I usually don't write about places where I am not. But in this report I am going to write about a place where I have been but am not now. And I'm doing it because Margaret Hassan is dead.
But to do that I need to begin at the beginning. Where inhuman behavior is concerned, a grisly Newton's Third Law ("For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction") applies. But it doesn't work out quite as neatly as the one having to do with Physics.
Margaret Hassan is dead because where (and when) meanness, cruelty, viciousness, brutality, acquisitiveness and all forms of violent abuse are concentrated, logical, rational, and precise inanimate symmetrical equivalence is replaced by an invariably less exact and terribly frightening animate asymmetry.
So Margaret Hassan is dead because of the foreseeable out of control not only circular but escalating nature of Newton's dangerously volatile and violent Third Law of inhuman behavior. Margaret Hassan is also dead because once again Newton's third law of inhuman behavior was clearly exemplified by self-proclaimed good guys bent on not just forestalling but also retaliating against those they designate as bad guys.
But the more violent the issue and the more desperate the struggle, the more so-called good guys run into a serious problem. They can't put their hands on a single "enemy."
So they take "friends" instead.
Margaret Hassan is also dead because bad guys who insist they are good guys never own up to the fact that in existential terms they might not be nearly as good as they insist they are. So these days western triumphalists and triumphant westerners see the struggle for Iraq (and also for Palestine by the way) as an efficacious and virtuous clash between democracy and theological/political fundamentalism or, as the fight used to be described twenty years ago, a conflict between "the evil empire" and "the great Satan." (I hope I can be excused at this advanced date for not remembering who was supposed to be the great Satan and who was supposed to be the evil empire.)
This lack of consistent equilibrium where violent human behavior is concerned makes "tit for tat" seem like the good old days. As a result, even such a primitive behavioral concept as "eye for an eye" continues to escalate in Iraq (and Palestine and Israel) to seventy time seven eyes for one…and worse.
Sis and I knew Margaret Hassan only briefly. That was in Baghdad during the chaotic six weeks following the fall of Baghdad. She was in charge of CARE's large and internationally respected relief operations, and we were members of CPT's small team. She and we were part of the remnant of humanitarian organizations still trying to operate in Baghdad. Most days of the week we would make our way to Sadaam Hussein's former administrative compound for occupation updates delivered by mid-level American and British officers. Our hope was that these "professionals" would "finally" report satisfactory progress in the allies' infrastructure rebuilding efforts.
But never was heard the "finally" word. Heard instead--nonstop-were only discouraging words in the form of accusations and assertions, which declared that it was the responsibility of the handful of NGOs and other humanitarian groups, like CPT, to initiate the rebuilding process…not the military. But Margaret Hassan, standing up to such indecent evasions of moral responsibility, time after time took the lead in telling truth to the coalition's power.
But its position was stubbornly defended and maintained by those mid-level martial marionettes with the straightest of faces and despite pre-invasion warnings by every official and unofficial specialist worth his or her training and intellectual integrity. The gist of those warnings had been that the "mission" against Iraq, no matter how it was being publicly proclaimed from one day to the next, could not be "accomplished" if simply investing the region with soldiers was the military's principal objective. Of course actions do speak more loudly than words; so where jump-starting reconstruction efforts was concerned, it became quickly clear to those of us at those briefings that we were dealing with a coalition of the unwilling. Although we were assured that security was the military's concern, we could witness daily that to our briefing officers security was one thing and to us--and the Iraqis--another.
So immediate confidence building measures, such as moving quickly to restore essential energy, health, sustenance, and civil protection services, which would have demonstrated palpable concerns for the so- called "liberated," were neglected in favor of an occupation that from the beginning began to acquire the characteristics of Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Those potential confidence- building measures were also neglected in favor of sticking to the Bush administration's privatized infrastructure rebuilding game plan. It was already clear to us back then that the policy underlying that process had far more to do with proving the efficacy of globalizing--corporatizing, actually--the pursuit of plutocratic- happiness rather than providing the Iraqis with the means to start acquiring and enjoying all of the four freedoms, especially the ones having to do with freedom "from want" and "from fear."
And so Margaret Hassan was kidnapped and murdered: in part--the case needs to be made--an innocent victim of the coalition's morally deficient leadership that was either scandalously shortsighted or deceitfully premeditated. That, of course, does not absolve her brutally militant killers from trying to portray her death as something other than what it clearly was: a hideous cynical, cold blooded, premeditated murder.
On the face of it, one would think she would have been the last person her violent insurgent captors, who were and are trying to coerce the invaders into withdrawing from Iraq, would ever think of harming. In love with her Iraqi husband, in love with the Iraqi people, in love with their faith, for thirty years she worked endlessly to try to represent and tangibly address her people's gravest needs.
She was not anyone's enemy; so why she was murdered!?
The answer, as I see it, is a corollary to Newton's Third Law of inhuman behavior, which, as I also see it, gives new significance to Darwin's description of human evolution as correctly being "the descent of man" (hardly, as our history has proved, an ascent.) I intuited the law when I found myself in the same kind of circumstances as Margaret Hassan, twenty years ago in Lebanon. Like Margaret Hassan, I was not an enemy, and neither were almost all of the westerners taken hostage back then. And our captors knew it.
The next law then (Levin's Law, if you will) is this. In desperate uneven violent conflicts there are no more friends or enemies: Just warm bodies, which either side cruelly uses to win. The tragedy of Margaret Hassan and the others then is that twenty years ago, the level of U. S. military involvement on the ground in the air and on the high seas in Lebanon was tiny compared to the massive level and ferocity of U. S. involvement in Iraq today. So the retaliatory level of the resistance back then with respect to noncombatants, as miserable as it was, was considerably less ferocious. Now, however, in Iraq the peril to noncombatants has risen in direct proportion to the exponential increase in the number of occupying troops and the additional exponential increase in the determination of both sides to win.
So what to conclude from the murder of Margaret Hassan and Newton's third law of inhuman behavior? Perhaps this reworking of an old truism, which I restate this way: The more things stay the same the more they are destined to change.
But not existentially for the better.