Two Eyes: for War and Peace

What if we were asked to Prevent the Invasion?

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I won't comment, not this time, (December 2008) as the Israelis strive to stop the deadly rain of rockets into their nation. I did comment last time, (2006) when the rocket's red glare come from not the west but the north. A group within Lebanon, the Hezbollah, were arrogant, or unable to control themselves, or something- for they opposed the will of their fellow Lebanese. Instead they followed their own little agenda to rocket Israel. The last straw, for the Jewish populace, was when the Hezzbollah did a cross-border raid and captured two frightened Israeli soldiers. Those two soldiers were under a peacetime viewpoint. Their comrades then began fighting for them under a wartime viewpoint.

We Canadians, including our armed forces, are peaceful, needless to say, but if we could better understand these two viewpoints, peace and war, then we could better understand others, and we could better predict whether or not the Lebanese will prevent future invasions and wars by disarming the Hezzbollah and destroying their rockets.

Prior to the 2006 invasion, the rocketing of civilians was hazy to us, unreal, like how back in the 1930's (according to Ray Bradbury's 1940's Martian Chronicles) we viewed the newsreels of warlords and Japanese troops in China. No one could be roused to take action, not back then, not now. In 2005 the plight of peace loving Lebanese was as hazy and dim to us as the plight of the Israelis later would be in 2008. Question: Back when Lebanon was peaceful, back a year before the Israelis reacted- ...What if Canada had been asked to help prevent the invasion? This makes for a neat thought experiment, and leads to me to examining the two viewpoints, or mind sets, of peace and war.

(Legal)

What could we offer in the year 2005 if the Lebanese asked for our help in figuratively arresting any Hezbollah drug dealers and seizing their stash? Or, more literally, arresting arms dealers and seizing the giant rockets? This assumes that Lebanese judges would issue arrest warrants, with laws that only the government may have crew served weapons. (Other common government monopolies include staffing embassies, declaring war and minting legal tender.)

Canada in 2005 had the physical tools: Some of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and military police that we had in Haiti could have been transferred to Lebanon, joined by their peers from Canada. We also could have sent police SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics) and little teams of soldiers. Just as vital as our physical tools we also had the abstract doctrinal tools: we had Rules of Engagement (which tells when to shoot) and we had the doctrine of Aide to Civil Power (which tells who can legally order, "shoot!")

The British used Aide to Civil Power to win the guerrilla war in the jungles of Malaya, while Canadians used this doctrine at the first Olympic summer games following the tragic 1972 Munich games. I was there. In 1976 I was part of a reaction force with the Canadian Airborne Regiment near Montreal. It was a good posting. That summer the TV theme from SWAT played. Remember the scene during the credits where everyone is grabbing a rifle from a rack? Same with us, except the racks were in our individual closets and we would rush out the barracks to helicopters not police vans. Ideally a civil policeman would have accompanied us but the police manpower was needed elsewhere.

Later that summer some of us (not me) went riding with athletes on their big busses, and dozens of us (me too) were transferred to a new metro barracks: tough old steel bunks in a ritzy high school. I was amazed to find a school with air conditioning! Also surprising was a gymnasium that seemed as big as a gym for a community college, with observation windows looking down. To this school Olympians were bussed to practice soccer and gymnastics under our protection. As we paced along the playing fields we carried our weapons slung on one shoulder. (We had a bulky 10 lb Belgian rifle made by Fabrique National which fired a big deer-hunting sized round.)

(Summer)

Our leaders were a few military policemen. There was a "gate" where the gymnasts entered. Here a Montreal civil policeman (or two) was always stationed with one soldier, which was usually me. We checked the IDs (on a neck string) of all the athletes. I recall a constable on the first day advising me on where to set down my rifle so as to cause the least fear in the passing civilians. The thought of their fear hadn't even crossed my mind. The point is that we soldiers were aiding a civil power with the civilians in command. In the event of trouble at my gate it would be that policeman who had the power to order me to shoot or to hold my fire, to help him arrest a man or to let a man go even if I disagreed. This way the citizens and their elected leaders could not conveniently turn their conscience over to the army. No martial law. No Big Brother here.

It was in Britain, a few years later, that the Libyan embassy was surrounded not by soldiers but by police. A unidentified terrorist (of yes, that religion) stuck a submachine gun out the window, fired wildly, and killed a policewoman by a bullet to the throat.

Let's jump ahead in time to observe an alternate reality: Lebanon, 2005. Watch the Lebanese and Canadian peace officers. There is a knock on the Hezbollah door. A submachine gun is stuck out the window. A Canadian dies. Another week, another Mountie down. Code blue. Back home flags everywhere go to half mast. Now what? Do we pull out? After all, our U.S. cousins pulled out of feeding the starving people in Somalia. This was after Somali civilians killed "as few" as 19 men. For a peacetime viewpoint "as many" as 19 men is harsh. I think "pulling out" goes with peacetime the way "cover up " goes with watergate. None of the watergate conspirators ever considered not doing a cover up. So although we would have felt badly for the Lebanese, we probably would have left them to their fate.

(Pull out)

Back then, as you may recall, our boys in Afghanistan, in the eyes of many, were not viewed as "real warriors" but as "merely peacekeepers" with our nation's flag, under the liberals, going to half mast for every death, peacetime style. As I see it, in the time-space of "2005 Canada" we had the physical tools, and the two abstract tools, but we citizens did not have the tools of the two "viewpoints," or mentalities if you will: peacetime and wartime.

The two views are like two eyes: if I have both then I can see others in three dimensions, I have more data, and I can act more appropriately.

I became aware that my fellow Canadians "don't exactly have their consciousness raised" when I attended a guest professor's lecture. In case it matters, I should explain that he showed slides of old Japanese articles complete with photographs of different races that made up Japan. The doctor explained how before fascism the Japanese (or at least the scholars) were conscious of having a multi-racial heritage, but not now.

During the wine and cheese that followed I was standing with a mature Japanese lady, who, like me, was from off-campus. We were joined by a young woman. This young person was educated, had a degree, and was halfway to a masters degree. She told us she had an interest in art history. There was a respected artist she liked, a household name. She had been astonished, and very disapproving, to see his wartime racist anti-Japanese posters. In the telling of this she screwed up her face and shuddered. The Japanese lady and I merely exchanged looks. How could we tell this innocent girl that she was being so ignorant? How to tell her that although she had a degree she was blind in one eye? We let it go.

(Japan)

I could have told her that during wartime you hate the enemy with all your heart and soul. If I am on a narrow jungle trail and meet a Japanese, and my rifle jams and I have to fight in vicious hand-to-hand combat, then a wartime poster that helped me to hate was a good thing.

With war comes a tunnel vision that makes you try to reduce your own casualties by focusing on killing the enemy. If you are preparing to land on a pacific beach then you rain down as many artillery shells as you can spare. You are heedless of blasting the nice pretty palm trees, careless of the it-takes-a-thousand-years-to-grow coral. As your shells are falling you feel no pity: not for the big fat enemy general, and not for the little fellow beside him, his skinny unarmed trumpeter.

A civilian equivalent could be my drinking buddy who takes a wide peace-and-war viewpoint, and who talks sensitively of "the sorrow and the pity" of French civilians in WWll. He has no issues with appearing homosexual and he will, accordingly, gracefully weave and pivot past all the bar tables. Until he gets in a fight. Then tunnel vision -heedless- tables crashing, drinks smashing; not for even a second will he glance away to view with pity the collateral damage he is causing. Not until he has won or lost.

When the fight is over, it's over. One of my best drinking buddies was a bouncer. We met the night he manhandled me out the door... With peace the other eye dominates: the hate vanishes, respect shines, and people come home with Japanese wives. I once flew on a Canadian Forces plane to Germany beside a returning German wife.

(Pacific)

It seems to me that during a war diplomacy must be done by specific civilians, free of battle's tunnel vision, perhaps after they have set themselves apart- closed one eye to their fellow citizen's wartime views. No wonder diplomatic functions seem to be in some serene formal alternate world. "Closing one eye" seems cold blooded, but it can be done if you are motivated.

I was certainly motivated as a student journalist when I had to set myself apart in order to cover sporting events or political parties. I once walked out of a theater, still feeling apart, and was asked what I thought of the play. "I won't know until I go home and write my review." Other critics have said this too. Once, with a group in a bar, I made a journalism intern publicly shed a tear because I showed him a poem, Night Editor by Alden Nowlen. The narrator is working on the night Martin Luther King Jr. dies: he has no feelings, no caring, until he looks in the newspaper the next morning and reads his own story... So if our viewpoints are somehow in our control, as with the editor during his night shift, then, for me, the trick is not to let myself be permanently blinded in one eye. Therefore I can't become a longhaired peacenik.

A wartime viewpoint means that we lose our pity, and furthermore we lose our denial of death. Peacetime is deny time. If tomorrow we were to begin building the Hoover dam we might proudly publish estimates of how many tons of angle iron and cement would be needed. But there would be no consulting of Workmen's Compensation Board statistics. No publishing estimates of death.

My experience is that in peacetime, if the U.S. president decides to shift an army over to Asia for "just in case," then no commentator will remark that this great move could mean death, perhaps from a warehouse accident, or a jeep flipping off a lonely mountain curve. Later, if force becomes needed, then folks at home will tell themselves that air power alone will suffice, surely, without a single pilot having his hair mussed. Only at a later stage will they admit that ground troops may have to go in and be in harm's way. This they will admit grudgingly. Sound familiar? Man, I just hate it when history repeats.

(History)

What if the president realizes how things will unfold? What if he knows, too, that there is no bomb "smart" enough to blast an enemy general but spare the little trumpeter? He dare not educate the American people about that, not in advance. People don't elect a president to "educate them," and they never elect a man who has a Ph.D.

...It's plain they don't want to be offended. Even essays "by the people, for the people" may offend. How can you inform folks without them thinking of the word "educate?" How can you be teaching without preaching? How can an academic such as a student, professor or white-collar-former-student, not profess what he believes? A social work teacher once advised us as college students that, for others who had barely coped with high school, "educate" is a dirty word. ... ...The remainder of this essay is what I wrote in 2006 as the invasion was winding down, the U.N. was entering the scene, and the world hoped both sides had been educated by fire into believing in peace.

Perhaps switching to a wartime viewpoint is not like flicking on a solid state radio, perhaps it is more like slowly warming up an old vacuum tube TV. I believe the Israeli army was in wartime mode. I say this because weary troops walking back after the cease-fire were so cut off from civilian concerns that they asked, "Did those two soldiers get freed?" This seclusion from the real world indicates a wartime world where people feel that suffering casualties is common.

(Football)

In the civilian world football players start the season secluded in training camp. On certain U.S. campuses, according to the student football expose Meat On the Hoof, the players will have their own dorms and dinning facilities, ostensibly for teamwork and nutrition, but actually to be secluded from the liberal arts students who don't take football so seriously.

What of the Hezbollah? From what I have read they had a wartime viewpoint, and it seems this view is enduring past the cease-fire. Therefore, if a Lebanese policeman my age, a husband and father, paunchy and balding, tries to arrest a Hezbollah, and dies... then it follows that neither the Hezbollah, nor his wife, or his wife's good sister, will feel a single tear. ...Not like my peacetime buddy in the bar.

What of the Lebanese soldiers? Are they being secluded from other Lebanese, including the Hezbollah, in order to warm up to wartime? Are they seeing posters of Evil Hezbollah? I totally doubt it. I totally doubt their sergeants are saying, "Listen up, stuff happens, none of us will live forever!" So despite Lebanon's cease-fire ideals, I'm sure they won't have the guts to disarm the Hezbollah.

What of U.N. soldiers? A senior Israeli officer, during the fighting, asked that any U.N. force be composed of combat troops, not "troops near retirement," not troops "seeking a vacation in the orange groves." That old Israeli knew that in peacetime, when the soldiers on base know each other's faces, life is very precious. I remember in the airborne we were shocked, the news flew around the base, when a sergeant died of a heart attack during a morning run.

To boot up to a wartime viewpoint requires a little time and a lot of commitment. Will the U.N. troops make that commitment? Will they help disarm Hezbollah civilians so that democracy is refreshed? Not if the troops are as lousy as the ones in Rwanda. We will see. I for one will see with both eyes.

Sean Crawford

2006-2008

posted to the net January 4, 2009

Calgary, Alberta

note:

~For more on "pulling out" see my essay, Decision Pie; Afghanistan slice

~As a child I liked the story of the little trumpeter in the Read Aloud series. He is drawn with long hair like a peacenik; at a war crimes trial (his side drew mustaches on the statues in the park) he tries to escape what he deserves by claiming he doesn't even carry a gun.

~It was in the shadow of the Hezbollah that I wrote my first two Battlestar Galactica essays. (#'s 1 and 3)

Footnotes on essays:

~Ben Franklin explains in his autobiography that he tried to avoid offending by saying, "as I see it," "in my experience," "perhaps" and so forth.

~Dale Carnegie sometimes twists like a pretzel to avoid preaching in his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Such a gentleman. I would have felt too ornery, felt it too undignified, to make such effort.

~In the business world you can't write, "I think." You are expected to be positive.