Collateral damage
From the list of names of civilian dead in Iraq:
Rkea Hmza Mnshad Alhgebe; eleven months; F[emale]; bullets; [at] Hy Alshrta; [on] 26-Mar-03
Scrolling down the list, my gaze stuttered when I reached this point; I have an eleven-month-old daughter, though she was only five months old - to the day - when Rkea Hmza Mnshad Alhgebe died from her bullet wounds.
Ivan Karamazov understood something that we appear to have forgotten. Nothing justifies this. There is no sense, must be no sense, can never be any sense, in which this child’s death is okay. The death of this child is a crime, and we’re answerable.
Maybe the only alterantives to putting her in harm’s way were also crimes. Maybe we were forced down this route by impossible choices, tragic choices. Maybe there was nothing else we could do. (I mean that: maybe this is true - though I personally do not think so.)
That does not make it okay. It does not make it right. It does not make it justifiable. It does not make it good. Even if we could not guiltlessly avoid her death, that baby girl’s blood still cries out - and we’re guilty all the same.
We’ve been drinking down utilitarian ethics since the day we were born, told on every side that the ends justify the means, and that if we have to do something nasty to serve a greater good in the end - well, then we have to do it and everything’s fine and dandy. We may know that it’s not nice; we may know it’s not in itself good, but we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it. It’s just one of those things, you know?
But there are things we simply should not do. Things we simply should not allow for. Things which are never ‘just one of those things’. Things which we must never find acceptable, even if we find them unavoidable.
We he have done what is abhorrent - and even if we could do nothing else, it is still abhorrent. And to have drugged ourselves into such a torpor that we feel no need to abhor what we have done, no dent in our sense of the righteousness of our cause - where we let the camera pan away, and think no more of it - is to dance on this girl’s grave, and eleven thousand others.
May God have mercy on our souls.
September 19th, 2004 at 12:58 pm
Do you know how many 11-month olds died every day under the sanctions? Estimates from several human rights organizations put the number of children dying (agonizing deaths from malnutrition and disease) between 4500 and 6000 a MONTH!–this while Saddam Hussein (and members of the UN) profited greatly.
For anyone who believes there is nothing worse than war, I urge you to consider what the sanctions were doing to children in Iraq.
For more information, visit this site; then ask yourselves, what was the most merciful thing to do?
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1998/mj98/mj98lopez.html
September 19th, 2004 at 7:05 pm
You’ve missed the point. I’m not saying that something like this can never be the lesser of two evils. Perhaps this war was the lesser of two evils (though I am not convinced that the choice was simply between continuing as we were and having this war, nor that the long-term consequences for Iraq and the region will be better even than sanctions). Perhaps the death of this child was (one element of) the lesser of two evils.
It’s still evil.
What worries me is how easy we find it to stomach that evil - how little it disturbs us, and so how little we seem to take it into account when deciding what our options are. (And it takes some detail, some individual story to wake us up again - like seeing the bare details of the death of a girl my daughter’s age.)
War is dehumanizing - even for us sitting in comfortable homes thousands of miles away. And even if it is incumbent on us to fight this war, it is also incumbent on us to fight that dehumanizing.
September 19th, 2004 at 8:08 pm
And I’d also like to ask Mr (or Ms) Awake, “Why was it only a choice between sanctions and war?”
Mike: thanks for posting your thoughts. I posted a reaction over on my blog … http://cardboard.nu/blog/2004_09_19/two_stories_compare_and_contra.html
September 20th, 2004 at 8:12 am
“What worries me is how easy we find it to stomach that evil”
I don’t know who’s stomaching it–I think it’s safe to assume that most people find it’s a tragedy of unimaginable proportion like the hundreds of innocent children killed in Beslan, or the millions of children dying in Sudan. In the last two instances however, they get very little media play. The very worst cases in Iraq are given round the clock media attention, avoiding any of the positive stories of the rebuilding that is going on all over the country.
Your whole post assumes the worst about people (Americans)–What do you think “people” should do? What kind of demonstration do you require as proof that people are sickened by the thought of innocents dying? Call for an end to the war? Have you thought that one through? The situation is not, and has never been as simple as the Left has made it out to be. And to Mike I would say, the only solution ever presented in the anti-war movement was for a continuation of sanctions. “Let the sanctions work, let the inspections work” was all I ever heard. Perhaps you need to get your “solution” out there a little better, if you have one.
For me, when I see an 11-month old child die, I hope and pray for a swift US/Iraq victory over those who would deny the Iraqi people their right to a better life. A swift victory over those who TARGET civilians, who blow up school buses full of children, who rape and murder volunteers trying to rebuild the country, who execute those looking for opportunities or a better life because they happen to be Budhhist or Christian or Jew. Get a clue on who the real enemy is before you make sweeping moral judgements against Americans you don’t even know.
Here’s a url to a blogger who keeps regular tabs on the progress being made in Iraq.
http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2004/08/good-news-from-iraq-part-7.html
September 20th, 2004 at 9:06 am
Here is another article on the progress in Iraq from the Christian Science Monitor:
Life in Baghdad: Better and worse
Polls show Iraqis optimistic for longer term, worried now.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0914/p01s03-woiq.html
Here is an except:
Last Saturday alone, the small clinic run by Dominican sisters in Baghdad’s Hayy al Wahdaa neighborhood delivered 20 babies - an almost unprecedented flurry for Al Hayaat’s sisters.
Why are Iraqis having more babies? “People have more money than before, so they think they can afford more children,” says Sister Bushra Farach, Al Hayaat’s manager. She adds that her clinic’s clientele has changed in the postwar period.
“We are private and have to charge, so we used to have only the wealthy. But now I notice men of very different social classes bringing their wives here. I even suspect some of them of making their new money from thievery,” she adds, “but we are happy to deliver their little ones.”
and…
“Outside Mr. Majeed’s abode, a small town of Shiite families inhabits the barns, pool house, movie theater, and even a former military command post once part of Uday’s domain…
In the busy Karada neighborhood, hardware store owner Hassan Mufeed says his business is better than before the war. But what gives him confidence in the future was a small incident that took place across from his shop. “A few days ago some garbage collectors reported a bomb right there,” he says, pointing to the sidewalk outside a bank across the street. “Before long the ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] arrived, and with the help of the Americans they took it out.
To Mr. Mufeed, that one incident told him that, despite the dangers, democracy has a chance in Iraq.”
September 20th, 2004 at 7:42 pm
Dear chicago_awake,
There’s obviously something up with my use of English; I’m failing to communicate.
You see, I meant what I said in the post and my later expansion: (i) that what I was saying was true even if the war *was* the lesser of two evils - i.e., this post was not itself an argument that we should not have gone to war; and (ii) that the problem was not with ‘people’ or with ‘Americans’, but with ‘us’. The pronouns were deliberate.
Maybe I live in a different media universe from you, but it simply has not been true from where I stand that the tragedy of civilian deaths in Iraq has provoked anything like the anguish provoked by Beslan - and that’s as true for my own reactions as it is for the media I see. And actually, I don’t think that in itself is inappropriate: there is a unique intensity of horror about what went on in Beslan.
Nevertheless, I do recognize in myself (and am arrogant enough to suppose I’m not the only one) a dulling of my reactions to the civilian (and other) deaths in Iraq - a creeping feeling that they are *routine*. Even boredom with the reports. And that’s a problem: it is one of the ways in which war dehumanizes all of us.
Let’s suppose this war is a just war and a righteous cause that will make things better in the medium term and very much better in the long term. The point of my post is to say that we - okay, let’s just say ‘I’ - that *I* still need to be horrified by what is happening now; that I must not think that any of these deaths is routine or acceptable or justified or right or good.
Nobody should be a means to an end - however good the end. That was the point of the Ivan Karamazov reference: Dostoievsky’s character asks whether the founding of the Kingdom of Heaven (a uniquely good end, if ever there was one) is worth paying for with the suffering of one child - and concludes that it is not. To be forced into a position where we have no other choice than to use people in that way is to be forced into a tragedy that betrays them and corrupts us.
(And I repeat: that’s not meant to be an argument to prove that, really, we’re *not* forced into doing this.)
Maybe I’m the only one being corrupted. Maybe I’m the only one, therefore, who needs to read my original post - as a reminder of the abhorrence of actions in which I am complicit. I wrote because I suspected that was not true.
On an entirely different point - maybe I live in a different political world from you as well. There seem to be rather a large number of people around here who were anti-sanctions AND anti-war - or at least against sanctions in anything like the form they took, and against the war in anything like the form it took. What a shame that opinions were more polarized in your context.
Best wishes,
Mike