Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 19:54:25 +0100 From: Steve Devos <steve.devos-AT-tiscali.co.uk> Subject: post modern wars... All The following is from Zygmunt Bauman and is taken from the CSL list... Not surprisingly perhaps, I forward the following primarily because of the first paragraph which I read halfway through composing an email which said almost the same thing! (apart from Clausewitz...) "The aim of the new type of global war is not territorial aggrandizement, but throwing any remaining closed doors wide open for the free flow of global capital. To paraphrase Clausewitz, we may say that this war is primarily the 'promotion of free global trade by other means'. For this reason, the aims of such a war could hardly be served by such old-fashioned measures as confrontation, engagement and combat, which inevitably imply entering commitments and bearing the consequences. Ideally, one would leave the selection of targets entirely to computers and smart, self-guiding missiles. Short of that ideal, the war planners tried to reduce the tasks of the army professionals to running the software programs and monitoring the computer screens. The new, global era wars are wars at a distance, hit-and-run wars: the bombers leave the scene before the enemy can manage any response and before the carnage can be seen. Richard Falk has compared this new war with torture: like the torturer, the attacker is fully in charge and free to select any violent methods of pain infliction which he deemed effective and so 'rational'. Such a comparison is not fully correct: torture, unlike the new war of the globalization era, made and encounter and, indeed, interaction between the torturer and the victim both unavoidable and 'productive'. The new global wars, unthinkable without the electronic technology which renders time instantaneous and annihilates the resistance of space, are won by the avoidance of encounter and by denying the adversary any chance of responding. This difference, to be sure, only magnifies the privileges which the attackers in a hit-and-run global war share with the torturer. Their freedom of manoeuvre is nearly absolute and so is their impunity. Casualties are counted only 'down there' on the ground - but the attackers never touch the ground if they are lucky; and all the odds are that luck will be on their side. In this, I suggest, lies the most sinister potential of wars which the military arm of the globalizing forces is able and willing to launch. The prospect of utter impunity, coupled with the redundancy of time-consuming, costly and risk-fraught ideological mobilization and the irrelevance of 'patriotic capital', as well as with freedom from the need to clean up the mess and devastation caused by the assault, combine into a temptation which may be not just difficult to resist but all too easy (indeed, 'rational') to surrender to. All those who pursue the politics of global free trade and global capital flow find that this particular 'other means' has a lot to recommend it, and there is very little to advise them against taking this option, let alone to prevent them from taking it once that is what they have resolved to do. A century likely to go down in history as one of violence perpetrated by nation-states on its subjects has come to a close. Another violent century - this time a century of violence prompted by the progressive disablement of the nation-states by free-flowing global powers - is likely to succeed it...."
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