162. Looking On

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By now we ought to be accustomed to "standing there looking on" while an atrocity is committed.  We stood and looked at Rwanda and Darfur and the Congo, as earlier we had looked at Biafra and Bangladesh.  I see, by Googling "atrocities 'while the world looks on'," that we have also recently looked on at atrocities in Lebanon, Algeria, Mali, the Kachin State in Burma, and the Congo again.  We looked on for a while in the Balkans.

We did not look on in Somalia (warlords stopping food shipments) or Iraq (Saddam Hussein gassing his own people).  We stopped looking on in Bosnia and needed only a glance in Kosovo.

We ought also be accustomed to reproach.  We got it in nearly all those cases.  Some was ignorant (what could anybody expect the U.S. to do in Bangladesh?), some came from too great a distance (the Kachin State in Burma), and some came from people with no constituency in the U. S. (the Tuareg in Mali — not at all like the Christians in Darfur).

Some cases taught us to re-evaluate reproach.  We couldn't stand being reproached for looking on in Somalia then we couldn't stand looking at our getting in.  We couldn't stand looking on as Saddam Hussein gassed his own people then we couldn't stand looking at what his own people, left to themselves, did to their own hospitals, schools, museums, and each other.

Now we are looking on as Bashar al-Assad commits more and more "atrocities against his people."   We can hear the reproaches coming.  And we know our government is ready to do things that will head them off.  In May General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "that military options are being crafted" (Fox News, 5-28-12) and in July White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that further atrocities in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad's forces should eliminate any doubt that a coordinated international response was necessary at the United Nations (Reuters).

What will the response be?  A calibrated, quagmire-avoiding response worked in Libya but can it work here?  If it doesn't, where are we?  That's hard to say but we know there's a good chance that we'd be looking at Syrian civilians, left to themselves, doing terrible things to each other.  Already the breakdown of authority in Syria is looking like the breakdown in Iraq — theft, kidnappings, inactive police stations, general lawlessness (NYT 8-10-12).

OK, but that's in our imaginations, struggling to construct the future.  These pictures are right in front of us, there, the broken bodies of five-year-olds.  Our hearts cry for action.

Yes, and so did our grandparents' hearts when the British showed us Belgian babies with their hands cut off by Germans, and so did our parents' hearts when the Kuwaitis told us how Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.  The world is full of heart-users.  If you don't believe it look at that Iraqi story.  It was told by a poor Kuwaiti "eye witness" who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, acting on the advice of a hired American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton.

All right, so you know that and the next atrocity you see or hear about you say, "OK which PR outfit is managing this one?  Which group is behind it?"  After a while your first question is a cui bono:  "Who stands to gain from the pounding of my heart?"

That's where you could end, in action-stopping cynicism, until you ask, "Who stood to gain from the heart-pounding over Hitler's first atrocities?  A lot of near-sighted, imperialist victors of World War I who produced that stupid, vindictive Versailles Treaty we'd have to force Hitler to abide by.  Act in their interest?  Not on your life."  And there you are, unleashing Hitler on Europe.

So you can't always hold off just because somebody bad is going to profit.  Sometimes you're facing an atrocity-generator you have to stop early, if you're going to stop it at all.  Decide to look on then and somebody is sure to remind you of the Big Looking On of the twentieth century, 1933-1939.  Reproach, reproach.

It's all so terribly uncertain.  Even your right to use the word "atrocity" is in doubt.  There's an 18-year-old soldier, drafted to fight in a war he didn't believe in, bleeding to death before our eyes.  But we can't call what we're seeing an "atrocity."  He's wearing a uniform and his body is 13 years older than the bodies that just moved us to tears.  So what do you call him?  What do you call war?