By Anis Haffar

Wars can be unpredictable and messy, to say the least. The causes may be politics, economics, or security. More often the intent is ego-driven: to conquer, plunder, and claim territories from weaker enclaves for the conqueror’s purposes.

The Source Record of the Great War [World War I] states, “the war could no more have been avoided than an earthquake or any other cataclysm of Nature’s unknown forces … To say that a war arises from this or that individual event is folly. Such empty phrases were part of the old blind statecraft which we have outgrown. War springs from human nature.” The lessons of the past lay before the future.

About 2,000 years ago, the Emperor Julius Caesar (100 – 44BC) conducted various campaigns, won territories, and exacted terrible vengeance from those that rebelled. He extended the Roman Empire far and wide including North Africa and Britain. He brought loot and riches to Rome and lavished them on the Roman nobility. He won such great influences that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius in his honour. His very person was declared sacred, and statues of him were placed in temples.

There was hardly a more tragic scene in drama than in the Roman senate where Caesar was murdered by his colleagues. The drama climaxed where after the fatal stabs from the conspirators’ blades, Caesar, in the throes of death and about to drop on the floor, spots a hazy view of Brutus, a protégé he had raised like a son. Blood dripping from his butchered body, the dying man staggers towards him. Lo and behold, Brutus, with a dagger drawn, advances and plunges the final blow into the Emperor.

Caesar’s last words, “Et tu Brute?” [And you too, Brutus?] echoed through time as the vintage symbol of betrayal and treachery. From the name Brutus, representing the supposed noblest Roman of all, evolved the creepy words: brute, brutal, and brutish.

Shortly thereafter, the great Roman Empire itself began to crumble, and was destroyed finally. Pundits called Caesar’s death the most famous assassination in history.

Before Caesar lived Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC), King of Macedonia and a former pupil of Aristotle. In his day, Alexander conquered larger and larger areas till there were no more lands to defeat. In his famous wars he devastated extensive regions, including Thebes which he razed to the ground as a warning to the Greeks. After his death, Macedonia itself was condemned.

In Helen of Troy, a handsome young prince from Troy named Paris drifts into Sparta, and sees Helen. He falls instantly in love with her. Helen‘s beauty lit amorous fires; and was, as you guessed, already taken as a wife by the King of Sparta himself, King Menelaus.

Paris, undaunted, ensues and seduces this wonder woman. And to add abuse to the King’s pierced and bleeding heart, he abducts her to Troy. If you were King Menelaus, with your subjects and family looking on, gaping - in your face! - what would you do? Just forgive? and still be strong and settled to lead?

King Menelaus must have borrowed a nerve from the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro Wiwa, in whose classic short story the question “Who born dog?” was posed, and applied. The King garnered a thousand ships, filled them with fighters, and set off to Troy. He waged a war for ten years. With Paris killed, the King now yanked his woman back home to Sparta. In that war Troy was burnt to ashes, and all its citizens destroyed. It was a pyrrhic victory: A great many of the King’s ablest soldiers perished including the celebrated warrior Achilles.

[There’s a new version of the classic movie, Helen of Troy, but that one paled against the original production directed by Robert Wise starring the Italian throb Rossana Podesta as Helen, Jacques Sernas as Paris, Cedric Hardwicke as Menelaus, and Stanley Baker as Achilles. If you got the chance, watch it.]

Also called The Trojan War, that story of love, possibly, was a myth about an extraordinary war ordained by the Greek gods for their sport, where humans figured and suffered like pawns. Though the gods might be departed, the morale lived! Like all great tragedies, the causes were worth heeding by all [including Machiavelli’s “Princes”]: do not bait or be baited unduly; egos can be hard nuts to crack; they bode evil for both victims and aggressors.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini

	Sadam Hussein's image falls in Iraq, but the country still searches for peace

Modern history, too, cited the deadly World War II (1939 – 1945) starring two egotistic, pompous men of shortish, vengeful stature - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In the end, the former killed himself; the other was hanged openly in a piazza in Italy.

A recent calamity to mind was Iraq. After the 9/11 catastrophe, both Iraq and Saddam Hussein did not stand a ghost of a chance against George Bush’s strayed ego. With Saddam removed by force and hanged, and cats of impossible hues out of the Iraqi bag, what wars or brave new “surges” could ever put them back together again?

With some 4,000 plus Americans killed, many maimed, $100 billions wasted on this tragedy, and Iraq and its people torn to pieces, victory, peace, and the culprits remained elusive still. With such “insane waste of natural resources”, as the poet W.H. Auden would say, the U.S. economy itself is in shambles. How could “the great coalition” have baited each other into such a woeful mistake? How did they miss the point in leaving Saddam and Iraq alone? Real power resides in knowing exactly when not to use it.

The important truths were likely to be those which mischief least wanted to see or hear. To parody Mark Twain: If the only ego you have is vengeful, you see every problem as war. Reason flew by the cuckoo’s nest, and the world has become poorer and more dangerous as a result.

Georgia, like a great many countries - big or small - possessed puzzling networks of enigmatic borders inside it. That is to say, not all the people in it are the same. As usual, differences overlap in ethnicity, religion, and so on. Try solving the ethnic disparities with a national solution – and religious idiosyncrasies erupted; placate religion in some way - and some other latent discrepancy materialized.

To outsiders, Georgia was one happy family. But we now see South Ossetia, and Abkhazia as autonomous enclaves seeking independence. The Russian foreign minister was quoted that the world “can forget about” Georgia’s territorial integrity. All that threw Georgia’s “national sovereignty” to the wind. The artificial borders have zoomed into view with vengeance, war, and chaos.

Ever scheming on the outskirts of internal sensibilities of smaller nations are the same cunning super powers equipped with missiles and the “the intelligence” to fan flames, to divide and conquer.

With the East – West tensions born again and activated, not only were the proxies edgy but also the Europeans straddling the uneasy middle space between American and Russian nuclear warheads.

In his Memoirs of the Second World War, Winston Churchill quipped that once when President Roosevelt asked him what that war should be called, he said at once, “the Unnecessary War”. He continued: “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people (we) still have not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils.”

Today, with nuclear bombs floating every which way like gas stalking sparks, geo-politics have taken on sinister bearings. Events in both the Middle East and the Caucasus raised causes for alarm. Egos must be restrained and contained before they soared out of control into nuclear flares. Peace, please!



Author: Anis Haffar [Eemail: gateinstitute@yahoo.com]