Postmodern Torsion

The news from The New York Times today is that a series of coordinated prison breaks -- not in Syria, but Iraq -- has released hundreds of militants to enter the fray in Syria's roughly three year old civil war.  Apparently, the breaks have been coordinated by the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, one of the more ideological (and al-Qaeda affiliated) groups in the conflict.  Yes, you heard right.  Prison breaks.  In Iraq.  To free militants to fight in Syria.

In some sense it is of course worth noting that the cross-border employ of new bodies to enter civil conflict is hardly new.  It's perhaps the nature of mercenary work, especially when things turn brutal.  Mercenaries from all over Africa were in Muammar Gaddafi's employ during the Libyan civil war. Bashar Al-Assad is using foreign mercenaries and troops on his side in the current Syrian conflict.  Indeed, turning the clock back a couple of centuries, for those who remember their American history, Hessian soldiers were among the most feared troops faced by the American colonists in their rebellion against the British.  Still, though, it's deflating news.  The rough estimates by most media put the death toll in the conflict around 100,000.  The number of refugees has swelled to well over 2,000,000. An absolute phalanx of actors has been involved in the Geneva II peace talks in their various rounds; the Pope sent an envoy from Vatican City to sit next to representatives from India and Indonesia -- all of whom, apparently, have an interest in events unfolding in Syria.  Of course, that's next to the usual EU-Arab League-U.S.-Russia phalanx that seems to show up everywhere.  It's been an intense, virtual international gang-up on peace.

Everyone knows the Syrian conflict needs to stop.  It's one of the great ironies that in today's day and age, we can't seem to get these things to stop (Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Somalia are also examples).  There's nothing flip meant in the statement; roughly since Vietnam, modern warfare has been taking place very much in front of the camera's eye, there for all to see -- at least when we want cameras there (and in Syria, it seems we do).  Ours is a world of few secrets -- and as many of the world's powerful governments have gotten to know over the past years, even secrets are hard to keep these days.  We know the moral of the story.  For some reason, though, it seems hard for us to make our morals a reality.

It is false to say that there was ever a time when the lines of either global or civil conflict were neat, all the ideological ends tied and all social dynamics accounted for; a "classic" proletariat never squared off against a "classic" bourgeoisie in either nineteenth or early twentieth century Europe -- interests were much more complex than that -- the Cold War created some strange bedfellows and the Stern Gang, the Jewish militant group responsible for terrorist attacks against the British in attempts to evict the Empire from the then-Palestine Mandate, entertained an alliance with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy in the interest of achieving just that goal.  Somehow, however, this is worse.  All the actors are present in front of us.  Many of them advertise themselves on the Internet.  The protagonists hardly keep themselves in the dark.  And still we can't get hold of rhyme or reason, figure out what anyone wants or get positions and goals stabilized enough such that real negotiation might begin.  Real negotiation, of course, begins when one knows what people have in mind.  That's so they can begin the process of giving it up, at least in part.

When the forces of modernization have been so thorough that significant sectors of the world come to experience a malaise that leads to fundamentalism, the power of democracy and the expectation of free speech is so prevalent we expect that it can take any form -- parties with questionable free speech credentials in Egypt, for example, claiming they have been duly elected (which they were) only to be overthrown by a clearly anti-free speech army -- and we are unclear about  the terms and purposes of intervention and the meaning of free societies, it becomes very easy for a conflict to spread in multiple directions:  geographically, ideologically and in terms of the spectacle of a range of bizarre actions, like prison breaks, that can lead to the deaths of hundreds more on top of the thousands we hardly dare to count. In the absence of ideological clarity, and a clear statement of purpose of what all actors want -- not only those on the ground, but those superpowers attempting to bring them to the negotiating table -- it will be difficult to avoid the irony and painful ludicrosity of a group of men sitting in lord-knows-who's living room and communicating over any of the million possible mobile networks, saying "let's go break guys out of prison over there (over there!) to get our fighting done over here."  And then actually doing it.  Prison.  Tomorrow, someone who shouldn't is going to pay the price for this massive set of ironies.  I'm not sure who.  But we know someone will.