I could probably be described — if the mixed and confused metaphors can be forgiven — as something of a dove in hawk’s feathers. Which is to say that after many hours listening to the debate, I wish to heck they would get on with it. It is surely time to go to war.
My desire for war in the Middle East is based not on sanguinary impulse, but a belief that our global society is undergoing something of a metamorphosis, a re-birth and I would like to help it on its way. My reasoning is all ”wrong”, but I think it remains compelling.
”Wrong” because I do not believe that Saddam has ”weapons of mass destruction”, which knocks away the central justification of war. I also find most of the atrocity stories told about him — critics being tossed into vats of acid and so on — at the very most ”not proven” in the tradition of the Scottish verdict. Which knocks away much of the emotional justification for war. I do also appreciate that, under international law it is ”wrong” for one country to seek to overthrow the government of another, sovereign state.
At the same time, I do believe those awful pictures of Kurdish men, women and children after Saddam had gassed them and that is sufficient for me. It is time for Saddam to go. So strong is the case for his removal that I believe once the ground war starts, he will last no longer than it takes an Abraham’s tank to travel from the border to Baghdad. Resistance will be minimal, because support for him even among the Iraqi people will prove to be minimal. And he will be only the first of many, because it will soon be realised there is no longer room in the modern world for dictatorships.
My justification for these bold and bellicose observations is to be found in 9/11, or — to be more specific — with the cellphones which gave a unique flavour to the tragedy.
The heart breaking nature of those cell-phone calls will be widely remembered. The wife on the doomed aircraft using her phone to ask her husband for advice as to what to tell the pilot to do. The hefty young man calling his family as he hyped himself up for what might well have been a heroic counter attack by passengers that saved the White House. The resigned callers, using their phones simply to say farewell to loved ones as they waited to be burnt alive, or pulped in the falling masonry. And the frantic calls made in the despairing hope that an answer would come from under the rubble of ground zero.
Everyone, as we well know in this age of telecommunications, is only a phone call away from everyone else. Never has the point been made more graphically.
Of course the significance of the cell phones lies not in the instruments themselves, but what they represent in terms of social change. And there were other pointers, other aspects of this age of information technology — from digitalised video signals to satellites and the Internet — which combined to bring to 9/11 a sense of involvement and the immediacy which was not even dreamed of at the time of the great disasters of the 20th century, such as the R101 and the Titanic.
What we saw in 9/11 was the much-anticipated transformation of the international community to the global village. The use of box cutters to topple the twin towers was a demonstration, not off the power of the individual terrorist, but of the integrated nature of modern society.
It is a world of shared information, in which Joe Soap, who happens to gaze through a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, has every chance of learning of a disaster in the USA before the US president, or the CIA. It is a world in which disasters or crises such as that on 9/11 see central banks move almost immediately, automatically and with little heed for politicians to steady the integrated markets.
A world of shared emotion in which they dig a survivor out of the rubble of New York and tears will spring to eyes watching in Tokyo. A world in which the debate as to what to do, in the aftermath of such tragedy, is hosted by the television networks on which political leaders involved (with the striking and significant exception of Saddam Hussein) are forced to perform in a world-wide battle for endorsement.
It is a truism that one cannot live in peace while one’s neighbour suffers. In time the neighbourhood has become national and now needs be seen as global.
If the sanctity of life is to be accorded to those in the World Trade centre – which means, but for accidents of timing, ourselves and our own loved ones – it must needs be given recognition and equal weight in the camps of Palestine, the slums of Africa, the gutters of India, the refugee boats from Indonesia …
In that context the role of the cell phone in the World Trade Centre tragedy symbolises far more than the ”brotherhood of man”. It reflects an intimacy of involvement which no longer allows room for the question as to whether I am my brother’s keeper. It is self evident that we are and as such it is beholden on us to seek the overthrow of the Saddam Husseins, the Robert Mugabes, the Pyong-yangs as if we ourselves suffered their tyranny. – Guardian Unlimited Â