The Justification of Pain

This post was started about a month ago, but was not finished until now. The context is a bit old, but the point remains.

A few days ago I read on the CNN ticker that the United States had bombed militants across the border from Afghanistan inside Pakistan. This is not the first time this has happened; in fact, I guess it's becoming common enough so that it's not really news anymore, since it was only reported at the bottom of the screen in the same place where information about Madonna's divorce and cricket scores are reported.

Tied to this, although we're a bit late in mentioning it, is the news that a U.S. commando team performed a raid across the Iraqi border into Syria--our neighbor to the north--two months or so ago. According to the New York Times, the commandos were going after "an Iraqi militant responsible for running weapons, money and foreign fighters across the border into Iraq". U.S. sources say that he was killed, while Syrian sources say that civilians were killed. It's hard to know who to believe. In response to the raid, though--as reported in this article in the online magazine Slate--the Syrians filed a complaint with the United Nations Security Council, shut the American School in Damascus and pulled out of a regional conference on Iraqi security. Even the Iraqi government, whose existence and success the raid was ostensibly designed to protect, protested against the action.

Again according to the New York Times, the actions in Pakistan and now Syria are based on "a legal argument that has been refined in recent months to justify strikes by troops and by rockets on militants in countries with which the United States is not at war." The article goes on to say that this concept is different from the doctrine of pre-emption--which the administration, you'll remember, used to justify invading Iraq--in that while the pre-emption concept is used to provide a rationale for going to war against a country and attacking governments and armies, this new concept is used to provide a rationale for attacking certain people or groups inside a country. So, I guess all the bases are covered now.

This new policy, though, makes me uncomfortable. For one, it once again ignores the basic concept of national sovereignty and says we in the United States should have the right to enter any country and do as we please if we think it is in our best interests. It says to the governments of these countries and their people that their interests, and their borders, don't matter. But just think how Americans would react if some country performed a similar raid on American soil for whatever reason. And it can't help the United States win friends in the world or in the region. A few posts ago we wrote about the antipathy towards the United States one experiences these days when living overseas. I don't think these kinds of actions will improve this situation.

But beyond this and in a way more important is the existential significance of this policy. It's disturbing to me that the American government seems to be spending so much time and effort these days coming up with creative arguments to justify hurting people. Think about it. In the past few years administration lawyers have been busy crafting inventive and separate arguments not only to justify pre-emptive strikes against a country but also raids against certain elements inside a country. The lawyers have also--don't forget--been busy crafting a definition to the exact meaning of torture, and have no doubt helped to decide that sending certain people from the U.S. to another country to be tortured excuses the United States from the accusation of the use of torture. So, we have now defined why we can hurt you, how we can hurt you and how much we can hurt you. Yay.

It's true that there are people and groups in the wide world who seek to do the United States harm. However, is the employment of violence all we have to offer as solutions to this problem? Have we no creative capacities to offer anything else? And must the administration spend so much time laying the groundwork for the use of violence, as if no other solution was possible or even desirable? Maybe I am different, but it bothers me that my government and country has placed such great priority recently on the justification of pain. Maybe if as much time was spent laying the groundwork for peaceful solutions to our problems, such justification wouldn't be necessary.

Merry Christmas!

Since arriving back in North America two weeks ago we have been greeted in Minnesota by temperatures 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit colder (about 21 to 26 degrees Celsius) than what we had been experiencing in Amman and in Vancouver where we now are with Annamarie's parents by a once in a lifetime snowfall for the area of almost two feet (around 60 centimeters) on Christmas Eve. For two people who have been living in a fairly dry, desert environment for the past 2 1/2 years, the Christmas trip home couldn't have been scripted any better! Merry Christmas everyone!

Gone Home, or Garbage Plane

A few days ago we flew back to the United States for Christmas, to introduce our new baby to friends and family and to just take a bit of a break from life in Jordan. We'll return to Jordan after a few months. Our direct flight on Royal Jordanian Airlines from Amman to Chicago was fairly uneventful, except for the man who shocked all of the stewards by emerging from the bathroom in the back of the plane and began casually meandering to his seat in the front of the plane literally as the wheels of the plane were touching down. In all the flying I have done, in many parts of the world and on many different airlines, this is something I have never seen before. The capper to it was his seeming unawareness--when screamed at to sit down by a stewardess--that he was doing something that in general the airlines quite frown upon. He just walked by her in no particular hurry and pointed towards the front, as if to mean that it was impossible for him to sit down at that time--no matter the position of the plane or the relative state of his safety--because he hadn't yet reached his seat.

Only after we had finally come to a complete stop and were allowed to exit, though, did we realize the carnage that had taken place on our 13 hour and 17 minute flight to Chicago. It dawned on us slowly at first as we struggled through the narrow aisle with our bags and our baby, but once we lifted our heads to observe our surroundings we could see that we were leaving behind an airplane drenched in garbage. There were newspapers strewn about everywhere, as if every passenger had one, and then deposited it on the floor not all put back together but as if each individual section was discarded separately after it had been read. Those in-flight magazines were scattered around as well, their readers apparently unable to slide them back into the pockets in front of them from where they came. There was food spilt on the floor and the seats, along with food wrappers and the plastic cups of a hundred different water requests, all of which somehow missed the post-meal pick-up and the last chance, pre-landing pick-up. There was paper thrown about, as if it had blown in with the wind. Row after row after row was coated with a jaw dropping amount of trash. "Do they treat their homes like this? I don't think so," a steward said to me.

Of course the steward was right. I have been in a number of homes in Jordan, and no, they do not treat them like a garbage dump. Hospitality is an important aspect of Jordanian culture, and a clean house is part of being a good host. Many do, however, treat the streets outside their homes like that. In fact, sometimes littering just seems to be a normal part of every day life. Kids and adults alike are always tossing what they don't need or want to use--be it pop cans, candy wrappers, styrofoam takeaway food containers or the ever popular plastic bags--on to the street. The garbage collectors in our neighborhood spend 10 to 12 hours each day just walking back and forth along the same small route, because once they've cleaned up an area, no doubt someone will have come by in the meantime and thrown to the street something they didn't want.

So it is this culture of littering that reared its head on board the plane with us, with every square inch of the plane taking the place of the streets of Amman and the airline stewards taking the place of our poor, overworked garbage collectors. The flight itself, as I said, was uneventful, which is good for a flight to be. But the site of our garbage plane, along with the brazen last minute bathroom user, made exiting the plane an event I'll not soon forget.