Juan Cole, Middle East culture professor at the University of Michigan, reflects today on the relationship/intersection of issues around war and natural disaster:
It is very odd that nations cooperate to help each other in the face of natural disasters. But when they become angry over some minor dispute, they are perfectly happy to inflict far more damage on each other than mother nature ever did. Pakistan and India were seriously contemplating using nukes on each other as recently as 2002. Now Islamabad is sending rupees to Delhi, and Delhi is expressing gratitude.
Now that nukes are becoming so common, humanity has to find a way to move into permanent cooperative and helping mode. War is gradually becoming unthinkable. The massive tsunami’s toll has now risen to 150,000, but an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would have killed 10 million.
This is part of my point in the previous posts calling for us to be reminded by this Tsunami disaster that war brings undeserved calmity upon thousands of innocents, and worse, this is no “Natural disaster” that we can do scarcely anything about, or prevent. This is an issue in which we certainly do have culpability; we are THE CAUSE, at least in term of who finally unleashes the most destructive forces.
In some way, we are under even more obligation to help the victims of a war WE materminded, carried out, and continue to support by such madness as reelecting Bush in November. But our guilt makes it even less likely that enough people will see it this way.
The first step is to put a stop to the occupation, to prevent continuation of the violence that is taking lives of innocents. Only then can we give aid to the victims of what we have wrought. There remains the problem of the anger and revenge raging in the families and countrymen of the victim nation? This is the ongoing and increasing danger: that the “peace” which is supposedly the goal of all this is given an increasingly lesser chance of happening, and the terrorism we seek to stop will only continue at a much larger scale than would be attempted at the hands of those we supposedly seek to punish. To find those small minorities, we create a much larger , more dangerous gang posed to explode into further violence. How in the world to people convince themselves that this is NOT the inevitable consequence of this? The rest of the world agrees. We move on into further degradation of international community (or , at best, deny our membership in the world community that seeks peace).