World Politics / War

Another War on the Other Side of the World

Sanitised for your protection and consent

I remember the day very well.

January 17, 1991.

Actually, I don’t remember anything else about that day and I had to google on which day this event actually happened. But I do remember the teacher in my Grade 12 History Class rolling in the cart with the TV and the VCR. Any day that happened was special.

The countdown to what would become the First Gulf War between the Coalition Forces (read: the USA) and Iraq over Iraq’s invasion of neighbouring Kuwait the previous August was on.

And when I say countdown, I do mean countdown. Days turned to hours turned to minutes as the world held its breath, watching live as time inevitably wound down. For many of us, this was our first contact with CNN and the way that it presented the news.

It was a big moment for the network too. It was about to go truly global.

A countdown ticker was visible in the corner of the screen for a few weeks already, ticking down the hours to the 12 midnight local time deadline set by the US for the Iraqi withdrawal. For us, on the other side of the world, that meant 12 noon.

We were going to watch a war at lunchtime.

Desert Storm, it was called. The headlines matched the video game name assigned to this conflict. The Mother of all Battles, was what Saddam Hussein promised us, we were told. He would not be outdone in the branding of this war.

President George Bush told us all “no more Munichs” and we, as high school students of history, knew what that meant. There would be no compromise, no deals, no bargains and no appeasement.

We knew what that word meant too.

And we knew why Bush was comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and it was not by accident. There were many people who had a clear memory of what conflict with Nazi Germany was like. Less mention was made of the fact that this was the same Saddam Hussein the US government had supported in the 1980s in his war against the slightly more evil Iranians next door.

The CNN anchors presented a gripping mixture of gravitas and glee. We’d never seen war before, most of us. This one was far away, as all wars are, but we needed to have explained to us. Explained in such a way as to ensure that anyone with a dissenting voice really didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Iraq had a battle tested army, the 4th largest in the world, American forces were deployed in Saudi Arabia — a Muslim country — at the invitation of the Saudi government, Hussein was a tyrant who used poison gas on his own people (where he got the gas was not a concern), America had superior military hardware, here’s s graphic of how a Patriot missle works against a SCUD missile, here’s a map of where Kuwait is since you’ve never heard of it before.

And here’s Hulk Hogan with an American flag, if you still needed help figuring out which side you are on.

The American government, for its part, had a clear memory of why it had lost public support 20 years earlier over Vietnam. It was because, for the first time, via TV, a war was able to enter the homes of the public every evening on the news. The unfiltered and unvarnished visuals that people saw of what was being done in their names wasn’t pretty and it divided the country. The filmed truth was no good to the US government. A different version of it would have to be presented next time.

Wolf Blitzer and Peter Arnette were on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad with green tracer bullets streaking in the night sky behind them. Dan Rather solemnly and sonorously reminded us that “in war, the first casualty is the truth”. Yes, Dan.

We ate our lunch, conscious that wars happen on the other side of the world. People would die, but that’s what happens in wars. And besides, this wasn’t about us. It was about the freedom of the Kuwaiti people.

The Kuwaiti people, of course, who had lived under a ruling royal family without elections since the independence of the country in 1961. The Kuwaiti people, the female portion of which had no rights. The Kuwaiti people, who had imported foreign labour to do the backbreaking construction work of building a modern society on the back of fantastic oil wealth. Oh, and the Saudi royal family next door, which the Bush family had been playing footsie with since Bush was a Texas oilman in the 1970s. Right before he became director of the CIA.

The war seemed easy, as if a video game. The Coalition forces invaded Kuwait, ousted the Iraqis and pursued them for a distance as they retreated into Iraq. They did not occupy for long, they did not defeat the Iraqi army, they did not overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. They did impose crippling sanctions in the hopes that the beleaguered Iraqi people would rise up in their might to overthrow Hussein. They never did, probably because they didn’t have enough to eat.

Iraq was done and dusted. Except it wasn’t. It would come up again in a decade and this time, the job would be finished by the elder Bush’s son. That said, the use of the phrase “the job would be finished” really depends on one’s perspective.

Our attention didn’t stay there long and was shifted toward other conflicts, in other parts of the world that we’d never been to and most of us couldn’t point to on a map. There never seemed to be any shortage of weapons for fighters to pursue these conflicts, nor was there any lack of war correspondents who were always there, bravely reporting, and by now very experienced and battle tested. Somalia, the Balkans, Rwanda and eventually Afghanistan and Iraq, again.

All of that is now ancient history. But as always, there is another war on the horizon, another enemy to be vanquished. Russia, this time, or more accurately, again.

We are preparing for war. The news we consume is helping us wrap our heads around this fact. One would assume that it is widely acknowledged that this is the last thing the world needs right now, another armed conflict, especially one that could involve us.

And yet, despite everything: Covid, climate disaster, food insecurity, racial politics, culture wars, cancel culture, widening wealth disparity, inflation, global supply chain problems, anti-vaxx, anti-science, anti-rational thought, creeping fascism — despite all of these realities, all ineffectively dealt with, now is the time to add war to mix.

We have no choice, we are told. We must meet aggression with resolve. If we can just come together and win this one, our problems will be solved.

Putin is evil, Biden is doing his overmatched best. The EU doesn’t have unity on this one. China is looking on, interestedly. The Taiwanese too, one imagines.

Our consent, not that it’s needed, is being manufactured. We don’t know where to focus our attention anymore and for us now, this Ukraine business just seems like another thing to keep us on edge.

Who gains from this? Who benefits from a public that is by now so overloaded with information and awareness of their own ineffectiveness in dealing with it, much less being able to harness it to play a role in creating a better world? Everything is in constant flux, the stability that our society relied on is gone. The sand continuously shifts under our feet.

The people who manoeuvre their countries into conflict and declare war are never the ones who will have to fight and die. We know this by now and we don’t expect this time to be any different.

But knowledge of this won’t matter and only leads us to conclude that the world is an unjust place.

Very few of us seriously have time or energy to pay attention to this, nevermind understand it. It doesn’t matter. It will be coming to all of us, in real time, if not in real life, via CNN.

If this article interests you, I wrote earlier on the question of “Why is there always an enemy”, here:

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