On a couple different occasions, I have drawn parallels between the American response to the limited Yugoslavian anti-terrorist campaign of 1998-99 (NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 for having the audacity to fight terrorists on their own territory) and the official response from Washington to Israel’s wide-ranging strike against Lebanon that came in response to Hizbullah’s kidnapping of two soldiers (a general outpouring of initial support). Our bombing of a Christian country has an eerie parallel with Israel’s bombing of a country that is roughly 40% Christian; the flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Kosovo, precipitated by our bombing campaign, bears a striking resemblance to the flood of refugees from Lebanon: both are primarily large Muslim populations (in both cases, there were many Christian refugees as well) uprooted by the attacks of the benevolent, freedom-loving bombardiers. Last time, NATO was supposed to be helping the hundreds of thousands of refugees; this time, the refugees seem to be targets just the same as everyone else. Last time, it was an anti-genocide campaign that caused massive displacement and what would otherwise be called ethnic cleansing; this time, it is an anti-terrorist campaign waged by terrorising civilians. The mendacity and doublespeak defending the attacks on civilian targets remain the same–the real villain is always someone else who is “forcing” the benevolent bombardiers to blow up Belgrade or Beirut. Bombardment shall lead to disarmament and glorious liberation. We have heard it all before, and it is, by and large, a pack of lies. But keeping the two wars in mind together is helpful in understanding American indifference to Lebanese suffering: Americans were equally indifferent when our own airmen were blasting innocent civilians for the crime of being Serbian.
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July 24th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
jsinger008
While this post presents a big fat juicy target to someone like me who is both a supporter of Israel’s current military operations as well as the American/NATO military campaign against Serbia in 1999, I will pass for now. Suffice to say, your sarcastic exaggeration (”the crime of being Serbian”) is something I’m sure you wouldn’t enjoy if the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak.
Instead, leaving Lebanon for the moment, I just had to make sure you read this article from yesterday’s “Sun-Times”:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/reed/cst-books-reed23.html
I thought of you and the rest of the “agrarian gang” while reading it and thought you might find it interesting. Enjoy!
July 25th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Daniel Larison
I don’t consider my assessment of the Kosovo bombing campaign to be the least bit sarcastic. The Serb civilians killed in 1999 had done nothing to anyone except be citizens of Yugoslavia. Whatever objections anyone might have had to Yugoslavia’s handling of its internal affairs, the deaths of those civilians are hard to justify, particularly in an allegedly “humanitarian” campaign. They were no more culpable for anything being done in Kosovo than the Israelis getting hit by rocket fire today are culpable for Mr. Olmert’s decisions (the Israeli civilians who have died in the last two weeks are guilty of nothing more than being Israeli), yet the civilians are practically the only ones who were and are getting punished. If I dwell too much on the wrongs of one side in the current conflict, it is not to exculpate or exonerate the wrongs of the other; I take it for granted that the villainy of firing rocket attacks on civilians is clear to all.
My aim is to argue against those who would more or less blithely disregard the lives of Lebanese people because it is convenient to their position, just as many did during the Kosovo campaign with respect to Serbs because it was fashionable in those days to oppose Serb “genocide.” Dozens of Albanian refugees were killed by NATO bombs in 1999 as well, and their only crime seems to have been to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All these deaths are tragic, and they were all completely unnecessary (to say nothing of counterproductive, if the goals were regional stability and peace) in 1999. In a few years’ time we will look back at this campaign and probably find the same to be true.
I do appreciate the article on the writers. There is a connection between turning to rural life and finding creation to be a source of artistic creativity. I do wonder whether it is better for city dwellers who understand the importance of place and roots to move off to an unfamiliar rural setting, or whether it would be better for them to build up agrarian-minded networks of people in their neighbourhood and to try to create rooted community where they are, a clearing in the urban jungle as it were. One of the themes at the summer school, a topic to which I intend to return soon, was Chesterton’s line that a place becomes loveable by loving it. Far from “high-tailing it to the Ozarks” (which makes no sense for anyone not from the Ozarks), staying where you are and making your place into a settled, humane place are central to an agrarian vision, which distinguishes that vision from the utopian vision of romantic pastoral poetry. I can understand the desire of writers to want to get out of Chicago, but if this is actually where they are from they might have done better to stay. This impulse to move around is ingrained in our cultural mentality, but it was against this impulse that I think Caleb Stegall was arguing when he has made remarks about people moving to the suburbs that so agitated everyone.