Individual venting is fine, but at a collective level it can become dangerous
VENTING IS fine, even therapeutic. Commenting on the marital status of the parents of the driver who has just irritated you can be seen as an everyday individual safety valve.
The individual rant is a parenthesis, then life resumes. At the collective level, it all too often precludes, or replaces, rational action. The collective rant becomes a comforting dismissal of those who carry out actions which threaten us as being insane, or to revert to a more primitive yardstick, evil.
Such primitive ranting became the default approach of the late and unlamented Bush administration, and in particular of its splenetic vice-president, Dick Cheney. This made its infamous and impossible “war on terrorism” into a self-perpetuating and self-defeating substitute for rational actions to address threats to US national security.
This irrational view of captured terrorists as evil and insane allowed the administration to systematically legitimise the use of torture, as revealed in the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross and confirmed by the recently released White House memos.
Experience teaches us that torture always fails. It fails on the moral level by denying all human progress, laws and conventions. Almost as importantly, it also fails on the practical level.
Utterly disoriented, sleep-deprived and pain-crazed victims will, in the words of Christy Moore, “sign anything if you let me close my eyes” as the case of the Saudi-born Abu Zubaida confirms.
Abu Zubaida, an injured veteran of the US-financed Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion, was 31 when he was captured in Pakistan on a March night in 2002. He was a fixer, in the words of a former US justice department official, “the above-ground support, the guy keeping the safe house”.
Although he quickly revealed what he knew, his interrogators were convinced they had landed a big fish, and cranked up the torture. Abu Zubaida then supplied information about various plots, including one to smuggle a “dirty bomb” (a conventional device surrounded by radioactive waste) into the US.
None of the information had any basis in reality, as one senior US intelligence official confided to Senate investigators; “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”
The US not only wasted millions, but its best counter-insurgency officials and Arabic-speaking officers spent as much time on wild goose chases as on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It would be nice to think that we humans are capable of learning the lessons of such counter-productive experiences of ranting replacing rational analysis and action. That does not, unfortunately, seem to be the case.
As we try to come to terms with Somalian piracy, the shortcomings of our global institutions are once again painfully revealed. And if that isn’t depressing enough, attempts to address some of those shortcomings are themselves the victims of poorly-argued rants.
Somali pirates are neither evil nor insane. They would certainly recognise themselves in the words of William Scott, who was hanged for piracy in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1718 - “I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”
Somalia collapsed in 1991 into a low-level civil war with regional and ethnic groups struggling for supremacy, leaving about 10 million Somalis abandoned to famine and chaos. Our world’s only available tool for such situations is our military forces. The UN brokered a tentative ceasefire in 1992, but the Somalian humanitarian and political crises deepened. In December 1992 Security Council resolution 794 unanimously authorised the use of “all necessary means” in Somalia.
This became the ill-starred UNITAF mission, with the US supplying 25,000 of the 37,000 troops deployed. Mohamed Aidid and his Habar Gidir clan emerged as the main Somali protagonists. In July 1993 US forces attacked an Adid gathering, believing in true rant fashion, that if Adid was killed or captured, peace would blossom.
Cobra attack helicopters strafed what turned out to be a meeting of tribal elders, killing 73 of them. Various Somali militia riposted, shooting down two US helicopters and besieging isolated US ground forces in Mogadishu. They would be rescued the following morning by Malaysian and Pakistani UN forces (the real Black Hawk Downstory).
In 1995, the UN withdrew all forces. Today an under-staffed and ill-equipped African Union force, primarily composed of troops from Burundi and Uganda, struggles to keep Mogadishu harbour open for relief supplies. This dangerous anarchy means that few aid agencies or NGOs can sustain operations in Somalia.
Lacking a navy or coast guard, unprotected Somali fishing grounds are stripped by foreign trawlers of an estimated €230 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster every year. Worse, Somali coastal waters have become a toxic dump. According to Nick Nuttall of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) various companies use Somalian waters as a dumping ground for “uranium radioactive waste, leads, heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, industrial wastes, hospital wastes, chemical wastes, you name it.” UNEP estimates that dumping such wastes in Somali waters costs €2 per ton, as opposed to €250 for correct disposal.
So now Somali fishermen, their fish stocks looted and their coastal waters poisoned, have started to range out across the Gulf of Aden and into the Indian Ocean, capturing ships and holding their crews for ransom.
At enormous expense, naval vessels from 25 nations are seeking to dissuade or to kill them. Action that, at best, can only be a stopgap until we take rational action to address the root problem of Somalian misery.
The EU’s security and defence dialogue offers an opportunity to transform our increasingly pointless armed forces into useful tools for international stability as part of a global emergency service.
Yet this dialogue is regularly denounced as “militarisation of Europe”.
Another rant we need to replace with rational action.