generalspeaking

Industrial Military Complexities

"...Others have suggested that the piles of skulls that marked the passage of a Genghis Khan or the fearsome slave-markets of Bokhara were proof of a primary instinct in man to attack, dominate and kill his own kind, an instinct often suppressed by the institutions of civilized life, but encouraged under the more 'natural' conditions of nomadic barbarism..." Bruce Chatwin

As developed as we are as advanced, thinking and feeling organisms, the human race is deeply vested in its primordial roots. Nature on the one hand has equipped us foremost with the overriding compulsion to endure and to grasp life, to ensure survival at all odds, to pass our genes on through countless generations. On the other, we are still invested with our ancient instincts to recognize the enemy, not of our clan, who will challenge us for scarce survival-ensuring resources. That deadly, vestigial competitiveness lurks deep within us all, the dim awareness of antipathy toward the adversarial, threatening 'other'.

We no longer use rude implements to fend off or mount attacks on the 'other'. And our deep-seated distrust of those who challenge our primacy, our ownership of resources while muted as we have become more civilized, still rears itself when the occasion demands.

Closed societies like those of North Korea and Pakistan which represent failures as constitutional states, and which cannot adequately care for their populations, choose deliberately and with malice aforethought to squander scarce resources on weapons of mass destruction; the ultimate weapon, nuclear devices. The better to bellicosely swagger and to threaten that those who oppose them may reap the whirlwind.

Iran and Syria, like Libya before them (before relenting), are eager to join the exclusive club. And their non-state, viciously militant satrapies are equally anxious to avail themselves of the world's most powerful weapons.

The world has become a powder keg of apprehension. It was inevitable. Alfred Nobel sought to assuage his conscience by trading his deadly invention (by yesterday's standards) for the uplifting role of recognizing and rewarding cerebral and scientific and political and social and medical excellence in a celebration of the best that humankind could attain to. Nobel laureates represent the pinnacle of human achievement.

The arms producers represent a nadir in human achievement, yet still remain a powerful element in world trade, with vast, princely sums of nations' treasuries being used to acquire the technologically advanced combat arms and crafts that are available. The leading countries of the world today, those invested in peace and prosperity, whose values and priorities are to maintain stability around the world because it makes good sense and war is a condition of aberrant human nature to be avoided if at all possible, also represent the very same countries whose technological advancement in the art of war and its implements have monumental importance. Not only for their own protection from rogue states who might wish to attack them, but also to enrich their own coffers, by sale to the highest bidders.

The United States and Russia, both manufacturers of highly advanced weaponry, speak of non-proliferation of dread weapons and claim to be invested in making the world a safer place by divesting themselves of some of their deadly inventories. France and Great Britain act as interlocutors along with the former two, in world conflicts. And where is the most incendiary potential for conflict located on Earth at the present time? Why in the very place where billions of oil dollars are being traded for advanced weaponry.

The United States is arming Saudi Arabia with fighter planes and helicopters, high-speed missiles, precision-guided bombs. Include the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. Russia is busy arming Syria with cruise missiles and other advanced weapons. Which Syria can then turn around and share with Iran, and with Hezbollah and with Hamas, and there is nothing at all new about this.

Nothing new either in the fact that when it comes to recouping some of the vast expenditures for energy the West has sent along to the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, a return of some of that treasury in exchange for weapons seems a fair trade to the arms-producing countries. That, in so doing they're upping the ante for the potential of an catastrophic explosion of war in a tight geography in which there are many aggressors and one very small and single target, appears to be immaterial to the great thinkers and movers in the national administrations that vie with one another for the prestige of being the most 'important', 'influential', and useful to the region's plans.

One thing remains constant throughout all of the turmoil, and that is human nature. We cannot, despite our best intentions, transcend the most basic, primitive impulses of human nature. Ancient codes of conduct written and later transcribed to address ongoing affairs of human interaction were meant by wise and concerned humans to direct humans through a passage of emotional and intellectual maturity. We respect those codes and we commit ourselves to them in the breach, less in practise. Religion was devised by clever and far-sighted minds as a device by which humans could be guided toward justice and matters of the spirit, not of the battlefield.

Yet even those religions, all of which were devised to tame nomadic cultures, celebrated legends of bloody war and massacres and assassinations, performed in the name of an omniscient guiding Spirit. We haven't travelled all that far from our primitive sources. The pretense and veneer of civilization satisfies us by its ennobling effects, but never for too long, until we succumb to the dire need to mount yet another war in yet another region for the greater good of humankind.

Arm the Middle East, that ancient geographic site of ancient tribal adversities, where kingdoms have come and gone, and bitter enmities remain. Arm the Middle East and witness a vast, violent upheaval as concerns of a final Apocalypse may materialize, leaving nothing but bitter ashes behind. This is a geography that has long been a plaything for other countries of the World, of Europe, and the United States. That playground is far too close to erupting.

On the other hand, who is to blame? What could be clearer than the usual human proclivity to resent being used, manipulated and victimized. What springs from the deep dark poisoned well of oppression and misery is violent resentment culminating in revolution.

The presence of Israel, an 'alien' religion and society, with its democratic ideals in a land consecrated to Islam, may be the most visible scapegoat as it has always and ever been, but sooner or later those whose grandiose and lunatic plans of final authority will themselves be annihilated.

Labels: Middle East, Political Realities, Russia, United States

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 30, 2010