iraq war

Published: Mongrel magazine, August 2006

Introduction to the ‘Revenge’ issue

“An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind”
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1929)

“Somewhere… somehow… someone’s gonna pay!”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Commando (1985)

ON JULY 12, Hizbollah ambushed an Israeli army unit on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Three I.D.F. soldiers were killed and two captured. In retaliation, the Israelis launched a devastating month-long assault on southern Lebanon that killed hundreds and left much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins. As the region knuckled down for yet another bloody round of reprisal and counter-reprisal, the New York Times asked Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert to explain the psychology that fuels such protracted strife. (He Who Cast The First Stone Probably Didn’t, July 24.) Read the rest of this entry »

Gimme Shelter

The phrase ‘fog of war’ has a double meaning. Ostensibly, it refers to the confusion that reigns among combatants on the ground in the heat of battle. Errors are made, lives lost or advantages squandered as a result of commanders miscalculating the strengths and weaknesses of their own position relative to that of the enemy.

But the expression can also refer to the manner in which events in war sometimes escape scrutiny from the outside world: whether through rising plumes of dust and smoke, a lack of proximity to the battlefield, the lethargy or obsequiousness of the media or the indifference of the general public. Read the rest of this entry »