Turning on the Killing Fields

I'm returning from a working summer sabbatical from Nonviolence.org to find the world situation both completely the same and completely different. It is the best of times and the worst of times, no? My April editorial, Making Friends, Making Enemies and Looking Toward the Future is a call to peace that's as relevant to developments in Israel, Lebanon, Iran and iraq but just as likely to be ignored.

Sometimes it feels that war is inevitable. The terrain of southern Lebanon is once more being chewed up by tanks and rockets. Israel's army and the Hezbollah militia keep one-upping the level of violence. Wars of evident defense can be a great recruitment tool for angry young men and neither military force is in any danger of being overwhelmed or destroyed. That thankless job goes to the civilians caught in the middle. Warfare in the age of terror consists of slaughtering innocents in the name of righteous self-defense. Hostilities never really end, they take a break after enough blood has been spilt to satisfy the powers behind the killing.

The Hezbollah rockets heading south and Israeli tanks going north are symbols of the proxy war that is being run from thousands of miles away. Hezbollah's arms come from Iran, Israel's from the United States. While there might be simmering resentments and isolated acts of violence, there would not be a war without these sponsors. The fighting in Lebanon could be switched off like a light bulb with the slightest nod from either Washington or Tehran.

iraq is the other front of this proxy war. Yesterday General John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, told the Senate that Iran could slide into civil war. The BBC is reporting that senior British diplomat William Patey informed Tony Blair last week that "the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of iraq is probably more likely at this state than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."

Baghdad has more-or-less seen fighting since American troops entered it but the decentralized insurgency is giving way to a kind of sectarian violence that is far more dangerous. If Patey's prophecy comes to pass iraq will be our next Lebanon: a bloody, seemingly-intractable civil war lasting decades, turned on and off by diplomatic whim from abroad, a killing field where innocents die for the false rhetoric of idealism far far away.

Images from Wikipedia articles on the Israel-Lebanon conflict and iraq War