<http://www.globalresearch.ca/old-and-new-wars-dehumanizing-war-killing-at-a-distance/5318115>
Old and New Wars: "Dehumanizing" War. Armies facing Armies no longer happens?
By Lesley Docksey
Global Research, January 08, 2013
Do we want a generation of veterans who return without guilt? Prof.
Jonathon Moreno
Last November global governance expert Professor Mary Kaldor gave a
lecture at the Imperial War Museum*, London. Her theme was Old and
New Wars - how the nature of warfare and the organisation of its
participants have changed. Old wars, she said, were essentially a
battle of wills between two states or leaders. A war of two sides,
two armies, can be vicious as it progresses but sooner or later one
side wins, one loses, and some kind of treaty is negotiated. In a
literal sense the war ends but, as any good historian knows, each war
has carried and planted the seeds of the following war.
However, armies facing armies no longer happens. There is a halfway
stage between old and new wars - such as happened in Vietnam and now
in Iraq and Afghanistan - where an invading army finds itself at a
loss as to how to fight what is essentially a guerrilla war fought by
people trying to rid their country of a force that has come in from
outside and is trying to impose its own solution on their state's
difficulties. But when, politicians having realised they are never
going to 'win' this war, the invading troops are pulled out, the
fighting goes on. It morphs into a 'new' war. Afghanistan does not
have a good outlook, and Iraq is still at war with itself, where no
such divisions existed before the invasion. Nor does the imported
heavy battlefield equipment do that well against insurgents with
roadside bombs or hand-held rocket launchers - which must be a sore
disappointment to those who love big machines.
There is no clear way to end new wars, something which we should take
account of. They are far more complicated in the make-up of
combatants, but all are seeking some form of power. And money (or
more accurately, profit) plays a large part. Nor is it easy to tell
who is raising money to fund the war, or who is fighting the war to
raise money to further their aims. There are too many actors -
soldiers in uniform, freedom fighters, religious fighters,
Mujahideen, war lords, mercenaries and. of course, men who simply
love killing and migrate from country to country, conflict to
conflict. They went to Iraq and now they are part of the Syrian Free
Army. Foreign passports proliferate in modern conflicts. So - too
many competing interests, with scant attention paid to those who are
truly 'on the ground', the little people living in little villages,
growing little amounts of food for their little families and sadly
fertilising their fields with their blood.
How many of these combatants have a natural right to be there, in
that country or that province? How many are interfering in someone
else's conflict? How many are making the situation worse while
justifying their actions by claiming they are there to sort things
out? How many are fighting for power and control over their
countrymen? How many are fighting because they have a particular
vision of their country and are trying to force that vision on
others? For each and every one of these fighters one has to ask:
what is that one trying to gain? It is a far cry from the old wars
with kings or politicians deciding to go to war to protect their
'interests' and sending off hapless soldiers to do the killing and
dying. Or is it? Is the difference between the old wars and the new
simply that the old wars were mostly fought by national armies, not
coalitions of convenience like ISAF and not splinter groups
representing different interests? The desire for power, control and
profit never alters.
All soldiers, across all time, can and often do act in an inhumane
way, committing appalling acts of cruelty. One only has to read some
of the evidence given at the Baha Mousa Inquiry to understand that
war insists that other people are 'the enemy' and that soldiers feel,
as they did in Iraq, that they have the right to torture and beat
those whose only crime is to live in the invaded country. But now
soldiers are taking that one step further, too far, treading beyond
the line. The tools and training of modern warfare are dehumanising
them. Take drones.
It is hard to believe that the first armed drones were used in
Afghanistan in 2001. In less than ten years they have become an
essential part of fighting war. They are controlled from half a
world away by people who have never been to the country they are
targeting; who have no knowledge of the way of life, the culture of
the little blobs of humanity they track in their monitors; who have
no understanding of the political and corporate background to the
'war' they are fighting; and, most importantly, by people who are in
no danger of having their own blood spilt. The deaths they cause are
meaningless to the hand that presses the button. They have meaning
enough for the people on the ground, gathering what they can of
shattered bodies for burial, and unsurprisingly their use creates
more so-called terrorists.
Killing at a distance dehumanizes those doing it - it is not killing
but a computer game. Scoring a 'hit' that involves no blood, no
entrails, no broken lives brings no guilt, no remorse and no proper
awareness of the hurt inflicted on others. But with the physical
damage being inflicted on Western forces (in the US Army alone 73,674
soldiers have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and
30,480 soldiers have returned from combat with traumatic brain
injury). This in itself is a good enough reason to use nothing but
drones, and if both sides use them then the only casualties will be
absolutely guaranteed to be civilian. It is bad enough that the US
thinks it is fighting a global war on terror, so all the world is a
battlefield. What price the world if another state takes that
attitude thinking, quite rightly, that the US drones are a form of
terrorism?
Using drones also dehumanizes the people they kill. These are not
fellow humans but terrorists, not civilians but collateral damage,
not 8-year-old boys or old men of eighty but potential combatants.
The enemy becomes nothing more than a fly to be swatted, a worm to be
stepped on. President Obama has to personally authorise US drone
strikes, more than 300 of them in his first four years of office.
That many of the deaths were of children cannot be disputed,
regardless of the fact that the US insists that only 'combatants' are
killed. But at the beginning of December last year a senior US army
officer speaking to the Marine Corp Times said that troops in
Afghanistan were on the lookout for "children with potential hostile
intent" - in other words, children could be deliberately targeted.
Yet a few days later, there was Obama weeping on camera over the
shocking deaths of the Connecticut school children. Afghan children
obviously don't rate tears.
Having gone past the old form of war of charging into battle against
another army, it is inevitable that soldiers should be expected and
trained, when fighting 'terrorists' - aka: freedom fighters,
resistance fighters, insurgents, supporters of 'regimes', religious
fundamentalists (non-Christian of course) - to operate in the same
way as drones, with targeted assassinations, raids on homes or
farmers out in fields. We are told - and oh, am I tired of this
being parroted by politicians justifying murderous actions by their
forces - that the terrorists are 'hiding' in civilian areas, using
women and children, even their own families as human shields. If
they are not regular soldiers but people resisting occupying forces,
they are not using their families as human shields; the houses are
their homes, where they live, where they and their families belong.
They are all civilians. And in much of the Middle East the
prevailing culture is that most men, particularly in rural areas, own
guns. Before the West visited so much war upon them, the guns
appeared mostly to be used for firing shots into the air at weddings
and other celebrations. But they own guns therefore they must be
terrorists. By that logic, many US citizens are also terrorists.
And now we have the possibility of super-soldiers, the ultimate
killing machines. Not satisfied with the vulnerability of soldiers
to fatigue, stress, madness, drug addiction and worse, a sudden sense
of morality, the Pentagon and others are researching ways of
bypassing all that humanity. According to bioethicist Professor
Moreno, the military co-option of neuroscience is now the fastest
growing area of science. Millions of dollars are being spent in
researching the soldier's brain, testing drugs that will wipe out
unpleasant memories of dark deeds done, quell the fatigue, mask pain
and eliminate feelings of guilt. It is not so much using robots
(which in one sense is what drones are) as turning humans into
unfeeling robots.
But if armies become mere operators of drones, or the 'super
soldier', guilt-free and heartless, becomes reality, then there
really is no end to war. For the publics' reaction to damaged
soldiers coming back home and being a drain on families' emotions and
the public purse because of PTSD or multiple disablements will be the
only thing that just might finally persuade the politicians that war
is not worth the fighting.
* This was the annual Remembrance Day Lecture for the Movement for
the Abolition of War (MAW)
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