FOGH of WAR

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Secretary General of NATO and a former Danish prime minister, gave an interview to Shaun Ley of Radio 4’s The World at One today that was little short of a disgrace. The interview will be available in the UK for a few days on the BBC iPlayer.

Rasmussen had made himself available in the light of the deaths of nine civilians, including two children, in Tripoli on Sunday. NATO has conceded that a missile overflew its military target. Rasmussen described the error as “a weapons systems failure”. He also accounted it “a very tragic event, a tragic accident actually”. Having found the phrase he wanted – “a tragic accident” – he used it as his default reference to the incident.

There was no acknowledgment in the interview, either by Ley or by Rasmussen, of the 15 civilians Libya says were killed by a rocket attack on the Sorman area of Tripoli in the early hours of this morning. This was certainly a residence, one owned by a close ally of Muammar Gaddafi. Taken to the scene, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen reported Libyan officials claiming that eight missiles had hit the compound and that two of the owner’s grandchildren along with their pregnant mother were killed. NATO has so far declined to comment on the attack but if what the Libyans say is true it can hardly be dressed up as “eight tragic accidents”.

Rasmussen, an accident waiting to happen

Referring to Sunday’s deaths, Rasmussen commented that “obviously the Gaddafi regime will use this tragic accident as part of their propaganda”. This is an extraordinary statement at so many levels. It seems to suggest that only one side in the conflict has any truck with propaganda. It seeks to imply that somehow the deaths are part of the crimes with which the regime is charged. It certainly suggests that the deaths should be viewed as above or separate from the conflict, as though no more responsibility attaches to NATO than if the children had happened to run out into the road in the path of one of its vehicles. And why should the Gaddafi government not make mention of the civilian deaths? If Danish civilians perished in some missile attack, whether or not the strikers called it an accident, would the Danish government draw a veil over it?

The notion that the deaths are fundamentally the fault of Gaddafi develops in Rasmussen’s argument in this passage: “We see the Gaddafi regime … launching rockets from mosques, placing bunkers near children’s playgrounds etc”. Of course, any right-thinking person can see that a country being attacked by foreign troops ought to have the decency to lay out formal battlegrounds away from built-up areas. Indeed, no civilised country ever sites military or intelligence within blast distance of residential buildings. Well, I say that … all around where we live there is a vast network of military and intelligence units including, it has been suggested by specialist investigative journalists, a “top-level NATO command post” that runs “a gigantic US computer system”. No doubt if Britain were subjected to aerial bombardment, such sites would be prime targets and perhaps we would be hit in “a tragic accident”.

Gaddafi, down but not out

It’s not at all clear who sets out the rules for confrontations in which one side claims it is being attacked and invaded by foreign powers and the other side claims it is protecting the people from their own government. Nazi Germany invaded several of its neighbours before and during the course of World War II. I expect Berlin complained that resistance movements – which it would no doubt have dismissed as Communists, extremists, terrorists and Jews – mounted guerrilla attacks on Germany’s brave soldiers in urban areas, using the populace as human shields. It is in the nature of guerrilla warfare, particularly as conducted in the homeland of the resistance, that it challenges the enemy to retaliate without committing atrocities.

Rasmussen said “We have carried out more than 11,000 sorties … we have damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 important military targets". Even if only ten percent of those sorties and those missile attacks were targeted at sites within blast range of homes, the least “collateral damage” they will have inflicted will be the extensive disruption of civilians’ lives. And who will pick up the tab for making good the damage?

Always at risk in Libya

When Shaun Ley questioned Rasmussen on NATO’s objectives in Libya, the Secretary General was at his most slippery. “There is no military solution solely” he said. “We need a political process and as part of that Gaddafi must go”. Now it is clear from this that regime change is part of NATO’s policy, although regime change is not provided for, implicitly or explicitly, in Resolution 1973, the United Nations instrument that enables the imposition of a no-fly zone on Libya. Making regime change a necessary part of the “process” is what commentators feared and forecast when they warned against so-called “mission creep”. We can be sure from this that the mission has crept.

But Rasmussen also said: “We have defined three very clear military objectives for our operation: a complete end to all attacks against civilians; withdrawal of Gaddafi’s forces to their bases; and immediate and unhindered humanitarian access and we will continue our operation until these objectives are met”.

Gaddafi's planes strike back

Each of these objectives has its unclear elements. If Gaddafi were to call a ceasefire and then rebels were to push out of Misrata and start trying to take other towns, what would NATO do? Attempt to halt them? And of course there are implications for the NATO objectives if NATO is itself beginning deliberately to attack civilians, as in the bloody Sorman carnage. If, as Rasmussen claims, Gaddafi’s military infrastructure is being destroyed, what would pass muster as the “bases” to which the troops should return? And as for the “humanitarian access”, how would that be policed except by what are called “boots on the ground”, which Resolution 1973 very definitely does not permit?

Ley did push Rasmussen on the increasing evidence that NATO’s solidarity is fraying and that few participants are looking for a long-drawn-out involvement. NATO has committed to a further three months of policing the no-fly zone, making six months in total thus far. This will mean that its involvement in the action will have cost the UK alone more than £500million. Rasmussen was evidently not prepared to engage with any idea of there being a limit on NATO’s capacity. “We do have the assets that are necessary to accomplish our mission” he declared and otherwise kept restating NATO’s determination.

Rebels swarm over a captured tank

As I read it, NATO has slid into an uncomfortable cleft stick in Libya. The rebels grow restive, agitating for more consistent, coherent and penetrating assistance in their struggle. If and when the conflict grinds to a halt, with whatever result, Libya’s economy will be too damaged for it to be able to rebuild without help from the international community. And certainly a new regime will soon denounce NATO if it is left to pick up the pieces by itself.

And then Gaddafi is not Hosni Mubarak and probably has grounds for his confidence that he has sufficient support to hold out longer than NATO will want to contemplate. But Libya is clearly deeply divided. What is to prevent a bloodbath of the defeated at the hands of the victors, whichever side prevails? Meanwhile, as other demands on governments’ resources start to take centre stage, politicians and the public will increasingly ask whether this commitment of cash and overstretched military might is really worth it. In sum, the whole adventure is a catastrophically badly planned and managed mess. Many of us warned at the outset that it would pan out like this.

SUBORDINATE LIVES

Thrift and, to a lesser degree, inclination keep us at home while others take their holidays. We are fortunate enough to have a house, land and a general environment that is very conducive to staying put. Even working from home takes no edge off the pleasure.

From a safe distance, we watch others sitting in traffic jams, sweltering in airport lounges, regretting the temporary accommodation into which they have stumbled. Holidays can be a pleasure, of course, and a necessary restoration. They can be much more than that: they can furnish some of the most glorious moments and memories of our lives. And equally they can be a disappointment, even a nightmare. East, west, home’s best.

The key word in that sentiment, though, is “safe”. From an even safer distance, we have looked on aghast in recent times as lives, homes, whole communities have been destroyed by flood, wildfire, earthquake, hurricane, drought, tsunami. Thousands of lives have been snuffed out. Thousands more have been deprived of everything. It’s unimaginable: losing in a few moments one’s family, home, friends, livelihood, land, pets, the tools of one’s trade, possessions, mementoes, livestock, neighbourhood – all of the things that define one’s existence.

All of these disasters are beyond our ability to resist or predict. They are natural events, the accidents of a moving, evolving planet. Or at least, they are up to a point. Many fires that destroy large areas are started carelessly, even deliberately. All of the other catastrophes, it can be argued, are made more prevalent by the degree to which we have exploited and polluted the planet. And the way that we behave brings closer another apocalyptic event, one that may become more common in the near future: pandemic.

But there is still another kind of disaster that can have just as devastating an impact on people’s lives, one that is entirely avoidable: warfare. In some respects, warfare (as well as being gratuitous yet willed) is even more damaging than the natural disaster. The intelligence about victims and casualties becomes caught up in propaganda. The impulse to help those affected, whether directly or by donation, is much weaker than in the face of an unwilled event and much more hampered by the ongoing nature of that event. Moreover, as is claimed to occur in Libya and Syria, those who seek to help may themselves become targets. And the toxic nature of modern weapons can continue to destroy long after the ceasefire, as any resident of Vietnam will tell you.

News organisations always want numbers to attach to disaster reports so that they can convey a sense of the scale of the event. But casualties of war are less diligently counted, harder to determine, more likely to be disputed. War propaganda routinely casts doubt on stories of civilian casualties and fiercely denies reports of atrocities. When evidence of civilian deaths and injuries begins to look harder to refute, the authorities issue a shrug: the term for such eventualities is “collateral damage”. The word collateral means parallel or alongside but it also carries the sense of being subordinate, of being of lesser consequence.

Military deaths are reported one by one, identified, praised and personally recalled. Civilian deaths are often unreported, mostly unrecorded, certainly not identified. The military personnel who receive wounds are rushed to the best available medical attention. The civilians who receive wounds must fend for themselves – crawl to someone who might help, stumble through wrecked streets at the mercy of falling masonry, snipers, bombs. Their hospital may anyway have been razed; if not, it will certainly be desperately short of staff, beds, power, equipment, medicaments, even basic dressings.

And the military don’t have to be there. Becoming a warrior is a career choice, save in those countries that impose conscription: China, Russia, Libya, Syria, Israel and most other middle eastern countries, many South American nations and – which may surprise you, as it does me – Greece, Denmark, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. The military are there out of choice – if not necessarily their own choice, certainly their government’s choice. They are equipped to protect themselves as far as is feasible. At worst, though certainly not eliminated, their risk is contained.

Civilians have no such advantages. They are where they live and, unless they are rich – and war casualties generally are not rich – that is their only option. They have no protection, no defence, nothing with which to retaliate, no basis from which to seek redress, no hope but the hope that the attack will end before their lives do.

In Libya, in Afghanistan as I write, as you read, or not long before or after, civilians are dying by the weapons of invaders, interferers, interlopers: the western powers, NATO, the supposedly civilised world. Lives and those things that make those lives are obliterated without a thought. It’s a price you have to pay, say the politicians and brass hats. It’s unavoidable. And there is the unvoiced subtext: it’s okay, it’s just collateral damage, it’s just ordinary people, they are of no significance.

If a bomber “took out” the family of Obama or Cameron or Sarkozy or Rasmussen or Petraeus, we would never hear the last of it. We would be asked and expected to feel and share that man’s pain. Does any one of them ever look back in the opposite direction at the Afghani man whose wife and children are killed by a misdirected US drone at a wedding, at the Libyan mother whose scared and ill-trained only son, obliged to defend Gaddafi, burns to death in a Libyan tank hit by a British missile more sophisticated than her family can ever hope to be?

The scars of the war in Vietnam will be visible – and present if invisible – for generations as yet unborn. Iraq, home to one of the world’s most ancient and lucid cultures, is a ruined land. So is Afghanistan. So soon will be Libya. Does nobody care about this wanton destruction of people and their civilisation?

Well, the NATO apologists will say, if the “great powers” had not acted, Gaddafi would have destroyed his own people? Would he? No one can ever know what would have happened had Libya been left to its own devices. What we know for certain is that Libya is wracked by civil war, a war that has been changed daily over five weeks by foreign powers. Everything that happens now in Libya is a product, to some degree, of the presence of sorties from the air by invaders. NATO is engaged and therefore is responsible. It is too easy merely to “blame” Gaddafi for everything. The invaders also have to own their actions.

In the modern world, as in the ancient, war is the option of first, not of last resort. Despots and governments, fundamentalists and rebels, generals and fighters stride into military confrontation with the intention of “winning”. It seems that they learn nothing from precedent. They have no plan B, no sense that the enemy may not fall down at the first puff of wind, no strategy for the unexpected, the long-drawn-out, the endgame. The moment that things stop being as a simple as a playground scrap, they start to tell lies, to seek to save face, to pretend that the end will be what is required, even if it turns out to be unrecognisably different from the stated or implied war aims at the outset.

Meanwhile, people die. The lives of ill-trained front-line troops are sacrificed. Bystanders who barely grasp the great causes at stake are mown down. Small children, whose task is not yet to comprehend the gutter into which they have been born, are orphaned, blinded, deprived of limbs, rendered zombies and mutes and psychopaths. Mean streets, the best that they know, are flattened. The earth is despoiled and will no longer sustain dependable crops.

And of course the damage done to the planet is not readily contained in the theatre of war. We may shit in the next field but the elements and the actions of living things bring the turds back into our own field. We unleash the dogs of war without taking the precaution of training them, directing them, studying their nature.

Humans have thousands of years of philosophy, diplomacy and historical study upon which to draw. How can it be beyond the glorious sophistication of mankind to contrive a mechanism whereby avenues other than taking up arms are comprehensively explored before a stone is thrown in anger? Cannot the UN be so constituted that territorial face-offs, tribal rivalries, disputed elections and perceived despotism are examined and the remedies negotiated before bodies and homes and productive land are destroyed?

Almost 2000 years ago, Tacitus wrote: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”. In some translations, “wasteland” is rendered as “desert”. Perhaps those generals and politicians who talk airily about “drawing a line in the sand” in Libya – evidently unmindful that a line in the sand is about as easily eradicated a gesture as can be made – will consider, when they are done in that benighted land, whether they have enhanced the desert or merely rendered it unfit for habitation.