East meets West
Carlin, David R. Jr.
ambiguous moral choices. What if, for example, we "won" the cold war, defeating Soviet totalitarianism and helping to liberate Eastern Europe, because of our nuclear belligerence? How does the...
...Though bearing a resemblance to other European colonial plantations, Zionism was European colonialism with a difference--a radical difference...
...But the Europeans could not hold their gains in the long run...
...This will help preserve the spirit of civil discourse and disagreement so remarkably present in the debate prior to the war...
...98-117...
...Israel's actions in 1967 as well as their destruction of Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981 are two...
...After one hundred and seventy-five years of struggle, the Muslims--by now under the leadership of the Seljuk Turks, not the Arabs--had repulsed the European invader...
...Too many things can go wrong, from the intervention of Israel or Iran, to a crisis in the Soviet Union, to the more likely martyrdom of Iraq and consequent political triumph of Hussein...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is an associate editor of Commonweal...
...But such stark choices are of little help in the more difficult and likely cases, as in Iraq, where soldiers must battle an adversary who uses civilians for protection, or where the enemy may use chemical or biological weapons...
...Last resort, as already noted, is an endlessly receding horizon...
...9. Israel...
...Their progress into Europe was not stopped till 732, when they were defeated by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours...
...He died in Babylon, the ancient city on the Euphrates, not far from where Baghdad would later be built (A.D...
...1991...
...Round V to the Asians...
...and Britain and France brought Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Arabia under their direction...
...Passing over the Trojan War, let's look at the principal stages in this old contest: 1. The Persian Wars...
...Though it took nearly a thousand years of looking, Asia finally discovered the champion needed for a definitive reversal of the Alexandrine conquests: the Arabs, who, with their new and militant religion of Islam, broke out of Arabia in the 630s and quickly conquered all of Persia and much of the Byzantine Empire...
...Like the church's prohibition against contraception, it may not always be the moral tool that effects the most moral result...
...But he was defeated at sea by Themistocles the Athenian at Salamis (480) and on land by Pausanias the Spartan at Plataea (479...
...From then until about A.D...
...A proportionate use of force is necessary and of course the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable...
...Such abstract distinctions are little more than efforts to hide from ourselves the truth of what we are actually doing...
...The trouble is that despite renunciation of their European identity, the Zionists were perceived by the Arabs as Europeans, hence as invaders--the latest in an ancient line of Western invaders...
...and in 1270, after a long series of reverses, the final Crusade, under the leadership of Louis IX of France (St...
...EAST MEETS WEST THE WORLD'S LONGEST WAR n the interest of keeping things in perspective, it may be worth noting that the current war against Iraq is simply the latest phase of an old struggle between Western Asia (or the Near East or Mideast) and the European world (including of course the European diaspora, e.g., the United States...
...5. Arab Expansion...
...Round I to the Europeans...
...Alexander's career represents the high-water mark of European advance into Western Asia...
...4. Rome vs...
...One is reminded that at one time the use of the crossbow violated justwar theory...
...But something in the cool scholastic operations of just-war theory--like that in the scholastic proofs of God's existence--fails to encompass the true nature and threat of evil in the world...
...In 53 B.c., Marcus Crassus, colleague of Caesar and Pompey in the first triumvirate, was defeated and killed by the Parthians in the battle of Carrhae, in northwestem Mesopotamia (modem Iraq...
...At Marathon (490 B.C...
...European colonial powers dominated North Africa...
...the Athenians repulsed a small army sent by Darius, the Great King of Persia...
...Similarly, it is all very comforting to hear that we are not interested in fighting the people of Iraq or intend them any harm...
...I think the unintended consequences of any war of this size in that part of the world make it a very dubious enterprise...
...How does the morality of nuclear arms shake out then...
...the Zionists had begun arriving, and they were determined to stay...
...If anything, Saddam Hussein's actions have confirmed the worst fears about his ambitions and capacity for evil...
...Round II to the Europeans...
...In essence I was willing to tolerate the sacrifice of Kuwaifis to a vicious foe to spare American lives and presumably prevent greater regional turmoil and bloodshed...
...I'm not suggesting we dispense with moral guidelines such as the just-war theory, but I do think they need to be employed with a greater sense of their artificiality, especially by those of us thousands of miles from the actual fighting and dying...
...That's a big presumption, and one that's a lot easier on me than on the Kuwaitis...
...Yet it is their cities we are bombing and their sons we aim to kill...
...Clearly, it is all but impossible to reconcile last resort with the idea of a preemptive strike...
...The EuropeWestern Asia battle has been going on for twenty-five hundred years according to the historical record, and more than three thousand if we add the testimony of Homer, whose Iliad is the story of a European attack on a Western Asia city...
...The border between East and West shifted time and again, the furthest European advance taking place during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D...
...Along the way he burned the capital of Persia--to even the score for the Persian burning of Athens in 480...
...Round IV a draw...
...But the counterattack was carried to Western Asia's home territory when Europe, inspired by Pope Urban II and adopting the Islamic concept of "holy war," conquered Palestine and the Levant in the First Crusade (1096-99...
...Nice Guy," personally led a great expedition across the Hellespont...
...Ask the Czechoslovakians whether we should have pressured the Russians...
...Round III to the Europeans...
...And now, after three thousand years, the United States has finally become a participant in the longest war, with George Bush playing the role of Agamemnon, Saddam Hussein the dual role of Priam and Paris, and lovely Kuwait in the role of Helen, the face that launched a thousand missiles, i 8 March 1991:151...
...762) and later still be bombed (A.D...
...Russia extended its empire southward into Central Asia...
...3. The Punic Wars...
...Similarly, pertinent questions about a war against a regime like Iraq's are slighted by a rigorous application of just-war theory...
...By the time he died (323) Alexander had conquered the vast Persian Empire along with Egypt and a number of lesser kingdoms, extending European rule throughout all Western Asia, right up to the borders of India...
...By the time Britain had second thoughts about its commitment, it was too late...
...Round VIII to the Europeans...
...Round VII to the Asians...
...As for the specifics of the present war, Bush and his advisers, for reasons both sound and specious, judged that economic sanctions would not bring Saddam Hussein to heel...
...The Balfour Declaration (1917) committed Britain to providing a Jewish homeland in Palestine...
...And my tentativeness is not without a moral burden of its own...
...Round VI to the Asians...
...Just-war theory would seem to foreclose such options, and in doing so it flies in the face of elemental logic and much of human experience...
...Though located in North Africa, towards the western end of the Mediterranean, Carthage was a colony of the Phoenician city of Tyre...
...Asia...
...This was the greatest reflux of Europe into the world of Western Asia since the rise of the Arabs in the seventh k century...
...Unlike colonists elsewhere, the Zionists were Europeans who meant to renounce their European identity, who had no European home to return to when the overseas venture turned sour...
...During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe") disintegrated, and Asia was once again expelled from Europe, retaining only Istanbul and its environs...
...Consequently, I think~it behooves critics of the war to avoid moralistic denunciations...
...Hence its empire, which included considerable portions of North Africa, Sicily, and Spain, was neither an African nor European empire but a Western Asian empire...
...By the early 700s the Arabs had captured all of North Africa (which until then had been part of the European world, but has remained part of the Westem Asian world ever since) and most of Spain...
...Under the Ottomans, Western Asia dominated southeastern Europe for centuries, twice reaching the walls of Vienna, in 1529 and again in 1683...
...and its struggle with Rome--a struggle that began in the early third century B.C., lasted through three wars (including the greatest and most famous of them all, the Second Punic War, which pitted Rome against Hannibal), and ended with the razing of the city of Carthage in the middle of the second century B.C.--was a contest between Europe and Asia for control of the West...
...The European counterattack had begun in Spain, where from the time of Charlemagne Christians had been slowly pushing back the Arab advance, though the final victory in Spain did not take place until the fall of Granada (1492...
...7. The Coming of the Ottomans...
...Strictly interpreted it is hard to imagine what, short of an act of self-defense, last resort might be...
...8. The Age of European Imperialism...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...This was the farthest Asian advance into the heart of Europe since the battle of Tours in 732...
...Louis), met defeat...
...6. The Crusades...
...Ten years later the next Great King, Xerxes, saying "No more Mr...
...Yet I can imagine any number of circumstances where a preemptive strike would save lives and forestall greater evil...
...This ancient struggle is the world's great con/ tinuing war, compared to which events like the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War are but moments in time...
...Ultimately, war in this instance was a question of prudential judgment...
...2. Alexander the Great...
...Terrible wars between Constantinople and Persia in the early seventh century softened both empires up for attack by the Arabs...
...630, Rome fought countless wars against the Parthian Empire and its successor, the neo-Persian Empire...
...Xerxes won at Thermopylae ("Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their orders"), and he seized and burned Athens, which had been abandoned by its citizens...
...Finally, however, it was Hussein's actions that precipitated the confrontation...
...But I may be wrong...
...In 1453 the Ottoman Turks did what the Arabs were unable to do centuries before: conquer Constantinople, thereby bringing to an end the Eastern Roman Empire, more than twenty-two hundred years after the legendary date of the founding of Rome...
...If Iraq directs a chemical attack from a bunker surrounded by civilians what do you do...
...To the extent that just-war definitions suggest there is some clean way to separate the people from the actions of their state it fosters dangerous illusions about the nature of modern war...
...More important, I imagine, they concluded that only a military confrontation would neutralize his power and stabilize the region...
...A good outcome doesn't justify an inherently immoral means...
...In other words, fighting a bully may require a few dirty tricks...
...Round IX...not finished yet...
...In 334 B.C., 150: Commonweal twenty-one-year-old Alexander, carrying out plans laid by his recently assassinated father, King Philip of Macedon, crossed the Hellespont in the direction opposite that followed by Xerxes one hundred and fifty years earlier...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
