A Life For a Life - The value of human existence in the political discourse of the Middle-Eastern powers
- written during Spring 2011 -
A Canaanite contemplating the laws and customs of war in the Middle-East over the last decade might not find many differences with the practices of the warmongering communities of his own biblical time. Calls for mass genocide, imperialism, religious-based hatred and Lex Talionis are still the rule rather than the exception. But what he will probably find even more disturbing is the coexistence of this organized system of political violence with a philosophical and juridical apparatus – having matured over the course of History – based on the respect and the protection of human life. If he was to change his focus to other regions of the world, he would maybe be surprised how peaceful and prosperous the rest of the world has become under the rule of this international lawmaking system and peaceful commercial relations. His native region, on the other end, seems to sink a little more everyday into his well-known anarchical system of constant belligerency. It is clear that the Middle-East today is rather the exception than the rule in our modern world, and it is difficult to underline other regions – Sub-Saharan Africa being the most obvious – where war is still present as an aspect of everyday’s life.
But this situation has after all been the natural expression of political conflicts since the creation of political entities somewhere along the foundation of the first cities, somewhere during the 3rd century BC, whose current-day locations on the banks of the Euphrates are still bloodied by permanent warfare. The absence of regulations between political entities and the weakness of trade between them are as much the cause of this situation as the politically created contempt for the value of the enemy’s life, whether a civilian or a military. But History never repeats itself, slowly bringing progress and regulation to the wilderness of competing state as well as the growing perception of the value of human existence to the philosophical subconscious of the Europeans populations, themselves devastated by centuries of looting and destruction.
It’s in the aftermath of the terrible battle of Solferino in northern Italy that Jean-Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman, horrified by the raw amount of casualties and the absence of doctors on the battlefield, decides to create the Red Cross, the first secular organization to claim neutrality and the aim to heal any wounded combatant regardless of his nationality. But he was also to summon an international conference that was to revolutionize the theory of warfare and create the Geneva Convention. By forbidding the deliberate targeting of civilians, protecting the life of war prisoners and denying the use of some categories of weapons, it became clear to all the political chancellors of the time that warfare could not be waged the same way as before. Indeed, while the hatred for the enemy’s life, created by the repetition ad nauseam of propaganda and political communication was enough to justify total war, involving the totality of the population in the war effort, it became also clear that the perception of the wrongfulness of this situation was growing in the political opinions of the European – and now American – populations.
Ironically, those laws of war were never to be broken in more critical proportions than in the almost immediate aftermath of their creation, deliberate targeting of civilians reaching summits it will probably never reach again – most notably on the East Front during World War 2 – making the conduct of medieval armies and of Renaissance’s mercenaries groups in conquered cities look like cartoon characters. This can be explained as much by the perfection of the “totalness” of the war during these conflicts – which itself can be explained by the growing of the populations and the industrial and technical progresses – as the very existence of those new laws of warfare that eventually made it clear that the situation reached inhuman levels of cruelty and destruction. It is only when people have a norm that they can judge an event, as here, it took the Geneva Conventions to make populations realize the situation was becoming completely abnormal. The philosophical layers of this revolution were laid by a rather short series of writers, among them the German general Von Clausewitz who, in a situation of total warfare, claimed the superiority of a civilian control of the military. His commentary by his colleague Brodie would turn this theory into practice with the German army and lead to the creation of the first modern High-Command system. This civilian control of the military triggers the creation of the political “big picture” into the mind of the generals who consequently have to stick to rules – related for example to the treatment of civilians – which were formerly unknown to them.
The creation of the United Nations in the aftermath of World War 2 can then be considered as the final stone of the edifice of warfare regulation, but this new organization eventually disappointed everyone for it merely moved the problem from a dimension to another. While cruelty in war was justified for centuries by the necessity to break a dehumanized and faceless archenemy of the Nation/Kingdom/God and therefore requiring no other no other legitimacy than the one linking a subject to its ruler, the consciousness of the existence of laws of warfare was to make the modern States apply an old science to a new field, political communication was suddenly to be used on a massive scale to justify lawless warfare by claiming permanently the higher moral ground and denying the enemy the possibility to present himself as a new position in international relations: the victim.
This new paradigm was to find its greatest incarnation in the long, deep-rooted and of an amazing political and social complexity of the bloodiest region of the world since the end of World War 2, the Middle-East. Indeed, the power games of the Cold War combined to the growth of what is now called the global community forced all the actors to present themselves to the world as the defenders of their national soil, the unrightfully aggressed or the object of barbaric repression in the case of liberation movements. Whether founded or not, those claims were to explode in the new framework of the international instances such as the United-Nations which quickly became the place where the international medias expected to see the guilty and the victims pointed out by the debates of the General Assembly.
The logic consequence of this metamorphosis of the international relations was then the creation in the Middle-East of extremely powerful propaganda machines whose aim was well-defined: hiding the wrongdoings of its side while maximally exploiting those of the other. And again, rather predictably, they were to focus their work on the ultimate crime, the taking of human life. All the medias, from the coverage of the Israeli occupation to the Gulf Wars were then to be fed under an increasingly overwhelming flow of data provided by all sides trying to demonstrate the contempt of their enemies for life and their own sacred respect for it. This was progressively to evolve from old-fashioned military communiqués to video sequences and internet sequences always provided with the clear intent to preserve international support via political communication and an appeal to the universally admitted value of human existence. But on an internal scale, no government really succeeded –nor really tried – to leave the of scheme of dehumanization of the enemy, a concept which always cause innocent deaths and therefore requiring an even higher need of international propaganda. This double-talk was indeed to become the framework of political communication in a region devastated by suicide warriors, high-tech bomber planes, and guerrilla urban warfare, whose most visible characteristic when it is seen by a bystander glancing at his neighbor’s newspaper during is morning commuting his the unacceptable toll on civilians life.
The creation of antagonism and rivalry in the Middle-East obeys to specific social and political rules. The political use of life through communication is an essential element of those dynamics.In a region which witnesses tremendous difficulties to forget, massacres from more than a thousand years ago still provide social groups with strong platforms for self-definitions but also hatred of the neighboring societies. The battle of Karbala in 680 BC is still commemorated today during the ritual of the Ashura and provides the Shia community with a permanent grief against the Sunnis, personified by the archvillain Yazid. The murder of Husayn, grandson of Muhammad is today one of the most sensitive ceremony on the calendar of the Middle-East. Robert Fisk even considers the killing of two Shia Lebanese by an Israeli patrol during the Ashura to be the starting point of the uprising against Tsahal’s presence in Lebanon. Therefore, the use of this extremely sensitive memory – the massacre of the Muslim prophet’s grandson and all his family – is recurrent in the speech of the Shia leaders, especially in pre-insurrectional situations. The Al-Sadr family for example, constantly used the comparison of Saddam Hussein with Yazid to justify the insurrection against the Sunni leader. On a smaller scale, it is frequent that old massacres be used by politicians to justify policies regarding the targeted social group. The Hebron massacre of 1929 is thus used by the Israeli settlers to justify their implantation in houses previously occupied by the Jews killed during the event. But the use of human life in the political speech goes beyond the conservation of hatred and anger between social groups. It is can also manipulate it to trigger a full-scale war. Just as in the western world, massacres – real or imagined – carry very powerful energies. The forging by the Kuwaiti royal family of baby killings by Saddam’s troops in the capital’s hospital – sometimes referred to as “KuwaitiGate” was probably one of the most critical factors that contributed to the popularity of the war in the United-States. The mention of massacred is also a recurring element today in the appeals of the Libyan insurgents to the European states. Killings are also the common spark of the two Intifadas. The most interesting use of those through communication is probably the case of Muhammad Al-Dura that was broadcasted on a French national channel and triggered the consciousness of the unrest in the European public opinion. It is still unclear today if the event was part of an attempt to simulate the killing of Palestinians by Tsahal, the child being shot by accident. What is certain however is that the short video shot forced the hand of the other Arab states in supporting the insurrection and created a strong movement of opinion in favor of the Palestinians. Eventually, political leaders can also use the murder of the antagonist as a strong motivation for his troops. This element was – and on a certain degree – still is the main factor of the Arab-Israeli war, Radio Cairo broadcasting for example in 1967 constant appeals to the murder of Jews. Newspaper in Syria and Egypt also relayed genocidal statements by PLO leaders – like Ahmed Shukairy – fuel for the motivation their public opinions.
Clearly then, the inclusion of human life in the political speech is a very powerful fuel to the conveyed message. In the case of political or military conflict, it can also trigger full-scale warfare between conflicting social groups.
Once the conflict starts, it faces the criticism of the outside world, eager to prevent further bloodshed and willing to enforce the separation of the combatants. The political speech then evolves to justify the pursuing of the conflict. The most obvious presence of this kind of instrumentalization is in the situation of long conflicts involving a strong national mobilization. Though those events are relatively rare in the Middle-East, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) offers clear examples.
After 2 years of conflict that failed to provide a decisive victory to any side, both Iran and Iraq came under considerable pressure from the UN to stop the hostilities on the basis of a statu quo ante bellum. Despite these diplomatic incitements, Saddam Hussein and the Iranian leaders chose to escalate rather than settle on the roots of the conflicts. Quickly then, Scuds missiles started to fall on major cities. Iran became the principal victim of the “War of the Cities” and paid a critical toll in civilian life. This situation was instrumentalized by both sides to defend the righteousness of their claim and secure international support. But the casualties were also given a very specific status close to holiness and idolatry. In Iran especially, a large part of the social life became dedicated to the cult of the martyrs who gave their life to defend the Islamic Republic. A whole parallel social system was put into place with special schools and financial aids to sons and relatives of the martyrs.
Because of this extreme conception of the value of human life, it became increasingly difficult for the involved states to front the necessity of a peaceful settlement and to give up violence. This situation of vicious circle built inside the public opinion of the State can also be found without any call from an international body to force settlement.
This instrumentalization of human life deep inside a conflict situation can be found in virtually all the Middle-Eastern conflict and on a much larger scale that in the Western world. In Lebanon for example, the murder by a suicide-bomber of Bashir Gemayel – political leader of the Lebanese Christians - fuelled a dramatic rise of violence against civilians that eventually led to the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Once again, the value of the life of the martyr exceeds its rational value and calls for a disproportionate revenge against the opposite side. This specific murder marked the acme of the violence in the Lebanese Civil War and was for most of the Christians the sign that the point of no return had just been crossed: taking a meaningful life on a side of a conflict can trigger inside their mental conception of it the consciousness that they have to either win or be completely exterminated. Whether of a political leader or a simple soldier, human life is the vector of an extremely deep value when political communication seizes it. Inside the conflict, it becomes a critical motivation for the peoples and their leaders to keep on fighting until the deaths are avenged rather than when a rational peace enforced by the international community is eventually set up.
Beyond those uses of human life as a vector of conflictuality and pursuit of violence, the Middle-East is also permanently using it as a creator of social link, therefore making it a dramatic element in the construction of political entities. Since the process of national-identity building started in the Arab world after the dramatic arrival of Napoleon in Egypt, it remains based on the definition of strong antagonists, making it most of the time a process of self-definition by the designation of a common enemy. This process is most obvious in Turkey – where the Kurd identity is denied through the demonization of the extremist PKK -, Iran – where the specific Shia faith involves a permanent complex of obsidionality - or Lebanon in which every community is defined by its relations with the others and its place in the alliance system. Therefore, it is obvious that the whole process of nation-identity building in the region is centered on violence and tense antagonism.
This situation led – and still leads – to extremely cruel and ferocious conflicts around the end of the colonial period. The Turk ruler Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk”, realizing the danger represented by the nationalistic claims in the eastern end of the Anatolian plateau started a complete genocide of non-Turkish population that was to leave between one and one and a half million of Armenians and other minorities dead. In the end, The Turk regime succeeded to secure a large part of Armenian-populated territories by carrying a systematic policy of displacing populations and simple extermination. This scheme of forceful removal and massive killing was to become the rule rather than exception in every conflict involving national-identity in the Middle-East. Lebanon is an extremely multicultural country that succeeded after its independence to build a relatively quiet model of coexistence between Christians, Muslims and other minorities through an extremely complicated and subtle democratic system. However, the massive arrival of Palestinian refugees following the first Israeli-Arab conflict was to shatter this model and trigger a conflict for the redefinition of the Lebanese national-identity. This variation in the balance of power of the communities was then indeed the start of a very violent conflict that was to leave Lebanon in ruins and a sizeable part of its population fleeing abroad.
This chain of events can be found virtually anywhere in the Middle-East where massive movements of population have occurred. The very centralistic regimes are therefore extremely afraid of any change in the ethnic balance of power of their population since they live in constant fear of being overthrown like King Hussein almost was during Black September. This situation is also one of the reasons why “Arab Spring” revolutions are so violently repressed in countries dominated by a large ethnic divide like Syria, since the ruling cast is afraid of the incontrollable flow of violence a redefinition of the national identity can trigger. Involuntarily, the same process would be launched in Iraq by the American intervention against Saddam Hussein. As a member of the Sunni minority, he made sure that the definition of the Iraqi identity would remain solely under his control, and he was indeed able to secure efficiently the Shia population on his side during the conflict with Iran. When the central figure of the authoritarian regime was removed, it left the way open to a reshuffling of the ethnic cards in the political structure of the country. Massacres and ethnic cleansing became then usual in Baghdad and the rest of the state, leaving it almost totally divided along ethnic lines when Saddam Hussein was slightly successful to enforce cohabitation.
Human life is then an essential factor of nationalist constucts in the Middle-East. Not only is it the basis of most of the political constructions there, but it is also the very creator of the impulses leading to the modern process of nation-building. This process is extremely present today in the “Arab Spring” uprisings where victims of the repressions – whether dead or just imprisoned - are integral part of the revolutionary process, their iconic status creating a posteriori legitimacy for the protesters. Indeed, almost each revolution in the Middle-East has its martyrs who contributed to make it a defining moment of the national identity. Iran has Neda, Israel the victims of terror or Lebanese Christians their former leader, Bashir Gemayel. All the victims, whatever their social status before their death, became the dead symbols of national unity and identity through their recuperation by political communication.
Strong notions of identity are therefore often based on values strengthened by human sacrifice. But this concept, through the heavy sentimental and passionate values it carries is also used permanently by Middle-Eastern regimes as a way to stabilize internal dissent and keeping the basis of their power strong. Most of the modern Arab dictatorships have used with their opponent a lot of different tactics in order to keep them in check. Reluctant to simply eliminate them physically due to the deep meanings of martyrdom in the region’s subconscious, they have often preferred to throw them in jail or threaten them and their families. Though Qutb was eventually put to death by Nasser, most political figures fighting the central authority are not killed unless they start an overt uprising – Hama massacre -. However, has we have seen, during times of political/ethnic change in the identity of the nation, the elimination of several “high value” individuals can be considered as an important step towards the re-stabilization of the nation. One of the most obvious examples of this situation might very well be the very bloody execution of Faisal II of Iraq by the revolutionary officers, as he was charged with all the blame for the foreign occupation. In Afghanistan, the same process took place when the Taliban eventually overthrown Najibullah in Kabul and castrated him along with his brother.
If then, during a revolution, the martyr – symbol of the process – can be anyone from the crowd of protesters; the much publicized execution of a representative individual from the former regime is also a very common feature. It allows the new regime to mark dramatically its difference with the former administration and allows the designation of a scapegoat, incapable of defend himself, for all the woes of the nation and the people. This provides of course a very strong incentive for regimes’ officials to defect as soon as the insurrection gains strength, or to leave the country, or to hang on to power until the very end, since they know their end is going to be extremely painful.
Under some conditions however, the removal of a “high value” individual can bring the contrary of the wanted effect. When they left the execution of Saddam Hussein to a gang of the overwhelmingly Shia Iraqi police, the Americans triggered a strong sentiment of unity among the Sunni community who felt strengthened in his feeling that the occupying force was overwhelmingly favoring the Shias. Sometimes too, even the mere expulsion of an individual from a State can lead to the iconization of his status. Khomeini – who also benefitted from his religious status that confers a specific value to his existence – became indeed a major figure of the Islamic opposition to the Shah after he was expelled from his religious offices.
Human life can thus be a very delicate thing for a political regime to use. If it can allow a smooth control over the population through threats and in extreme situation executions, it can also starts very delicate events. Due to its very heavy place in the human spectrum of values, human life is sometimes for the politician who uses it a very common application of the law of unintended consequences.
Now that we have explored the most important schemes that characterize the political use of the human life in the field of communication in the Middle-East, it is important to understand why this region is so specific in its coverage of the matter. We must explain the reasons and the rationales behind this constant obsession for the value of life. When he wrote On War at the beginning of the XIXth century, the Prussian Major-General Von Clausewitz probably had very little idea that he was synthesizing the essence of the western conception of warfare based on its religious, cultural and political values. In the western conception of warfare, the individual is a tool to the will of the State, to which he freely chose to swear allegiance. The value of his life is then extremely ambiguous since he constitutes only a negligible part of the national body during warfare, but also, since he exists in a representative system, a valuable part of this very same construct once peace is achieved. In war, the individual is a sacrificiable element of the army but he is ALSO a citizen towards whom the State carries a responsibility. Therefore, in war, the nation chooses to unite with the state and give up its representative control in order for it to lead the conflict efficiently. If unity is a priori achieved, there is very little need for the state to communicate on the status of the war since agreement was already given and since he has de facto become the only leader of the nation.
That is why human life in the context of the western world carries two very different values. In the context of an “obvious” war, when the nation is under attack or under existential threat, the state can simply forget the notion of acceptable casualties and throw as many soldiers as he wants/can in the fray. This is what Clausewitz defined as absolute war. On the other hand, when the conflict was picked by the state and when he fails to gather agreement from the nation – or when he loses it -, the dead of an individual becomes a symbol of the failure of the leadership and a critical blow to the states' policies.
In the Middle-East however, this process is occurring in a much different cultural context and is confronting a world in which the modern warfare is already fully implemented. Indeed, the Middle-East never fully acknowledged the concept of nationhood but merely tried to copy it in order to achieve most of its benefits. But as explained by Bernard Lewis and Victor D. Hanson, in order to achieve the full extent of the western-based modernization, one cannot simply copy its institutions and its concepts, but have to internalize socially and philosophically its implications. A state does not reach military modernization by creating a regular army, but rather by understanding and applying the whole conceptual apparatus that comes with it – national unity, enforced discipline, military accountability to the political sphere, etc. -. This is the main reason why the Middle-East is still stuck in the “life for a life” conception of political warfare, because it has extensive difficulties to leave its philosophical framework.
Therefore, war in the Middle-East is absolute in a very raw meaning of the term. The state pushes a very weak national body on the battleground with a mix of clumsy ideological propaganda and ill-maneuvered elements of nationalism, creating either very short confrontational phase (Syria-Jordan 1970) or very long conflicts (Iran-Iraq 1980) because it lacks of a- solid military with national-based morale and b- solid civilian support that could allow a unilateral resolution of the conflict out of the “Life for a life” framework.
This combination of loose philosophical military framework faces a world which has mostly evolved out of this situation and that experiences a twisted fascination for this processes of seemingly endless conflicts based on values that have for the most part disappeared due to the emergence of alternative modes of conflict-resolution. Therefore, the western world finds itself in the very delicate situation of the regional power of the Middle-East but also of a foreigner mostly ignorant of the traditions and cultures of the social groups he tries to intervene in. This leads those social groups to answer violently to any of those interventions, but also triggers the contamination of western media networks with the “life for a life” approach of warfare. The omnipresent coverage of Middle-Eastern conflicts – not much bloodier than most of the conflicts in Africa or South-East Asia – has become a integral part of the “life for a life” belligerency. Indeed, by recuperating the irrational fixation over human blood, western media carry back to the developed world this old conception of war.
It has become extremely difficult to leave the cycles of violence induced by this circular conception of killings. The problem is that when they chose to intervene in the region to put an end to violent cycles – like in Lebanon in the beginning of the 80’s or in Somalia in the 90’s-, western powers have always abused of the life for a life concept to both justify their intervention to their public opinion and to the population they try to interact with. Indeed, since the western state cannot claim that the integrity of the nation is threatened, it has to resort to those alternative legitimization techniques: the very same ideas that are constantly used by political leaders in the Middle-East, the “life for a life” uses of human existence. When the West chooses to influence militarily, it becomes an integral part of the cycle of violence since it gives up to the very elements it chooses to fight. By condoning torture, by allying with doubtful warlords or by bombing indiscriminately urban areas to spare casualties, modern states are regressing to “life for a life”. When it claims it is going to change Afghanistan – a war that could have been in a very modern way since it laid on the very strong legitimacy of the 9/11 attacks -, it actually is the one that is being changed into a waging a pre-national war without any regard to modern conceptions of warfare.
On the contrary, when the West wages war internally, it remains extremely efficient. The Falkland War or the 2008 Georgian war are models in their use of modern values regarding warfare and therefore have an excellent ratio of military/civilians casualties, without any possible comparisons to the figures of the “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan or Gaza. Indeed, those latter wars are waged on the “life for a life” claims making tremendous efforts of propaganda to “proportionalize” the intervention when they are not simply based on bogus allegation of WMDs.
A second trend that strengthens this situation is the ideological tropism of the Americans to confuse – or in the case of the so-called “neo-cons”, flatly negate – intervention and education. Where it became clear in Europe – after the various periods of implantation of republics during for example the Roman or the Napoleonic period – that modern military intervention was only complete with the communication of a political system and a strong administration, the US seems to have lost its ways since the end of World War II. It seems indeed to be blinded by its irrational faith in democracy and considers its implantation as a mechanical process that would not necessitate much financial and military aid. This leads to the continuation of the “life for a life” paradigm and even strengthens it since the population fails to see the efforts of the troops on the ground as a long-term process towards an end, but rather as a meaningless series of indiscriminate killing that eventually leads to the victory of those able to recuperate the trend, namely the jihadists or extreme “life for a life” nationalists ready to capitalize on the incomprehension of the American military and political leaders. This critical situation faces the impossibility for this western leadership to provide its troops with a comprehensive reason for their presence there (because it failed to create the conditions necessary to modern absolute warfare as explained earlier) and leaves them in the field with little, if any, incentive to behave as modern soldiers, creating new tropisms of life for life dynamics.
The problem of the Middle-East lies deep in its conception of politics that can only reach the critical mass necessary to the creation of a political entity by using to nausea the divisions of the social groups inside the state or the competition with other states (a little like the famous Asabbiyya system described by Ibn Khaldun) through the communication and the permanent use of death, martyrdom and revenge mixed with religious (whether Sunni, Shia, Jewish or Christian) concepts that provide a weak basis of national identity to groups that share nothing more in common. This cocktail lays the ground for dramatic warfare that refuses any distinction between civilians and combatants, citizenship and tribe, razzia and genocide.
So far, any tentative by the western world to act on this predicament has been botched by either dramatically inaccurate ideological conceptions of the situation and/or the refusal to risk soldiers’ lives in an attempt to balance the lack of legitimacy of those enterprises. One should not forget however, that it took Europe an almost outwordly amount of philosophical conceptualization spread on ten centuries to reach absolute warfare and international law. And if it is clear that influencing the Middle-East is a daunting task for western NGOs and governments, those entities should take care not to be the one influenced by this backward conception of warfare. As Nietzsche would have put it “For when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”.
