Enormities

 Yesterday, I read a political pamphlet that has sat on my shelf for years—a slender (20 pages or thereabouts) volume by the Scottish writer and poet Tom Leonard, called "On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait." The piece, published in 1991, is a gut-wrenching excoriation of the moral indifference of British and US citizens, who passively consumed TV news portraying the Gulf War as a righteous struggle, and raised few if any objections to the slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops after they had been rendered defenseless—or to the bombing campaigns and sanctions that disrupted civilian infrastructure, sowing the seeds of a massive humanitarian crisis that would go on to afflict Iraq's people for the next decade and beyond. Reading it now, thirty years later, it is impossible not to see parallels with the U.S.-backed war in Gaza. 

Leonard, to be sure, drastically oversimplifies the moral issues of the war. He never provides a serious response to the question of what the international community is supposed to do when one country blatantly violates the sovereignty of its neighbor. To the extent he considers this matter at all, it is merely to point out that Kuwait was an unattractive despotic regime in its own right, and that anyway, both its and Iraq's borders are the relatively recent products of imperial diplomacy. But such is equally true of innumerable governments in the global South. If we start viewing every country whose boundaries were drawn in part by colonialism as therefore illegitimate, and lacking any right of collective self-defense, what's to stop any nation on Earth from invading its neighbors if they choose to, or starting any war through unprovoked aggression?

Many left-wing critics of today's war in Gaza commit the same moral obfuscation. They never squarely address what exactly Israel was supposed to have done, in the face of a sudden invasion and massacre of their civilian population that left at least 1,200 people dead, without the slightest attempt to distinguish military targets. What would any nation on Earth do in the face of such an assault and provocation? What would the left-wing critics do, if it had been their children or parents raped, burned, or shot to death in their cars and homes, or kidnapped across borders at gunpoint? 

But the Tom Leonards of the world always have the last word because, after the retaliation is done, the legitimate causes and justifications of the war fade from view, and we are left with the staggering immensity of the human suffering that it brought. And what's more—he's right that we should have known such suffering would result. We should have spoken out sooner. It was possible to feel righteous at the outset of the war, because then we could still tell ourselves that we support this war, but only to the extent it is fought in a just and humane way—only if our government and its allies fight in accordance with the international laws of war, and respect civilian life. But what are we to say after the war has gone on for some time, and it is clearly not being fought in that way? Have we truly absolved ourselves of blame? 

Leonard would say of course no. He is withering on the subject of those Western critics and politicians—including many left-wing Labour MPs—who supported U.S. and British involvement in the Gulf War, but only "if it stays within United Nations guidelines" (that is, only so long as it remained focused on ejecting Saddam from Kuwait, and not on invading Iraq to neutralize Saddam's military and the threat of his government). Leonard seems to imply that if you want the war, you have to take "the whole animal" (to borrow a phrase from a character in a Norman Mailer novel); you don't just get to keep "the tasty parts." If you were in favor of this war, you have to accept responsibility for the mass bombing and sanctions in Iraq too—and all the brutal suffering they unleashed upon civilians. 

How, Leonard seems to demand of the war's liberal supporters, could they have expected it to go any differently? "Anyone," he writes, "who has not willfully shut out the thought of what must be the effect of blocking food and medicine to 17 1/2 million people for months, then dropping 2,500 planeloads of bombs on their country every day for seven weeks, would not require an envoy from the United Nations to warn them of humanitarian disaster." Could not much the same words be written of Gaza today? Was it not clear from the outset of the conflict that Israel's retaliation in the enclave involved shutting off electricity, food and medical aid, and other essential humanitarian supplies to Gaza's civilian population, while also unleashing unspeakable carnage from the skies in the form of bombs and airstrikes? Could anyone not have foreseen the humanitarian consequences of a war waged by such means? 

It is possible to go mad with guilt and self-doubt, when faced with these mass atrocities and suffering —should I have said something sooner? Said something different? Would a word from me have made any difference? Did I have an obligation to speak regardless? Was there some way this could have gone differently? Can one retract what can never be retracted, revoke the irrevocable? Or does none of it matter now—none of what was said or what justifications we offered—because now Gaza is a smoking ruin—a dead hulk with tens of thousands of its civilians missing and killed, including innumerable children—an entire generation of the enclave's young people, uprooted or destroyed, suffocating under the rubble of a collapsing apartment building or cast into a second exile? 

But even Leonard, who—to win the argument—needs do no more than show us the results of our government's actions abroad—"Go, blindworm, go/ behold the famous States," to quote Emerson—Leonard, who, because the war happened and Saddam was defeated, never had to address the counterfactual of what would have happened instead if the Iraqi dictator had simply been permitted to invade Kuwait without impediment, and who therefore need merely confront us now with the ghastly effects of what did happen, of what our government chose to actually do, in order to have the moral upper hand—even Leonard relents at last. Having won his point, having shown us the horrors that our war unleashed, he relents in favor of preserving a small corner of the human self from the engines of moral self-reproach. He says that one is not obliged to go mad taking the burden on one's shoulders of the entire world's unmerited suffering. 

One does not have to lose oneself, that is, in the inward self-mortification and to spend all one's mental energy in twisting on the moral rack—thinking, should I have said something more; was it wrong to speak of anything else; was it wrong of me to write a blog about the Josie and the Pussycats movie when I could have been writing instead about the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza and Israel? No, Leonard says, one is not obliged to spend all one's lifeblood in this way: 

"To let one's mind continue in turmoil over present enormities is to reduce oneself to the status of a Francis Bacon scream," he writes. "The enormities have at no time in History been absent [....] There's a maturity of maturity, the crossing point where you decide not to go 'insane,' but to insist on your own indestructible [...] status as a human being [....] Accepting this is to accept the always present validity of humor and dalliance, of turning up the road to the left or wherever because that's what briefly occurs, to sit somewhere out of anyone's planned cognizance looking at the lines in your hand, or a leaf, or the sky [....] That is nothing to do with 'sentimentality' in my opinion. It is to do with being a human being." 

Bertolt Brecht once wrote, in his "To Those Born Later," that in times like these, "A talk about trees seems almost a crime/ Because it implies silence about so many horrors." (Willett/Manheim/Fried trans.) Leonard seems to reply: we will always be living in times like these. There will always be horrors. We must not be silent about the horrors. But, having spoken out against them, we may also proceed to talk about trees. We can look at a leaf, at the sky. For, one could ask, what are we trying to make room for, when we seek to end horrors, if it is not such calm pleasures as this? What are we seeking to substitute for horror, if it is not a world where more people may live their lives in a quiet and dignified freedom—the sort of freedom that allows one to spend a moment in contemplation, beyond the reach of "anyone's planned cognizance." 

In the end, short of becoming a distended open-mouthed "Francis Bacon scream" ourselves, I don't know how we can do any better that this: We must protest against war crimes. We must insist that it is in fact possible to fight a war—even, or perhaps especially, a "just" war—by just means—otherwise every apparently justified pretext of war would become an excuse for the wholesale slaughter of civilians. It is in fact possible to endorse the stated end goals of a war, without thereby backing every possible means that might be deployed to that end, no matter how atrocious. One can in fact say—however much Leonard mocks and excoriates the position—"I will only continue to support the war if it stays within United Nations guidelines." Just as today, one can say, "I will continue to support the effort to eliminate Hamas from power, but not at the expense of civilian life." 

And having said it, one can put the blog or pen down, and go out and look at trees...