War gods roar again,
appear unstoppable
By LAURIE KING-IRANI
President Clinton has never been to war. Like many other
politicians, he spent the Vietnam era enjoying an idyllic university lifestyle
far from Southeast Asias killing fields. If Clinton had experienced war,
he would be less eager to involve the United States, a handful of reluctant
allies and the long-suffering Iraqi people in the dangerous conflict now
brewing in the Gulf.
The president, like most Americans, knows war primarily from
movies that ooze self-righteous machismo and present war as a football match
pitting good guys against bad. The daily misery of war as lived experience does
not make the final cut. On screen, the decisive battle comes and goes in a
flash, the hero emerges triumphant, no innocents are scarred or damaged and
everyone goes home happy and proud. This is war fought and won by the gods:
Particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are the Superpower, the
Sole Leader. What we say goes.
After living in Israel and Lebanon for most of the last six years,
I am continually taken aback by this American hubris. Even those earnest war
protesters waving placards and shouting slogans before the White House seem
supremely self-confident to my eyes, eyes that have seen war. I envy the
protesters easy assumption that the values, beliefs and principles they
hold dear can possibly halt the gears of war already set in motion, now
virtually unstoppable.
Two years ago while living in Lebanon, I had my first taste of
war. It is a metallic taste of repressed sorrow, rage and fear that can neither
be swallowed nor vomited. These corrosive emotions stick in your throat day
after endless day. And I saw only 16 days of war: the Israeli assault on
Lebanon code-named Grapes of Wrath.
That was enough for me to learn how war disrupts your digestion,
your schedule and your relationships. Tempers flare, sleep evaporates and
concentration disintegrates. War also upsets your assumptions and expectations.
I learned what it meant to be powerless, at the mercy of the merciless. I saw
that innocents could be slaughtered with impunity while the outside world
yawned with indifference.
I learned how cheap was the life of anyone within range of the
Israeli Air Force whose jets shrieked and whined over our heads threatening
death and destruction every moment of every day. My brief experience of war
left me awed by the strength of people in Lebanon who had survived 16 years of
unrelenting terror, helplessness and chaos with their sense of humor and joie
de vivre intact.
When I first moved to Lebanon in 1993, I mistakenly assumed I
wouldnt be seeing any military action. Curious, I often talked with a
friend about how she experienced the Lebanese war as a child. Hanady, a
journalist, was only 7 years old when the war began. At its end, she was 26,
but looked older. Was there a moment when you knew, as a small child,
that the war had begun? I asked one evening as the sun set over the
Mediterranean.
Yes, she answered with a pensive look in her green
eyes. I expected a dramatic tale to pour forth: soldiers fighting in the
streets, tanks at her window, bombs falling in her garden. But instead, Hanady
said, I knew something awful was happening when I came home one afternoon
and found my father standing in the middle of the street talking to some men,
and he was wearing his bathrobe and bedroom slippers.
This small disruption of normality initiated her awareness of war.
It seemed so surreal.
My most enduring memory of Grapes of Wrath is not the
day I sat typing at my computer in West Beirut and wondered why my teeth and
feet were vibrating, only to find myself suddenly shouting as the
earth-splitting rumble of an explosion a mile and a half away shook my body.
Nor was it the knowing look in the eyes of my Palestinian colleague as she lit
a cigarette with trembling hands and said, You see? Its like the
explosion is coming from within your stomach, isnt it?
It wasnt scene after scene of carnage on the evening news:
decapitated school girls, crushed babies, burnt refugees and wailing mothers.
Nor was it the maggots that started to turn up in our fruits and vegetables,
the natural result of a dramatic increase in Lebanons fly population due
to the many carcasses of sheep, goats, horses, donkeys and even people that lay
rotting in the fertile fields of south Lebanon.
It wasnt even my fathers voice over the telephone,
shaking with fear and rage as he begged my husband and me to come back to
America: Sweet Jesus! There are burnt babies in the arms of dead mothers!
The Israelis have gone insane. And it wasnt the Israeli Mirage jet
that streaked past my kitchen window, so close I could see the pilot. Later I
cried as I realized that the jet had been on its way to bomb people into
smithereens in Baalbak, and there was nothing I could possibly do to stop this
or any of the other daily murders.
No, my most vivid memory of the short war I witnessed in Lebanon
is as surreal as Hanadys memory of the earlier, much longer war.
There was a song popular on the radio that April, a haunting song
by Joan Osborne titled What if God was One of Us? It first caught
my attention the day my husband and I were trapped in a massive traffic jam as
everyone tried to escape Beirut after the first Israeli air assault on the city
in 14 years. It was a hot day for early April, and the song wafted from one car
radio to the next through countless open windows like the sardonic background
music of our predicament, a mocking indictment of how very un-Godlike we all
were at that moment, scurrying like cockroaches fearful of being crushed by a
large foot coming down from the sky.
Three days later, we opened the windows at my office. From a
nearby dorm music blasted, filling the eerily empty streets with that song
again: What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a
stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home?
And it occurred to me that the problem was that some of us did
indeed think God was one of us, or, more precisely, that some of us were gods:
Gods Chosen People were smashing the Party of God in a very godless
manner.
Today I played my Joan Osborne tape and listened to that song
again. As music so mysteriously does, it brought back memories and feelings
with surprising intensity. I began to tremble and cry as the lyrics asked their
plaintive question about our likeness to God or lack thereof. I cried not from
sorrow but because I recalled my powerlessness then, in 1996, and my
powerlessness now in 1998. I cried because I am helpless before what may be
coming, not only in Iraq but also throughout the entire Middle East. I trembled
because so many people may die while Bill and Saddam play God with others
lives. And because it seems that none of us can stop it: The gods of war have
decided.
Laurie King-Irani is a cultural anthropologist and freelance
writer now living in Washington.
National Catholic Reporter, February 27,
1998
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