.

A Timeline of the Iraq War

Unbeknowst to most Americans, today is the 10th anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War. In recognition of this sober and increasingly forgotten observance, ThinkProgress has published a great timeline of the Iraq War that recounts all of the details of this understated conflict from beginning to end (including its somber consequences).

It’s remarkable how far removed most of us are from that conflict, even a decade later. Even I’ve had to remind myself that it was going on, and technically still lingers in some form or another (as it likely will for some time). Of course, the same amnesia and apathy does not apply to the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who took part (or their families), and especially to the millions of Iraqis who have been killed, maimed, traumatized, and exiled by the subsequent breakdown in society. Needless to say, the social, economic, and political consequences will likely remain both sides of this conflict for generations (albeit in different ways and degrees).

But given that it’s a busy day at work, I’ll keep my own musings brief. Please feel free to share your own reactions, thoughts, and opinions. At the very least, try to (re)familiarize yourself with this dangerously misunderstood and forgotten war.

My Enemy, Myself

Few people are malicious or evil for no good reason . Being evil for the sake of evil is a myth that applies only to the villains of childhood fairy tales or mainstream entertainment media.  Humans are complicated creatures who seek to rationalize everything they do. What one person thinks is evil, another may find to be acceptable, if not good.

The Haunting Works of of Richard Mosse

I stumbled upon some of these eerie photographs while carousing through Tumblr. They are pictures of the Democratic Republic of the Congo taken in infrared, which produces a surreal and almost alien feel to them. The artist is an Irishman named Richard Mosse, who has an impressive CV in cultural studies, fine art, and photography, and has been involved in a lot of showcases and projects.

Below is a small sample of work:

Vintage Violence, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011.

Men Of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011.

Growing Up In Public, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011

You can check out the rest of his work, which includes photos from the Iraq War, here.

 

 

On This Day…

On this day, November 29, in 1972, American video game company Atari released Pong, one of the first video games to achieve great popularity at both arcades and households. Who would’ve known then what this simple game would eventually lead to (indeed, the American video game industry, including Atari, suffered a devastating crash in 1983).

The humble beginning of what is now one of the world’s largest industries. Who would’ve thought?

 

Oh, and it’s also Liberation Day in Albania, in which the country was liberated from Axis forces in 1944, almost entirely by its domestic resistance movement. Aside from managing to free themselves (thus being one of only two states in Eastern Europe to lie outside the Soviet yoke), Albanians fiercely protected their Jews. The country was perhaps the only one that ended up having *more* Jews after World War II then less.

 

Mother Albania, a concrete statue located at the National Martyrs Cemetery of Albania, honors the nearly 30,000 partisans that died resisting the Axis. The plaque reads: “Glory to the martyrs of the fatherland forever.”

Hotel Rwanda and Just War Theory

Hotel Rwanda is a 2004 American drama film that tells the true story of hotelier Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) and his efforts to save his fellow citizens from the Rwandan Genocide that transpired in the spring of 1994.

The film begins by showing the rising political tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups of Rwanda, which quickly culminates in an outbreak of mass violence and genocide. During the course of these worsening events, Rusesabagina and other protagonists are forced to come to terms with an unprecedented scale of violence, while at the same time trying to do what they can to save hundreds of fellow citizens who have no sanctuary.

Through the resourceful use of his hotel and its supplies, his own personal savvy, and a network of allies, Rusesabagina eventually succeeds in saving his family (which is part Tutsi, the targeted minority) along with over a thousand refugees – albeit not without facing traumatizing circumstances, many close calls, and loss of nearly a million fellow Rwandans by the end of the conflict.

The film explores several ethical, philosophical, and political themes. There is the altruism and moral obligation that Rusesabagina displays towards strangers who are not of his ethnic group (and the subsequent risks he takes to help them), the sense of hopelessness in trying to save lives with few resources and little international support, the moral breakdown of society as Rwandans violent turn on their neighbors and fellow citizens.

Indeed, a recurring element throughout the film was the sense of abandonment and shock felt by the protagonists at the world’s apathy to such a grave moral plight. This is highlighted by the presence of both the Red Cross and United Nations Peacekeepers, both of which are overburdened and unprepared for the crisis – and both of which serve as proxies for the global community. The inability of these organizations to intervene – particularly the peacekeepers, who cannot act without official authorization (which never comes) – serves as a stark reminder of the world’s moral failure. The protagonists are forced to make due with what they can, and to survive overwhelming odds on their own.

One of the central philosophical questions raised by the film – and the real-life genocide it is based on – is whether the UN, United States, and other countries should have intervened militarily to put a stop to the genocide. Would doing so have been just? Or were there good reasons not to?

By my reasoning, military intervention was a moral imperative that should have been undertaken. When analyzing the criteria for a just war, such an intervention fits perfectly: clearly, the cause is just, as hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being massacred by the state and its militias. Rwanda was not in the midst of a civil war pitting two militarized political factions, which would be a comparatively more ambiguous scenario; rather, it was enduring a one-sided slaughter on the scale of genocide.

In this respect, comparative justice would also have been met. Given the scale of death of unarmed civilians, the killing of the genocide’s perpetrators would have been an acceptable cost, especially as the film showed that mere bribery and blackmail was often sufficient to deter the genocide brigades – thus it could be argued that the mere presence of armed troops from foreign nations would serve largely as a deterrence without the need to kill.

As such, both the probability of success and the proportionality of the response would also have been acceptable. As shown in the film, the Rwandan state was very corrupt and susceptible to bribery, and most of the genocide perpetrators were relying on small arms and machetes to carry out their campaign – there were no tanks, plans, or advanced weaponry involved. The element of a single national military (if not several) could easily rout and intimidate such ragtag and corrupt forces.

Furthermore, it should be noted that the United Nations officially holds that the formal recognition of a genocide obligates member states to intervene out of moral duty – cynically, however, this was why many states were not willing to identify what transpired as a genocide, despite clear evidence that a minority group was being explicitly targeted for extermination for its identity (one of the main recognized criterion for a genocide).

The need for a competent authority to lead the effort would also have been easily met. Aside from the governments of various nation states (many of which would ostensibly be developed democracies like the US) mandates and resolutions sanctioned by the UN are viewed in international law as legitimate sources of authority. A UN resolution to permit military action would have sufficed, especially as the UN had already legitimized the presence of peacekeepers in the country through another mandate.

Finally, even taking all these guidelines into account, would intervention have been a last resort? Given that at least some of the perpetrators, including their leaders, were pliable to corruption (albeit only to a point) it’s possible that negotiations or financial bargaining could have been sufficient in stopping the conflict peacefully. But given the presence of extremists willing to kill hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens, it seems unlikely that there wouldn’t be a need for some degree of military action. Considering the many unarmed, civilian lives at stake, resorting to military intervention would’ve been the least bad option.

So in short, I believe a military intervention to stop the Rwandan Genocide would have been just, given that such an action can follow all the parameters and prerequisites of just war theory.

As for why this genocide began in the first place, it was a convergence of several factors (some of which were explored in the film): mainly, it emerged due to a history of ethnic hostility and rivalry stemming from colonial preferences for the minority Tutsis over the other majority Hutus, the latter of which had their fears of Tutsi domination stoked by opportunists and paranoid extremists. As shown in Hotel Rwanda, economic and political insecurity, a lack of civil society, and rampant corruption only heightened the level of fear and hate that often leads breeds violence. Indeed, every genocide that has ever occurred – including the most infamous one of all – was triggered or intensified by economic, political, and social problems (indeed, the genocide occurred very shortly after a civil war between factions of both ethnic groups). The subsequent mass panic is put upon a minority group with which there are preexisting animosities, and from there violence ensues.

The Casualties of Veterans Day

Unfortunately, I was too busy yesterday to make a proper post about this commemoration. And while I’m tempted to make an idealistic and reflective post about the courage and tribulations of those in uniform, or to share the origins and history of the event, I wanted to take a different route from what is the norm.

I read an article in Foreign Policy that reminded me not only of the true origins of Veterans Day, but on how the loss of its original source of commemoration has been detrimental to our understanding of war.

All of our nation’s veterans are honored on November 11, but it is important to recall that the origin of this observance was revulsion at the horrific casualties suffered by so many countries during World War I. Yes, a second and even more destructive conflict followed all too soon after the “war to end all wars,” impelling a name change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. And the rest of the 20^th century was littered with insurgencies, terrorism, and a host of other violent ills — most of which persist today, guaranteeing the steady production of new veterans, of which there are 22 million in the United States.

But despite the seemingly endless parade of wars waged and fresh conflicts looming just beyond the bloody horizon, World War I still stands out for its sheer horror. Over ten million soldiers died, and more than twice that number were wounded. This is a terrible enough toll. But what makes these casualties stand out even more is their proportion of the total numbers of troops mobilized. For example, France put about 7.5 million soldiers in the field; one in five died, and three out of four who lived were wounded.

The other major combatants on both sides suffered horribly as well: the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s 6.5 million soldiers had a combined rate of killed and wounded of 74 percent. For Britain and Russia, the comparable figures totaled a bit over 50 percent, with German and Turkish losses slightly below one-half of all who served. The United States entered the conflict late, and so the overall casualty rate for the 4.3 million mobilized was but 8 percent. Even so, it is more than double the percentage of killed and wounded from the Iraq War, where total American casualties amounted to less than 4 percent of the one million who served.

Few conflicts in all of military history have seen victors and vanquished alike suffer such shocking losses as were incurred in World War I, so it is worth taking time to remember how this hecatomb came to pass. A great body of evidence suggests that this disaster was a product of poor generalship. Historian Alan Clark’s magisterial The Donkeys conveys a sense of the incredible stubbornness of high commanders who continued, for years, to hurl massed waves of infantry against machine guns and rapid-firing artillery. All this went on while senior generals stayed far from the front. A British field commander, who went riding daily, even had soldiers spread sand along the country lane he followed, to make sure his horse didn’t slip.

Indeed, World War I is often overshadowed in its barbarity by what followed it only around two decades later. But in many ways, as the article notes, it was just as tragic and horrific (all the more so because its very occurrence, along with the failure and arrogance of its victors, gave way to a second world war). It was also an ultimately unnecessary conflict that dragged on for far longer than any participant expected – a war that perpetuated itself beyond the need to rectify its original casus belli, and which did so at the literally unimaginable cost of millions of lives. Millions of individual persons (I feel the need to emphasize this as sheer numbers make it hard to remember the humanity of those they represent).

WWI was also but a large-scale example of what average troops, mustered mostly from the lower and middle-classes, have had to endure throughout history: being at the mercy of military and political leaders who were often too detached, elitist, and arrogant to take into account the well-being of their grunts. So long as there remained an ample supply of politically and economically powerless young men, there was little reason – in WWI or elsewhere – to be concerned about attrition – there were plenty of other men where those came from (though cruelly, this brutal calculation on the part of the Soviets in World War II is arguably what helped us win the day: they took on the overwhelming majority of Axis forces by sheer numbers, tenacity, and ruthlessness).

So after having read this piece, I came away with the idea that not only should veterans be rightly recognized for their courage and service, but that we mustn’t forget the horrors and brutality they (among others) had to endure in the wars they fought. All too often, I get the impression that we honor the valor and glory of those who served while forgetting that in most instance, even the “good” and victorious wars they partook in are tragedies in themselves. We should honor veterans not just be recognizing what their service but also by ensuring, as much as possible, that generations of young men won’t be grinded up or maimed in the cold machinery of war.

War, even when just and victorious, is always a terrible thing. It will always cost lives and create acrimony between men who may otherwise have no good reason to hate each other, let alone kill one another. I know that there will always be a need for war. I know some wars may be necessary. But just because something is needed doesn’t mean it isn’t detrimental or regrettable. Whether or not men and women had to answer the respective calls of duty that they did, doesn’t change the horror that they faced. They did something few of us would ever want to do – for good reason.