Page 1 of 2 The Vishnu
strategy meets its match By
Conn Hallinan
The Supreme Lord said: "I am
death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to
destroy." According to the great Hindu text
Bhagavad-Gita, Vishnu delivered that speech to
Prince Arjuna before a great battle almost eight
millennia ago.
Physicist Robert
Oppenheimer paraphrased it in 1945 to describe the
explosion of the first atomic bomb. The latest
channeling of the Hindu god can be found in an
Israeli commander's evaluation of last summer's
war with Lebanon: "What we did was insane and
monstrous: we covered entire
towns in cluster bombs."
The commander was
decrying the way Israel, the United States and
Britain wage war these days, which has
increasingly become an exercise in mass
destruction. In the past five years, Vishnu has
visited Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. The result
has been death and ruin on a biblical - or more
aptly, a Bhagavad-Gita - scale.
During
last summer's 34-day war, the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) dropped some 4 million cluster
munitions on southern Lebanon. According to United
Nations relief coordinator David Shearer, "Nearly
all of these munitions were fired in the last
three or four days of the war." At least a million
of these unexploded bombs are still waiting in
ambush for unwary farmers and children.
The IDF destroyed airports, harbors, water
and sewage plants, electrical generators, 80
bridges, 94 roads, more than 900 businesses and
30,000 homes. Retreating Israeli soldiers
systematically destroyed the infrastructure of
villages and deliberately polluted water tanks and
wells. According to the Lebanese government, some
1,189 Lebanese were killed, 4,399 wounded, and
one-quarter of Lebanon's population - about a
million in all - were turned into refugees.
Lebanon is hardly unique.
Since
the Gulf War in 1991, according to Handicap
International, the United States and Britain have
dropped more than 13 million cluster bombs on Iraq
and strewn the countryside with more than 500 tons
of toxic depleted-uranium ammunition. A Johns
Hopkins University study found that anywhere from
426,369 to 793,663 Iraqis have died since the
March 2003 invasion. The war has also driven 1.8
million Iraqis out of their country and created
1.6 million internal refugees.
Since
January 2006, almost 4,000 people have died in
Afghanistan, more than 1,000 of them civilians.
The United States has dropped more than three
times the number of bombs on that country over the
past six months as it did in its first three-year
campaign against the Taliban. B-1 bombers
routinely unload more than 8,500 kilograms of
explosives during bombing runs, while AC-130
gunships, spitting 155-millimeter howitzer shells
and tens of thousands of 40mm cannon shells, prowl
the skies. In September, an AC-130 killed 31
shepherds.
Three of the most powerful
armies in the world attacked countries that are
only marginally in the same century as Israel, the
US and Britain. Yet in spite of overwhelming
firepower, Israel was fought to a standstill in
Lebanon, the Americans in Iraq are in increasingly
desperate straits, and British forces in
Afghanistan, according to their former chief of
staff, General Peter Inge, face the possibility of
outright defeat.
Has the Vishnu strategy
met its match?
There was a time when a
handful of British regulars ruled the South Asian
subcontinent, when a few brigades of US marines
could keep Central America safe for the United
Fruit Co, and when the IDF smashed far larger
armies in a week of fighting. But the British
faced mostly tribal warriors, and the marines were
up against unarmed peasants. The Arab armies were
big, but poorly led and technologically inferior.
All empires - whether they are based on
colonies or economic domination - depend on uneven
development. There was a time when industrial
capitalism was all-powerful, and when the people
it conquered often did not even think of
themselves as "nations". When the people in one of
those conquered countries did think of themselves
as a nation, the maintenance of empire became a
rockier affair. Tiny Ireland tied down more
British regulars in the 19th century than did
India.
Eventually the emergence of
nationalism made it impossible for the colonial
powers to retain direct sovereignty over Asia,
Africa and the Middle East, though many of those
former colonies are still economic and political
vassals. The British withdrew because they
suddenly faced hundreds of millions of people who
were united in wanting them out and, if push came
to shove, would fight to make it so.
The
great powers retreated, but they always believed
that their superior military power and their
willingness to use the Vishnu strategy gave them a
final vote in matters concerning their interests.
For many, that illusion of superiority held even
when reality demonstrated the opposite. Hence
revisionists like US
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