Living in Fear Together or Iraq War Redux

Israel and Lebanon are at war again. The world asks themselves haven't they had enough? The slim Israeli justification for launching real war -- the capture of an Israeli soldier -- now looks as convenient as the White House's claims of WMD in Iraq. Tanya Reinhart, leading Israeli scholar and commentator, reports the Israeli army was preparing for an attack months earlier, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its government.

For its part, Hezbollah is the David, benefiting from the absurdity of foisting primitive rock-ets at military Goliath Israel.

"The military arrogance of Israel, the fact that Israel is bombarding a helpless country like Lebanon, destroying its infrastructure, dismantling the state, is making people more and more angry," [said Labib Kamhawi, political scientist in Amman, the Jordanian capital].

"I feel a sense of pride because of this small group of people who are capable of fighting the state of Israel and all its military power," said Fayez Smet, a criminal defense lawyer. "Whether they win or not, they are heroes." (from LA Times A Divide Deepens in Arab World)

As tragic as all the events are, the entire conflict seems to me the last gasp of macho, without real power -- a desperate flailing about. Both groups are without answers. All that remains are habits. The habit of retaliation, the habit of expanding old wounds with fresh gashes, the habit of war.

John Keegan, one of the world's foremost military historians, says in his masterpiece A History of Warfare To refuse to recognize that politics leading to war are a poisonous intoxication, we do not need to believe, like Margaret Mead, that war is an 'invention'…. All that we need to accept is that, over the course of 4000 years of experiment and repetition, warmaking has become a habit.… Unless we unlearn the habits we have taught ourselves, we shall not survive.

The habit of war prevents both sides from seeing any common ground. Neither can acknowledge that past and present horrors suffered by both sides have given them the common experience of grief, oppression and fear. Recognition that they do have such a fundamental experience in common can lead to sympathy, compassion and eventual trust. These are the conditions that lead to the peace and safety both claim to want. Both groups will wildly flail around until the other recognizes and honors the deeply human desire they share to be safe and free.

The majority of people throughout the region seem as weary of these habits of war as the world is of reading about them. It is the leaders -- without effective answers, feeling impotent to solve the problems, and benefiting from illusions of potency -- who are now resorting to macho indiscriminate demonstrations of power. These displays merely highlight their true impotence -- they don't solve anything and cause more of the grief, oppression and fear they are purportedly trying to end.

"Why should we be the only ones who live in fear?" said Muhammad Abu Oukal, a student at the Islamic University in Gaza City. "With these rockets, the Israelis feel fear, too. We will have to live in peace together, or live in fear together." (from The New York Times Rockets Create a 'Balance of Fear' With Israel, Gaza Residents Say)

I have hope that the truth of this student's last statement is now self evident, that the choice rings clearly inside enough people of the Middle East, indeed inside enough people in the world, that the leaders benefiting from world calamity will find themselves alone, abandonded, defrocked of any illusion that they are making progress.

When enough people see the truth of the manipulation, the flaccid reality of their current leaders, the opening can come to unlearn the habits we have taught ourselves.