Oct/Nov 2002

A Statement of Conscience: "Not In Our Name"
The Bill of Rights Foundation

We Must No Longer Tolerate a Culture of Violence
Depak Chopra

Murder for Profit
William Rivers Pitt

Opposing the President's Call for "Relentless War"
David Krieger

"Diplomacy" in the Age of the American Empire
Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan

The Middle East: A Human Perspective
Pam Derby

What Awaits Us in Iraq "Warrior Kings and the Test of True Vision"
David LaChapelle

Free to Choose: Health Care for All-Oregon: Measure 23 on the Ballot this November
Gerald Cavanaugh

We Have the Right to Know What's in Our Food
Louis Mincer

Oregon's Measure 27
Give Oregonians A Choice

Same News Every Channel, Every Media
Don Monkerud

The Cult of Greed and the Anesthetization of Democracy
John Darling

Forest Health & Logging Wealth
Lesley Adams and Joseph E. Vaile

Finding Balance in the Autumn Season with ayurvedic Practices
Myrica Morningstar

Sacred Plants
David Crow

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

The Thomas Messages
James Twyman

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

What Awaits Us In Iraq

Warrior Kings and the Test of True Vision

By David La Chapelle

The skies roared with thunder and the earth heaved,
Then came darkness and a stillness like death.
Lightning smashed the ground and fires blazed out;
Death flooded from the skies.
When the heat died and the fires went out,
The plains had turned to ash.

This is a fragment of dream, from a story inscribed in stone that once adorned a great city built around 2700 B.C. in what is modern day Iraq. Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Mesopotamia, had this dream as he was journeying to subdue the demon of the forest and cut down the cedars necessary to build his city of glory.

During the Gulf War the coalition air force dropped 140,000 tons of bombs. Take the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and add six more and you would have an equivalent fire power. Since the Gulf War the skies of Iraq have continued to rain death. In 1999 alone more than 1,100 missiles were launched against 359 Iraq targets. Over 200 military planes, 19 naval ships and 22,000 American military personnel are committed to enforcing the “no-fly zones” at a cost estimated at around one billion dollars a year. The skies have roared with thunder and the earth has heaved.

The debate about whether we should go to war with Iraq has successfully skirted the fact that we are at war with Iraq and have been since the invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that the United States was instrumental in arming Saddam Hussein in the conflict with Iran that took at least a million and half lives. And, in a now famous meeting on July 25, 1980 with April Glaspie, the American Ambassador to Iraq, Saddam Hussein was assured that America would not get involved in the dispute with Kuwait. This refusal to stand ground was immediate permission for Saddam to invade, which he did a week later.

If we take the long view of history this area has seen a remarkable number of “regime changes.” The Summerians, Akkadians, Kassites, Mitanni, Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Mamluks, Safavids and British all conquered the land in an ongoing succession of power. In this century at least nine coups were attempted in a constantly shifting game of murder, military uprising and revenge. Most were successful and left a legacy of instability which only the ruthless tactics of a true dictator could change. It was not until Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 that any period of stable rule was established. And yet he very quickly launched the devastating war with Iran, followed by his invasion of Kuwait. Destruction is a near friend of this land.

Much as been created as well. This fertile land has also been the birth place of many of the tools we take for granted in forming what we call civilization: legal codes, writing, large scale public works, administrative infra-structure, record keeping, banking, abstract mathematics, city building, urban planning, private property, and medical practices on an organized scale. These all appeared with the Summerian peoples around 2700 B.C.

Destruction and creation seem to dance in an interwoven embrace in this land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the beginning it was in fact the rivers themselves that demonstrated this tension. The flooding of the rivers created the fertile soil in which civilization was born and also brought the kind of death and destruction that civilization organizes to forestall with their floods.

The great cities of the region, Ur, Ninevah, Uruk, Babylon, Baghdad were constantly being created and destroyed as new waves of invaders would seek to control of the fertility and the critical trade routes to the East. Cities of remarkable beauty were created. The hanging gardens of Babylon became one of the wonders of the ancient world. At its high point in 800 A.D. Baghdad was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Two vast semicircles twelve miles in diameter occupied both sides of the river and included palaces, gardens, aviaries, hunting preserves, wide streets and intricate aque-ducts. Flowers, trees, social order and elegant architecture supported the home of the million people who had gathered there.

Babylon was sacked several times in its earlier incarnations. Nineveh, Ur, Uruk and other cities would fall as the various invaders sought to assert their control.

When the Mongols sacked Baghdad it was estimated that 800,00 people were put to death in forty days and the streets were said to run with blood. The utter annihilation of Baghdad broke the power of this land for centuries afterwards.

Since cities first arose destruction has come their way on a regular basis. The land in which our attention is being driven by the current talk of invasion has probably the most consistent history of regime change of any place on the planet. This perspective may be useful in considering the war talk of the present administration. We are assured that the peoples of Iraq will rise up in a spon-taneous support of open democratic process. The complex structure of Iraq belies this palliative assurance. The modern state of Iraq is actually a bit of a fiction. The lines were drawn on the map by British interests guided to a large extent by an iconoclastic English woman named Gertrude Bell. She was a wealthy heiress who had taken to wandering through the deserts of the Mideast and had come to know many of the principle players in the complex web of tribal relations. She settled in Baghdad and helped craft the modern state of Iraq until her she took her own life after World War I. Competing factions and tribal interests were corralled by the British into forming a nation.

The current lines on the map display the tensions that exist within Iraq. Two no-fly zones protect the north and south of the land and their respective peoples. Only the middle is held by Saddam Hussein.

We are asked to believe that the collapse of the middle under the weight of our technologically advanced armed forces will some how assure democracy for the country. This logic is difficult to understand.

We had a chance to try this at the end of the Gulf War and we turned our back on supporting the rebel uprising, sentencing thousands to death, because we did not want a divided and weakened Iraq.

No amount of advanced technology is going to transform the deep currents of history that blow with the desert winds across the land of Iraq. Before we rain more death down out of the skies it might be worth understanding the appointment with destiny that we seem determined to keep.

There is something about the land we know of as Iraq that invites the acting out of mythic battles. The origins of these impulses go back thousands of years. One of the great protagonists was Cyrus the great, a Persian warrior who had adopted a radical new religion of his time and conquered much of his known world. He was to subdue the land between the Tigris and Euphrates sometime around 550 B.C. The radical dualism of Zoroastrianism held that the universe was a battleground between the forces of darkness and those of light. Cyrus took it upon himself to battle for the light and in doing so inaugurated the most deadly of marriages: that of religion and war. It became one’s religious duty to conquer the world. The seeds of the Twin Tower’s demise were sown in the blood shed by Cyrus’s sword.

Saddam Hussein has ample credentials for a warrior and he has repeatedly attempted to cast his actions within the context of a Holy War. It is easy to cynically decry this urge as a cover for his pure lust for power, but to do so would be to turn our backs on history. The deeper matrix of Saddam’s intentions spring out of resonance of warriors vying for spiritual dominion and the inevitable pendulum of civilizations exchanging their grounds of temporal power. His actions betray a kind of cruelty that is associated with earlier times in humanity’s development. But they are embedded in the lineage of the warrior-king. These actions have a logic of their own that is grounded in the soil of Iraq. To miss this vital point means that if we should behead him he would arise again in another form, just like a figure out mythology, unless a new vision of leadership can be demonstrated.

Saddam has proven his capacity for death and destruction. Under his command over the last thirty years tens of thousands of Shiites, more than 250,000 Kurds, unknown numbers of other nationalities, 17 ministers and two of his sons-in-laws have been killed. He has gassed villages, created one of the worst ecological nightmares on the planet when the Kuwaiti oil fields were ignited, launched two wars that have killed nearly 1,700,000 people. The long term effects of the Kurdish gas attacks continue to manifest in the people who managed to survive. His sophisticated attempts to forge weapons of mass destruction inform us that he is not only ruthless, but organized and willing to use the most advanced technology in the service of his goals.

And yet in the face of this brute force the most compelling challenge awaiting us in Iraq is not military. It lies closer to the heart of the human soul. Can we move beyond the cycle of violence that has been the signature of the fertile crescent for thousands of years?

We assuredly cannot wait for Saddam Hussein to correct this difficulty. Saddam Hussein does not live in a vacuum. He lives in the cradle of civilization, with the echoes of history resounding clearly around him. His behavior is a clear and even consciously articulated attempt to recreate the glories of earlier warrior-kings. But it is darkly skewed because he has no fundamental anchor in the true responsibility such earlier kings articulated for the benefit of all their peoples. He is frozen in the myth of the possible past and as such is bankrupt as a leader of common good. We are not fighting an isolated despot. We are entering into a very odd appointment with the birth place of our own civilization.

There are very deep forces at work in these gathering storms of war. Hammurabi, an early warrior king of the era, articulated an understanding that was born of the fierce battles of will that accompanied the birth of civilization. In his extensive code of behavior, which enumerates hundreds of specific prohibitions, he has two which found their way into the west through the spread of Christianity.

The two read: “If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out.”

The present administration is proposing to install democracy on advice of this ancient king. By using the brute force of our arms we are being asked to believe that we will usher in a regime change that will be more to our liking. President Bush is being cast as a warrior-king of his own, who will make his own mind up and act unilaterally in the best interests of not only our own country, but the world. Our secretary of defense assures us that seeking unanimity with our allies may cloud our ability for rigorous thinking and action. If we take a bold stand then surely the world will follow in our footsteps.

The sheer logic of history should make it clear that every action has an equal reaction. If we act in a dictatorial manner we assure a reaction commensurate to the exercise of that force. What made the birth of our own country unique is the fact that a vision of a new way of being together as a nation was introduced into the stream of events. A government was conceived of the people and for the people. And an elaborate system of checks and balances were introduced to assure that unilateral action, and the dangerous concentration of power that such a gesture creates, would be balanced by a collective and deliberate wisdom.

The danger of the current war plans in this country go far beyond the immediate potential of death and destruction of a technologically enhanced armed forces. They are greater than the possibility of alienated allies and further enraged Arab populations. The lack of consensus building, the refusal to adhere to a code of international law, and the blind belief in our own manifest destiny threatens to make mockery of the very democratic ideals that we are purporting to give as a gift of victory to the Iraq people. This is a dangerous collapse of vision. And without vision, the people will die.

The ancient warrior-kings of Mesopo-tamia gave birth to the idea of a divine kingship. These lines were used to describe Gilgamesh, one of the first great warrior-kings:
“The one who knew all I will tell about …
He saw the great Mystery, he knew the Hidden:
He recovered the knowledge of all the times before the Flood.
He journeyed beyond the distant, he journeyed beyond exhaustion,
And then carved his story on stone.”

And Hammurabi, the man who gave us an eye for an eye, had a clear vision of what leadership meant:
“The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to declare justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.”

It is sad to see that these lofty sentiments are often missing in our current national debate after nearly four thousand years of human effort. They are not to be found in the repression of freedom in Iraq and unfortunately they are not easily found in a deeply suspicious view of the world as a series of dangers to be contained by ever more elaborate use of force which the current administration offers as a rallying point for action.

Certainly the danger of terrorism and the use of weapons of mass destruction call for vigorous action and defense. But if this action is not grounded in a more inclusive vision of what it means to live together on this planet they will be doomed to failure.

The current discussion of war is being articulated as a reactive pattern of aggression. If we do not strike first, then we will be struck. If we need a preview of what this kind of behavior will produce then we only have to cast our glance to the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. What is missing in the national debate is true vision of a common good that can provide a unifying force of inspiration and vision of how all peoples of the world might live together. Are we simply going to systematically bomb country after country that pose a threat to our well being and truly believe this will create national security?

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man, capable of great destruction. And there is no doubt that our world would be a safer place without him. But to strike him down with an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is to help hold our future hostage to a distant past.

World epochs are often shifted by fundamental changes in the way we perceive the world. Newton ushered in the mathematics, conceptual clarity and understanding that seeded the industrial revolution. The view of the world that is emerging at the cutting edge of physics and even biology is that our reality is constructed out of a contextual relationship. Stem cells migrate to become differentiated depending on their location. In Quantum physics it is understood that the observer is a part of conditioning the actual effect of the outcome of events in the physical world. If politics are to reflect the kind of context sensitivity which such discoveries are revealing then we need to deepen our capacity to include those that are beyond our borders in our decision making.

The old warrior kings were grounded in a fundamental dualism that made their job description straight forward: they were to stand as intermediaries between the gods and humankind. Their force of arms helped manifest divine will.

Unfortunately our current administration is acting as if they have a divine mandate. Unilateral leadership, we are assured, is a sign of strength. In actuality, in the face of the daunting issues facing our planet, it has never been a greater sign of weakness.

It will be our ability to draw forth the collective wisdom of all peoples that will allow us to face the many challenges ahead. Acting as ancient kings will only assure that history will repeat itself.

We have the military capacity to neutralize any threat on the planet. Or so we would like to think. But the use of excessive force seems to only create the seeds of the next dictatorship. The harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I assured that Hitler would rise to power.

What is needed to respond to Saddam Hussein is not more force. The firepower of the Gulf War was more than adequate to shift the battlefield. What happened in the Gulf War is what may very likely happen if we enter on a new adventure in Iraq: a lack of strategic planning as to what the aftermath of the war might entail meant that Saddam Hussein was allowed to stay in power. Until our administration can demonstrate in actions that it truly believes in democracy as expression of the collective wisdom of the people for the people then its leadership must inevitably be questioned. We are being told by the current leadership of the United States that precipitous action is our only option. If democracy is to truly emerge as a global process then we must be able to model it in our dealings with other countries and peoples. We need to act as if they matter and are not ciphers in a vast game of global power.

The vision necessary for our emerging planetary crisis is one that necessarily needs to be inclusive, multidimensional, adaptive, courageous, respectful and be based on a willingness to let our strength be in service of a common good. The planet has grown too small to remain isolated and truly survive. A consistent pattern of unilateral action from environmental concerns to military decisions seems to say that what is good for America is in fact good for the world.

If we are going to engage the forces of creation and destruction that seem to inhabit this land called Iraq, then we had better have a vision equal to the powers that abide there. The ghosts of ancient kings wander the rivers. Cities more beautiful than we have ever seen once lived there. Our civilization was born there. Surely we can find the national character to meet this appointment with destiny using the same degree of vision and courage that brought our nation into existence. Our nation was born with the force of arms, but its true birth came from a much deeper wellspring. We are called upon to express a vision of the possible future that might move us beyond the cycles and cycles of violence and repression.

This is the real debate that needs to be had in Congress, in the Press and in our homes. Without it an invasion of Iraq will only mean that we have become seduced by the rhythm of history.

Returning to the birth place of civilization we will have said in essence, “We never grew up.”

David La Chapelle lives in Juneau, Alaska. He has been a healer for 25 years, is a writer and a contributor to the Institute of Noetic Sciences Magazine, and has led countless training, retreat, and wilderness quest groups. His latest book is Navigating the Tides of Change: Stories from Science, the Sacred, and a Wise Planet (New Society Publishers). Visit David’s website www.tidesofchange.org for more of his writings, resources for navigating personal and global change, and information on his classes and retreats. David will be in Ashland, Oregon on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1 for two sequential evenings of music, storytelling and meditation. Call (541) 488-5490 if you are interested in attending.