The disappearance.
Militiamen and Marines fight pitched battles – but it seems there’s nothing new left to say.
A semi-secret war rages in Afghanistan – but we’re all out of words.
The Mahdi Army wants to drive the Americans into the sea but it’s a fairly safe bet they’re not leaving anytime soon.
The US claims it will finish off all its opponents in a final showdown (this time in Najaf – last time we looked Fallujah was the site for last stands and remember Tora Bora - but never mind about all that now); but we know (or should) this is just talk – super weapons and large numbers of ‘enemy’ casualties notwithstanding. There can be no final showdown – the US is at war against the entire country. The Mahdi Army is only the current manifestation of a much larger thing. If they’re destroyed, others will replace them.
Meanwhile, the US and its Pakistani assistants wage war against ‘tribes’ and “resurgent” Taliban in the Afghan-Pak border areas.
The Taliban can’t eliminate the Americans. The Americans can’t destroy the Taliban and its ‘tribal’ allies. So, there’s lots of scurrying from place to place, killing and bombing and launching rockets and dying bravely and dying full of fear and living with injuries to the body and mind. There’s a word for all this: chaos.
…
A feeling sets in; this will last for a thousand years and then suddenly end when the total exhaustion of will and supplies overtakes the combatants’ descendants on some gray battlefield. Perhaps it’ll end when global warming or an asteroid or the peaking of oil production or.. Of course, this is excessive and off-target; events move very quickly in both expected and unexpected directions. It surely won’t last for a millennium. One way or another, it’ll all end.
In the meantime, the question of what’s to be done - and perhaps a subtler question, what’s to be thought and felt - arises.
The easy things come first of course; solidarity with the people we like: trade unionists, socialists, folks who generally talk about democracy, ordinary people caught in the grinder. And also, relentless demands for the occupations and war making to end.
But beyond these essential and uncontroversial (in lefty circles) reflexes there’s the need for something else: a kind of keen, persistent and discerning attention that’s difficult to maintain.
.d.