to study war

From Daybook.

In 2003, mass anti-war protests against the choreographed build-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq. The protests politicised a whole generation of us.

Twenty-three years later, the US and Israel launch another illegal war off the bat, with no pretence at UN presentations, consultations, weapons inspections, by a president at once pursuing a Nobel peace prize and illegally invading multiple other countries with the only justification being that this is what he wants to do. Just because he can. A “pre-emptive strike” when there is no sign of any impending attack is not a pre-emptive strike at all. The phantom idea of Iranian nuclear weapons which don’t exist, from a nation that seems intent to blow up the entire nation, the entire region, the entire world. But isn’t that what this entity, this holding corporation we call America has always done, Democrat or Republican alike? The Democrats just use a bit more window-dressing, a bit more “due process”: vacillate, qualify their condemnation, tacitly agree.

The term “regime” is used exclusively in western media to describe that of the late Khamenei, killed in a strike, but perhaps people might reflect, it should be used on the world’s richest nation, the world’s most feral, venal, viral empire, one of the most internally unequal countries in the world, a country that illegally invades others, just because it can.

Their justifications shift day by day. Pre-empted by Israel, to pre-empt Israel, to destroy nuclear capability, to enact regime change, to destroy the army and the navy, to liberate the people, to protect American interests: just because they can. Military commanders declare a crusade, the US President “anointed by God” to bring about Armageddon. I’m not making this up. The Secretary of Defense and his Crusader tattoos.

And so what it comes down to is this: At least one hundred children die in a bombing of a girl’s school in Minab. To linger with the horror of it. The numbers rise each day and they are replaced in the newspapers by columns on the deaths of three US soldiers and disruption to the flight paths of western travellers. As if one life were worth a hundred. As if anything could ever justify this. 

We’ve seen it all happen before. This has been daily life in Gaza for three years now, and we’ve seen it all happen before. We were there on the streets or in front of our screens during the Iraq War in 2003 and we watched the bombs fall on TV like fireworks, we sat and we watched it all and sometimes we spoke and we shouted and wrote poems or essays and the carnage went on, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if this attack will save lives, as if it will not kill many, many more to add to the thousands already killed on the streets in Iran in protest for the last three months, the millions killed by the US and its proxies across the world for the last three centuries. As if one can declare war on an entire country just to boost one’s approval ratings before the mid-terms. As if one has the right to dictate the way the world works, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if the trail of carnage, destroyed lands, destroyed lives that is our present reality will prove anything different.

And that is the way the world works, they will say, because they make it.

And we’ve seen it all happen before.

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On the video the smoke rising in Tehran and the birds fly in front of the camera away. Where they go to, where they’re flying: some place, perhaps, where people might hide or fly or flee, some dream of that; that flight, that movement, from bombs in the sky to border regimes and death in the ocean, that incessant movement, that structures this world, its blocs of power, its people in the cracks, the possibility for people’s war diminishing as the people are massacred, by whoever, regimes internal or external; to have to believe in the movement of the people nonetheless, whatever that might mean; to believe, at the very least, that people wish to survive and that there are others in the world who wish them to survive too, who don’t wish death on their heads, bombs in the sky, extraction and crusade and a customary sadism, experienced in “outraged futility” as we protest or we scream, or experienced in customary banality and swiped away from onscreen—the tremulous, held-in banality of this evil that burns the world in its wake.

And now we are politicized, and then we were politicized, and now we know it all, or some of it, and then we could see it coming, and now we are bamboozled, and we are taken by surprise, and in 2003 that movement of hundreds of thousands of the street stopped nothing, whatever our will, and yet to keep trying, to owe the dead at least that, and for the living, too, to owe them that, though here as the first spring flowers poke from the earth and the birds outside begin in profuse strains their song, death from the skies is the only skylark’s flight poetry can see.

“When weapons come from the US, do they strike us more gently than when they come from the regime’s killing machines?”