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War's Sacred Toll
Last week, explosions once again tore through the great Askariya mosque in Samarra, one of the Shi'ite faith's most revered shrines. Its massive golden dome had been destroyed by bombs last year, and now its proud golden minarets are gone. Dozens of mosques, Sunni as well as Shi'ite, have been targeted in the sectarian violence. These deliberate provocations initiate cycles of attack and revenge, aiming at a broader collapse of moral order that will finally drive the American occupiers out of Iraq, fully discrediting those who embraced them.
A conflict in which victory is thus defined by chaos, strategy by the mere inflicting of social anguish, naturally organizes itself around assaults on the sacred. Such taboo-shattering violence can seem endemic to the intra-Islam civil war that has been unleashed by the American invasion, but it contains a larger warning. Something about war itself.
The common visceral reaction against attacks on the holy suggests that humans regard places of prayer, or shrines to the numinous, as exempt from violence. The word "sanctuary," after all, has come to mean the realm of safety. When I was a boy living in Germany, son of an Air Force officer, nothing demonstrated the virtue of American war making methods better than the fact that US bombers had spared the magnificent Cologne cathedral, which dated to the Middle Ages and the spires of which were the tallest structures in Europe until the Eiffel Tower. Oddly, the photos that showed the wholly devastated urban core of Cologne, with the soaring church standing alone amid rubble stretching to the horizon, left me feeling proud. In my immature mind, the virtue of our military's not having attacked that church trumped the horror of its obliteration of a whole population.
I wrote of this before, and a reader, a veteran target-picker from the Eighth Air Force, snorted at the legend, telling me that the Cologne cathedral had been spared because its spires were an essential navigational aid. Now I understand that the very idea that humans are slow to attack holy places is legendary, too. When war sets loose the impulse to hurt and to destroy, what matters most to an enemy moves to the center of the target.
The current of religion along which Islam and Christianity flow took a decisive turn when Babylonian invaders destroyed the Temple of Israel in Jerusalem in 587 BC . That destruction of God's dwelling place, together with the years of captivity that followed -- the Babylonian Exile -- changed the nature of Israel's faith. It happened again when Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 , sparking a religious crisis in Judaism, a factor in the split between the church and the synagogue. Through the centuries, the measure of war's brutality was always taken by attacks on the sacred. In Irish memory, the emblem of Oliver Cromwell's rampage remains the desecration of Catholic churches, which he turned into stables. The French Revolution defined itself by vandalizing Notre Dame and renaming it the Temple of Reason. In 1871, revolutionaries of the Paris Commune murdered the archbishop and used Notre Dame as a warehouse.
In the 20th century, the Nazi war against the Jews began with the Kristallnacht attacks on synagogues in 1938. General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, wanted the first atomic bomb used against Kyoto, a city of shrines and temples, exactly because it was the religious capital of Japan. (When Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto from the target list because of its sacred character, he could imagine the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as virtuous.) The genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge included the trashing of Angkor Wat, one of the most magnificent temple complexes in the world. And the arrival of a new kind of Islamic extremism was announced by nothing more powerfully than the Taliban's destruction of the two Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
What is going on here? These attacks are against more than places and structures. Religion is a mode of meaning, but religious meaning is more than a set of ideas. God is present in the world as meaning is present in words and symbols, and that intimate connection between the divine and its expression, including the architecture and design of sacred buildings, enables believers to experience the touch of God on earth. However much religious impulses can be complicit in violence, that ineffable and precious touch is the absolute opposite of war. Human beings can never kill each other without killing God.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
Copyright 2007 The Boston Globe
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11 Comments so far
Show All"These deliberate provocations initiate cycles of attack and revenge, aiming at a broader collapse of moral order that will finally drive the American occupiers out of Iraq, fully discrediting those who embraced them"
Are you sure about that, James Carroll?
Sectarian violence is an excellant means of fragmenting and enervating nationalist resistance. Sound Machiavellian strategy. So long as they are killing each other, they aren't killing US troops.
Who bombed the Askariya mosque in the first place? Who was able to outwit the security that protected it this time?
A case can be made that the US is using such terror tactics to reduce Iraq to complete chaos and destroy nationalist, patriotic feeling until it finally knuckles under to US control.
Saddam Hussein was the symbol of Iraqi national identity. His Ba'ath Party was completely disenfrachised and he himself was humiliated, then hanged in the most undignified manner. The US occupier presided over the desecration and looting of Iraqi culture in violation of international law. The US occupier deliberately destroyed Iraqi civil infrastructure, electric, water, sewage utilities, and it has not reconstructed them.
The US occupier provided protection only for the oil ministry.
This is not incompetence, this is policy.
Who benefits from this "civil war"? The occupier, whose task is then to manage the chaos until the players become exhausted and cry out for law and order only the strong occupier can provide.
Who benefits from this assault on the "sacred"? The occupier, who can then proclaim through its proxy government a new "freedom of religion" in the new "democratic" order.
James Carroll's naivite is amazing. He not only blames the victims for destroying lovely buildings, he convicts them of spiritual depravity.
The real source of this depravity can be found in the White House.
I agree, although I would not take James Carroll to the task; he is a sincere fellow at least.
Divide at impera is an old play book, so it will take awhile before we will know for sure, who orchestrated "sectarian madness' in Iraq. Thanks to Zbigniew Brzezinski we already know for sure, who orchestrated "sectarian madness' in Afghanistan in the 80s: Zbig did.
Now he is talking about growing global political awareness, which might very well to doom American Empire. Too late, Zbig! It will be too late for current non-entities to admit in 25 years from now their mistakes in Iraq. I hope that by that time they will deliver their apologies in Chinese!
Bush is turning out to be sinisterly effective in his two goals:
Subverting an entire country whoose religion is not christianity.
Gaining some control of a genuinly rich oil source with the show of might.
I am not sure how Carroll is convicting the people of the land of spiritual depravity as curxpuppy suggest.
Is it too cynical to suspect that the neocrazies are behind at least some of the mosque bombings, either directly or indirectly? Since we know their goal is perpetual chaos (which they then point to as the reason "we" can't leave,) and since we know they are pathological liars, and since we know Rummy, after 911, floated the idea of blowing a few things up here in American in order to "draw out the sleeper cells," is it such a stretch to believe Cheney/Bush are doing a little creative destruction themselves? Just wondering...
Evidence is lacking in the idea the US government is blowing up mosques. But when asked about the prospect of a Shiite majority government allied with Iran in about 2003, Rumsfeld replied that "It is not going to happen." More anti-democratic words have not ever been spoken. So if a puppet regime supportive of Bush administration goals to control the entire Mideast and its oil, cannot be installed, then at the level of motive, chaos is STILL a fulfillment of Rumsfeld's stated intent: amid divisive chaos, the Shiite-controlled nation allied with Iran is not happening. That, for the Bush administration, may still constitute "success." So the thread of the discussion above has credibilty at the level of motive, even though the evidence is not conclusive. I hope for an investigation to see if indeed the "Salvador Option" is being consciously exercised here.
In the comment above, first sentence, I meant to write: "US government." Sorry. For some reason, the edit function is not allowing me to ever correct my goofs.
Werent some British soldiers caught at a Basra crossing wearing local robes and with a trunk full of explosives? Nothing much was reported on this story--which was about 2-3 years ago.
No doubt there would be attempts to create discord--but the Iraqis dont have much to be proud of either--seeing how they are killing each other.
When you think about it, "God's dwelling place" should be in everyone and everything--not just a stone building. I think that's why Buddhists werent as upset as art museums about the destruction of their statues by the Taliban.
The alleged sectarian war of Shia vs Sunni is being perpetrated by Shia and Sunni, according to Carroll. This attack on sacred architecture constitutes and attack on God.
His thinking kind of floats about in the etherium, but what he's saying is that the Iraqi crazies are attacking God, and therefore involving themselves in spiritual depravity of the worst sort.
He's trying to take a lofty view above the political fray, but what he ends up doing is advancing the Bush agenda by heaping opprobrium on these war-crazy Arabs. He is blaming the victim, precisely as the Bush perps do. These fools can't get their democratic act together after all we've done for them!
Carroll's essay is such a pious anti-war screed that I am reminded once again why academic liberalism is such a failure.
As for the evidence that the US is engaged in a political strategy of tension, one is unlikely to to find something that would meet US legal standards. It's much easier to carry out black operations in a war zone.
On US soil, a black operation requires much greater discretion. The strategy of tension being perpetrated here would be easier to prove. There is evidence although a concerted effort was made to destroy it.
The problem is that dull, ignorant, lazy beast called "public opinion". The greater part of the American public wants to believe that it's leaders are honorable and the Pentagon a righteous warrior.
The fact that the president is a sociopath with an incurable feeling disorder and an insatiable lust for power is wholly unpalatable to most Americans, even though he and his gang are dismantling the Republic in plain view.
Some of the most spiritually depraved people on the planet are currently calling the shots from this White House & Pentagon. They cannot grasp the meaning of the Geneva Conventions. They are, in fact, amoral, and yet, mirabile dictu, remain invisible to the public, which is purportedly among the most religious nations.
Show me the evidence that these people are not engaged in a global strategy of tension ("the war on terror")and that they did not initiate this strategy on 911!
The people do not know and cannot know what really goes on in the black domain of their own government until such time as they withdraw their consent and demand their right to know what their government is doing with the money and power they have given it.
Commentators like James Carroll, no matter how subtle, pious, and priestly a man he may be, needs to take his head out of his ass.
cruxpuppy June 18th, 2007 2:22 pm
You hit the nail directly on the head….
Only to say these are definitely WAR CRIMES under International Law (Nuremberg Principles) under which American Constitution Article IV (correct me if I'm wrong) is the Supreme Law of the land being signatories to….
A stain on American history for generations to come…..
The mind boggling extent of these ongoing CRIMES, I am surprised that a MILLION people are camped outside the White House in Protest like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine 2005….Is indicative of the highly successful BLACK OPS being done on the dilly wily voter!!!
Also, thank the Federal Reserve for 15 years successfully hiding the REAL core inflation valuations insuring the ongoing impoverishment of the MIDDLE CLASS keeping them working longer for less REAL wages hence keeping them DULL and STUPID and in the DARK like mushrooms…..
Cruxpuppy,
Your posts are more enlightening and meaningful than this article.
And you are correct! The situation in and news out of Iraq is controlled/manipulated by the US.
The Boston Globe should be ashamed of publishing such dribble. If they want to report on activity in Iraq, they should be in Iraq. Just as the the other MSM should be and report objectively and skeptically.