THE WAR IN CONTEXT:: Iraq, the War on Terrorism, and the Middle East Conflict

Iraq + war on terrorism + Middle East conflict + critical perspectives

The aberration of war
By Paul Woodward, The War in Context, June 1, 2006

Steve Smithson, a former Marine infantryman who served in Kuwait in 1991, says the Haditha massacre needs to be seen in contrast with the rest America's efforts in Iraq. "We need to focus on a lot of the good that we are doing and put an incident like this in context. It's an aberration."

The word aberration is going to be used a lot in the coming weeks.

Commentators on the right are already predicting that "irresponsible war critics" will use Haditha as "a political tool to take apart America's support for the war and to shatter the legitimacy of our cause and the morale of our troops." Indeed, it is already being claimed that there have been "countless My Lais" in Iraq. Ironically, in as much as both critics and defenders of the war are inclined to focus great attention on the events of November 19, both sides are likely to promote a skewed image not simply of the war in Iraq but of warfare itself.

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The social prohibitions on homicide most likely have biological roots that can be traced all the way back to the origin of species. The drive for individual survival is intimately linked to a drive to protect the gene pool. A species willing to prey on itself is obviously on a sure path to extinction.

As humans, this instinctual drive for self-preservation has evolved into complex and refined ethical codes, yet at its core, the admonition, "Thou shalt not kill," can be understood as the formulization of a will to live. We generally avoid killing each other not simply because we are obedient to religious injunctions but because our individual survival depends in part on our collective preservation.

How then can we go to war, since warfare requires training humans in the art of killing humans? Do we bear a unique and macabre trait as a self-culling species? Or is warfare, far from being an expression of humanity's innate violent tendencies, an exercise in the suppression of a self-preserving instinct?

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In Iraq, the "enemy" is alternately demonized as ruthless terrorist or demeaned as uncivilized "raghead." In either case, he becomes less than human and his eradication is pursued as a form of social cleansing. Society is being purged of an inhuman element.

Haditha is an "aberration" in as much as victims who are women and children are inescapably human, yet as an aberration it is the exception that proves the rule. Outside such instances, supposedly, war itself does not inevitably challenge our basic values.

In practice, this notion of righteous war -- war in which we play by the rules even if the enemy doesn't -- is a notion that can only be sustained if we avoid imagining what it means to target locations.

Every day, weapons are fired, missiles launched, or bombs dropped, on enemy locations -- sources of hostile fire or any kind of insurgent activity -- yet these locations do not exist in a battlefield. In the vernacular of modern warfare, businesses and homes become "terrorist compounds", "hideouts", "insurgent positions", or ubiquitous "targets." Yet precision guidance systems, telescopic sights, or night-vision goggles, do not prevent targets being knowingly selected in the knowledge that who or what is concealed behind a wall cannot be determined.

In Iraq, civil society and the military arena are indivisible and the shield protecting innocent life is an invisible boundary separating the intended and unintended target. Ignorance of the innocent absolves guilt. As a result, the only innocence that really ends up being protected is the "innocence" in the mind of a soldier able to forget lives unintentionally lost.

The distinction drawn between willful killings in Haditha and accidental killings elsewhere, is a distinction that serves the killers and a country that insulates itself from the ugliness of warfare. To the thousands of Iraq's unintended victims, Haditha is just another bloodstained thread in the shroud of war.