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It was strange to hear about tightened security around the launch
of the space shuttle Endeavor "because it's the first time
a space shuttle has been launched while we're at war", according
to NASA. The President and the Departments of State and Defense
have also been calling it war, but the actual war stuff seems limited
to disgruntled Afghan tribesmen under the neighborly-sounding moniker
of the Northern Alliance. It doesn't feel like war. It feels like
a manhunt combined with a confusing shell game in which the good
guys look exactly like the bad guys and none of them are telegenic.
Was ever war in this fashion waged? Was ever war in this fashion
won? The last war fought to catch a single person was 6000 years
ago, in Troy, as the Greeks pulled up in their long ships to get
Helen back. Now, in the same general part of the world, the US is
buzzing around looking for Osama, a mild looking, in fact downright
goofy looking fellow. Was this the face that launched a thousand
Tomahawks?
No matter how many pictures of cratered runways and nighttime video
of parachuting commandos the broken Pentagon trotted out, this war
lacks the clarity and gratification of the Gulf War. 'New type of
war' is a common and high-level refrain. Perhaps our images of war
are antiquated: dusty Marines in Humvees liberating cities and oil
wells, B-52s bombing bridges and columns of tanks, aircraft carriers
plowing through the waters to enforce blockades. This war can't
be fought in those recognizable 20th century ways. It certainly
can't be won those ways. It is a war that involves freezing assets,
rooting out immigrants with insidious intent, and a domestic vigilance
that would make victims of the McCarthy era squirm. At what price
victory? And even if we do win, we may not realize it. Perhaps this
accounts for the spate of holiday war movies: a sad nostalgia for
the comforting and conventional ways of dying and killing. But those
old concepts of war may have collapsed.
Earlier in the year, China seemed like the latest greatest boogieman
threatening freedom and democracy in the world. Not only are they
still Communists (let's see, that leaves Cuba, North Korea, and
China), but they're thugs who bumped one of our planes out of the
sky and had the audacity to rifle through it. That was back when
international incidents were the domain of superpowers.
In 2001, we finally tidied up the whole Kosovo thing, or at least
brushed it under a UN-monitored rug. Early in the year, the Serbs
themselves arrested Slobodon Milosevic and shipped him off to The
Hague to stand trial for war crimes. But then the people we were
helping in Kosovo, the Albanians, start causing trouble in Macedonia.
No wonder 'Balkan' is also used as a verb meaning 'to split into
numerous small groups bitterly opposed to each other'?
You can't use the words 'bitterly opposed' without bringing to
mind Palestine and Israel, who overnight took two steps back after
spending long slow years to take one step forward. Israel had loosened
her grip and Palestine had finally shown her moderate side. Land
and peace were changing hands at long last. And then one day children
are throwing rocks and getting shot, suicide bombers are going off
in buses and malls, and now F-16s are bombing Palestinian police
stations in Gaza City. Of all the stories of 2001, this one offers
the least hope. There are very few encouraging signs that the two
sides will be able to resolve their immediate differences and come
back to the negotiating table. In Israel, it seems that all the
olive branches have dried up and blown away and the dove is an endangered
species.
A new kind of economy
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