Palden
Jenkins

Paldywan Kenobi's view on Iraq

5th February 2003

Palden Jenkins

This article was written some weeks before the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war. In it I made a prediction which turned out drastically incorrect.

Ever since early in 2002, I have felt that a war in Iraq isn't going to happen. Now, I might have to eat my beloved Hebridean hat over this! We shall see. More recently, I've seen a possibility of a war which goes dreadfully wrong. Two indicators are the certainty that USA will win easily (a mistake no sensible military commander makes, since it tempts fate), and the recent space shuttle 'accident', reminding us that 'there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip' - no matter how technically advanced or triumphalist you are. But in all my investigations, I have not seen an attack on Iraq as successful or highly likely. Hmmm. There has been plenty of contrary opinion of course! The scale of conviction that war will happen is quite daunting.

How can an Iraq war not happen, when the buildup for war seems so unstoppable? Well, the new cold war scenario unfolding since 9-11 represents a miscalculation - a mis-reading of current history, underlying trends and viability, and a diversion from the crucial tasks at hand. It's an old-fashioned male, hawkish mindset, a dragon fearing extinction and mindlessly thrashing its tail. It is powerfully insidious too, exercising a tremendous grip on the world population. Despite material errors, twisted logic and visible insanity in the evolving Iraq situation, there's a high degree of permission and commission being granted - largely by omission - by the world public, even though so many have profound reservations. Those underlying, intuitive public feelings are coming to the test. I believe this is historically an important juncture. It concerns two major issues: the obvious one is war, and the less obvious one is the attention given to events by the world public.

This is why the war might not happen. Public awareness and underlying feelings are very strong, even though still rumbling relatively quietly - and they draw on the accumulated subliminal experience of the 1990s wars. It would be operationally more workable for USA and UK to pull off an Iraq intervention if public feeling were behind it. Even in the military, confidence and a feeling of mission-correctness are weak - and if generals' and pilots' hearts aren't behind it, trouble looms. American operational invincibility must be judged after, not before, the event. As I have pointed out previously, USA stands at a very similar point to that of UK around 1910 - certain of its might and priority and heading for serious reduction. By 1920, UK's time was done - though, ominously, it took until the late 1940s and the 1960s to really catch up with it.

Let's look at our current time. The world is now entering the serious stuff of globalisation: how is the world to be organised and controlled? USA has one answer - superpower dominance. Yet, tentatively, the 'rest of the world' is slowly formulating another answer - something to do with 'the international community', in a more communitaire, egalitarian sense. This is the big question of at least the next ten years, and 2001-03 is phase one. By countering the international community-forming process, the Bush camp is unwittingly speeding it up: with or without USA, the world has a lot to get organised.

This community-forming process is not easy or simple: there are lots of old scores to be settled, and rampantly individualistic nations cooperate only up to a point, even though they all know more is needed. It's shaky territory. Meanwhile, USA presents safe knowns: join our club, obey the rules, and we'll leave each other's dirty sheets concealed. A strong lobby of interests in USA fears loss of dominance. Superpower dominance worked for the twentieth century and, though it is being reasserted, current history has another agenda. So there's a grating going on in the geopolitical tectonic plates, with risk for earthquakes.

There are governments, institutions, corporations, vested interests and background powers who tend to support the superpower dominance model because there is uncertainty in the ranks, and they are afraid of the consequences of not supporting USA. USA exploits this loophole: the alternative is as yet too tentative to stand up to USA's bluster and force. The emergent world community of nations, cultures, ethnicities and popular opinion has no consolidated voice at present, and there are many complex issues to clear up too. But every time USA pushes its case, this emergent world consensus is nudged to firm itself up. One of the unappointed elder bishops of this consensus, Nelson Mandela, recently pronounced "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America". Strong stuff. Something is brewing.

At this stage, no one knows the way forward into a world order that is basically humane, ecologically-friendly, just, equitable and safe. The next 20-50 years will work this out. No road-map offers global guidelines suitable for everybody. There are, however, plenty of possibilities which need more development-time: the new formula needs an evolutionary leap, a shift in the world context, yet to come. Strangely, some of the forerunners of this new social development paradigm happen to be countries relatively isolated from the international community - such as Iraq, Iran, Cuba and North Korea - plus countries that have undergone large-scale recent changes - such as Russia and South Africa - plus countries or regions that have been knocked out of the economic development game by disaster or politics - such as several African countries. In these places, irrespective of their governments, people have had to improvise to solve their problems, and in so doing they open up grass-roots social options outside the range available in the modern capitalist world. Future social options are being hot-housed in advance of the rest of the world, and these might in future be leading nations and regions, by dint of that experience.

The potential Iraq war is an attempt to impose a certain order not just on Iraq but on the world. This is an attempt to gain control before things go awry. Awry, that is, for the former twentieth century order, which has much to lose. There is a strange death-urge hidden within this control agenda too: being unsoundly based, an Iraq war risks creating major setbacks for American superpower credibility - just a lack of success can undermine its bewitching appearance of invincibility. An unconscious urge to fail hides behind the assertions of America's hawks. This self-destruct program risks pulling the rest of us down with it.

We must thank George Bush and Saddam Hussein for their efforts: their medieval feud pushes the world into confronting important issues, including armaments, arms trading and military aid, plus the modern war addiction suffered by politicians, generals, terrorists and all of us. After 1989, when the Wall came tumbling down, everyone wanted war to go away - but it won't unless peace and disarmament are strongly asserted. Disarmament is an historic trend born in the 1920s after 'the war to end all wars' (WW1), gaining momentum in the 1950s-60s with the rise of the peace movement. But world consensus must shift clearly and unequivocally to override the profits and interests driving the arms trade. The tricky bit is that disarmament means genuine conflict resolution and international justice, otherwise it cannot work. Thus disarmament must be consistently reasserted by mainstream global consensus over decades. This is a big one: it demands longterm commitment, something the fickle aspect of public opinion doesn't savour. It rests on clear, mainstream world consensus.

This consensus concerns other enormous matters too: environment, world justice, economics, corporate power and much more - in particular, global decision-making procedures and institutions. What is noteworthy is a significant rumbling in the guts of millions, possibly billions of people, as the collective unconscious readies itself for facing the full implications of all this. It's that 'something is seriously wrong' signal that comes up every now and then. It creates a deep disquiet, only some of which is expressed publicly - the rest feeds into a longterm cumulative reservoir of shifting values which surfaces during crises like Afghanistan and Iraq. As the global situation intensifies, the heat rises in this nightmarish fermentation.

Psychologically, it represents a clash between human instincts and conditioned conformity. Politically, it is resolving itself into a clash between people and 'big brother' - governments, corporations, armies and their supporters. It's not quite that stark, but that's how the collective unconscious, rightly or wrongly, resolves it. The collective unconscious doesn't speak with ifs and buts - it makes simple, clear statements without explanations. Until it formulates a statement it rumbles with unease, burping occasionally with indigestion. On the question of peace in Iraq, something is coming clear - and not just about Iraq.

We are being asked to go along with a war most of us don't support and, when the cruise missiles start up, we're supposed to close our eyes and accept a fait accompli. We'll switch on our TV sets and give plenty of business to the media, who are ready for the great show. Wonderful - it's business, and we all support that, don't we? But wait. In recent decades, public sensitivities have had some training - with the help of CNN and BBC (who are also at war!). Consider this: arguably, the emotional potency millions of people, particularly women, felt toward the Afghan situation in October 2001 played a significant, unacknowledged role in the rapid fall of the Taliban - there are few other satisfactory explanations. Rationalists would dispute this, but they are not the sole judges of this question. The mass collective psyche is an active player in geopolitics, with or without Security Council support.

We stand today at another such window. Public feeling is escalating. The prevailing charged emotions of today are split between opposition to the war or disquiet about it - but not support for war. Also, a two-pronged peace-attack is falling into place: one prong is made up of generalised semi-conscious mainstream public feelings, and the other is a funny prayer coalition of Muslims, Buddhists, new age pacifist meditators and (some) Christians. If Afghanistan is anything to go by, this grouping could become decisive. Whether this works or not is, of course, yet to be seen. But it has been done before. This tradition started, as far as I know, here in Glastonbury (where I live) in WW2, with the establishment of the nationwide Silent Minute (a daily national silent meditation) plus the 'occult war effort' (by a collection of occultists of the time), blessed by Churchill and catalysed by Wellesley Tudor Pole and Dion Fortune.

Deep issues are at work here, beyond all the oil, military and power stuff. It's touch-and-go. Time gets squeezed and stretched, potentised by an acute polarisation in the collective unconscious - a friction between what's sensed to be right and what seems to be happening. There is a sense of making history too. The historic issue concerns world disarmament. Optimistically, it could take ten years to remove all world WMDs, and perhaps up to thirty years to deconstruct the conventional and small-arms military race. Social-political peace-processes, major national changes and rebels, criminals and terrorists are involved, so it could take this long. But that's fast in terms of history. Whatever is the case, the nervy brinkmanship of our day heats up the question of disarmament. If this possible Iraq war, phoney or real, is to be turned to any genuine, lasting gain, it is surely that it could shoehorn the world into a comprehensive, historic disarmament process. Perhaps we need to contribute to making this so.

So I have a suggestion. Please consider carefully what you feel and pray for - whether it's formal prayer/meditation or simply deep wishing. Do pray for peace. But if a war does start, make a few modifications to the prayer. Praying for peace when a war has started can raise the hackles of hawks and raise the stakes a further notch - because hawks fight for war, regardless of the Iraq excuse. Telling a smoker to give up makes them smoke more, unless they're really ready to quit.

I'd suggest the revised prayer could contain the following three elements:

accepting that war and madness have started, may these events truly serve the greatest good, not only toward the objective of world peace, but also in generating wholesome, unexpected side-effects;
pray for and inwardly support the victims of the conflict (both civilians and military), and,
may the world's public be fully aware and open-eyed.

Formulate these your own way. This is a making-the-best-of-a-tough-situation prayer strategy. Don't lose heart if war breaks out: keep focused on eventual world peace and positive outcomes and remember that war can still contribute to peace in ways that peace cannot (this is no justification for war, but it's still true, especially if we help it go that way). Stay out of an oppositional or negative frame of mind - humanity's collective psyche doesn't understand negatives, and steady constancy of mood and commitment is needed when shooting starts, to counterbalance the intensely nightmarish madness. Please consider this suggestion and do what you feel best with it.

While we're at it, let's give thanks for the value of brinkmanship: it forces us to peer over the abyss and shift our stuff - the stuff we're usually too busy or compassion-fatigued to think and act on. Brinkmanship brings up fundamentals, forcing us up against our walls. It is potentially a gift - if we make it so. The highest magic happens in twenty minutes flat, but to work it well we must enter that zone of compressed time, intensity and integrity that allows it to happen. We live in a potential history-making moment, and world consensus is at stake.

The future depends on such a felt and spoken consensus - it acts like a containing field encouraging and disallowing a variety of possibilities. Around 1989 we watched consensus-eruptions break out in the crowds on the streets of former Soviet countries, and changes happened (though in China such consensus was clearly insufficiently strong). Potentially we stand at one of those moments, where the logjam of change could get freed up. It depends how far we want to set in motion a process of up-stepped world change. But if we back off now, world disarmament gets delayed, and trouble will surely follow.

Nowadays it is common to voice anti-American feelings: Americans shouldn't indulge in self-pity or pique but look at its genuine causes. Forgiveness will come with correction. But this is not the main issue - anti-Americanism is a diversion. American superpower mentality prevails because the international community has not established an alternative. Military adventures happen because no one stops them. A new global consensus is in its formative stages, but the Bush crusade is unwittingly pushing it forward by trying to push it back. Tyrants provoke a reaction: you're with or against them - or dithering painfully somewhere between - and they force us to form a view on issues we don't happily face. Three of these issues are war, the causes of war and the potency of today's world situation. Humanity needs to speak. This is one of those moments of compressed, potentised time.

Saddam Hussein probably does have some WMDs, but so do others - not least USA, UK and France. My assessment is that, as an ageing dictator who would prefer to complete his term well, Hussein wouldn't have used them. He wanted to live out his days as the self-appointed father of his people. He could have been softened up and tempted to redeem himself - but this softening strategy needed actually carrying out, and it wasn't done.

Meanwhile, sure, this war is about oil, geopolitical control, Israel, military rearmament and other agendas. But it is delaying two mega-issues to a later day: a proper global evolution of world power and control and the worldwide adoption of energy-efficient and ecologically-friendlier technologies, economics and social forms. These are massive, fundamental global matters affecting many wider issues in turn. They are now postponed, though the Bush crusade is unintentionally raising them up the world agenda. This is where mass consensus comes in. It's time to fully acknowledge we're in the twenty-first century. It's time for change - before it's too late. Some of us have been saying this for thirty years, and it's truer now than ever.

Please do all you can to re-humanise Iraqis. They aren't objects, pawns in others' games. They have the longest history of urban civilisation on Earth. Their current isolation forces them to survive as best they can. Please re-humanise 'badguys' too - dictators, hawks, troops and military pushers - since we're asking them to step down and re-connect with the loving, considerate, sensitive human in themselves, and they're frightened. Hard-nuts are humans too.

Compassion isn't about pity: it's about putting ourselves in others' sandals, shoes and boots, feeling how they experience life, from their angle. It's about sharing the experiential predicament of being human. We're all very mixed in our inner beings, and this saint-and-sinner mixture is what our precarious world situation is all about, played out before our eyes. We are all guilty, by association and complicity, of crimes against humanity. It's time for a clean-up, time to take the big risk. Yes, our economies might be weakened. Yes, chaos could break out. Yes, world disarmament could be tough. Yes, there will be more brinkmanship - without it, complacency continues to hold power. How much does our anticipation of things going 'wrong' stop us from moving forward? Answer: lots.

Sooner or later, we have to stand up for a world peace-building process. When? 2008? 2012? 2020? How old will your kids be then? Do we really believe that inwardly shifting the world consensus makes a difference, or are we but helpless recipients of history and the deeds of titans and assholes? Are we willing to move forward on this and face whatever consequences arise? And if the war doesn't happen, will we all go home again, hoping the problem will just melt away? These are issues we face today, hidden behind this threatened war. These involve historic mass decisions.

We are responsible for the life, death and constrained existence of the people of Iraq. Let's shoulder it well. We ourselves are actors on the stage of the theatre of war - even if we're 'over here' while it's 'over there'. Geographical distance doesn't apply in the world of the psyche - though cultural and experiential distance do. This is an experiential stretch, a challenge to step beyond secure positions. What goes on inside us makes a difference and we're transiting from practice-runs to the real stuff. This isn't really between UKUSA and Iraq - it's between war and peace.

This mental war, threatening to become a shooting war, obliges a shift of underlying values. We stand at a power point in time where humanity's clarity of intent is being honed. This is the evolutionary process of the twenty-first century: humankind is training itself in the reality of creating its collective reality, and the stakes are rising. We are redefining the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. We're beginning to create our future facing forwards.

And my hat's continued existence is at risk.

Paldywan Kenobi's

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