A Feckless World: Warfare, Disasters and Democracy
David Alexander
Cranfield University
Royal Military College of Science, UK
d.alexander@rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk
al-wad' ash-shadh (Arabic: a perplexing predicament)
Warfare and disasters are kindred subjects, but to what extent are they
susceptible to the same sort of analysis? Opinions differ, though some experts on
catastrophe include armed conflict in their studies, along with the natural and
technological hazards that more usually make up the field (Ebert 1997, Hewitt 1997).
In this essay I intend, not to explore issues of classification, but to consider the
lessons for disaster prevention and management offered by current warfare. First, I
shall review some of the elements of modern armed conflict and then examine the
lessons they present for emergency preparedness.
In March 2003 when it became clear that war would inevitably break out in
Iraq, some 30 million of the world's citizens demonstrated against the bellicose
policies of the American and British governments. A slim consensus was achieved
among the American public about the need to go to war, but in many parts of Europe
and the Arab world, governments and populations were clearly at variance.
Moreover, the United Nations Organisation was in the process of being sidelined, to
the evident distress of many of those who took to the streets. Indeed, the same
disquiet affected the large numbers of parliamentary representatives who voted in
their respective countries against executive orders to support the war. The
forthcoming invasion of Iraq was set to contravene both international law and the UN
Charter. Many people did not like that, but their protests carried little weight.
Various analyses have shown that in situations of risk, crisis and disaster, the
news media 'construct' the event, which is to say that they report it selectively in
such a way as to create a particular image of it (Ploughman 1995, Stallings 1990,
Wilkins and Patterson 1987). This is how public opinion is formed and maintained, a
process satirised long ago as 'barber-block' politics by Thomas Love Peacock in
Crotchet Castle (1831). In the mass media, dissension is restricted by political and
economic considerations based on power, influence, ownership, commerce and
advertising. It is therefore somewhat remarkable that so many dissenters exist in
societies where such powerful instruments are used so pervasively to shape the
public's attitudes.
One of the most consistent trends in this process is historical shallowness.
The news changes daily, yet it cannot really be understood without connecting the
day's events with developments that have occurred over decades, perhaps
centuries. In the case of Iraq, Saddam Hussein is seen as a rogue and a cruel
dictator, which he no doubt is, but such a profile must be viewed in the light of past
attitudes towards him and his country. Western powers, particularly Britain, created
Iraq during the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
Five disparate geographical entities were coerced into one rather artificial nation,
judged by the Foreign Secretary Sir Winston Churchill to be 'ungovernable'. A
decade later, Sir Arthur Harris developed his 'saturation bombing' technique by
experimenting on the hapless civilian residents of Iraqi villages that appeared to be
sheltering pan-Arab nationalists who wished to change the pattern of states and
balance of power. The Western mass media may easily forget, but in the Middle
East memories are rather longer.
The British mandate in Iraq lasted until 1932 and its enduring legacy was one
of political instability. In 1979, two decades after the Ba'ath ('Renaissance') Party had
engineered the downfall of the Hashemite monarchy installed by Britain, Saddam
Hussein came to power following a CIA-sponsored coup d'êtat. Fourteen months
later Iraqi troops crossed the Shatt al-Arab River to invade Iran. For the next eight
years of war the western powers supported Iraq with armaments and intelligence,
despite Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Iranian troops and later
against Kurdish-Iraqi civilians. Even in the 1990s Western governments were
consistently failing to stop the export from their own countries of advanced weapons
technology to Iraq, including the ability to manufacture chemical and biological
weapons. In the light of this, the invasion of March 2003 amounted to what the
American novelist Thomas Wolfe called 'making the world safe for hypocrisy'.
When wars break out involving the Western powers, they are debated
endlessly by our news media, politicians, experts and publics. Despite the
shallowness and short-termism of much of that debate, it succeeds in energising
people to make their voices heard. Democracy takes two forms, direct (or
participatory) and representative (including constitutional). It was born as the former
and became the latter when applied to groups of people that were too large to
govern by taking account of everyone's opinions. As representative democracy has
grown, so governments have come to fear and despise participatory democracy.
They are not entirely without reason, as the eighth-century scholar Alcuin noted: Nec
audiendi sunt qui solent dicere, "Vox populi, vox dei"; cum tumultiositas vulgi semper
insaniæ proxima est. (Nor should we listen to those who say "The voice of the
people is the voice of God," for the tumult of the mob is always close to insanity.) Yet
representative democracy cannot survive and prosper without a grass-roots element,
which must of necessity be composed of its direct-action counterpart. Its lack of
amenability to control is one of the safeguards against totalitarianism.
The public, whether long-suffering or miserabile vulgus, needs its leaders. In
this context, it is often said that yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's statesmen.
The archetype was David Ben-Gurion, whose call upon the Jewish community in
Palestine to rise up against the British mandate led in 1948 to bombings and later,
paradoxically, to the full honours given to an international statesman. However, it is
equally true that yesterday's statesmen can become today's terrorists or dictators,
and Saddam Hussein is one of these, the leader of a regime that 20 years ago was
regarded in the West as the "acceptable face of Islam", the secular bulwark against
the dangerous religious fanaticism emanating from Iran, and has now become the
hoarder of 'weapons of mass destruction'.
Whatever the power of weapons used, the sheer intensity of technological,
economic, social and political investment in warfare means that total warfare is much
more common than ever before. Since 1945, 90 per cent of the victims of war have
been civilians, not soldiers, and more than half of them have been women and
children (Alexander 2000). From the point of view of civilians trapped by warfare, it
matters not whether leaders are statesmen or tyrants: the only participatory activities
are to fight, run, hide or give oneself up to whatever fate is in store.
Like Afghanistan, Iraq is a seismic country (Fahmi and Alabbasi 1989). It also
suffers floods and droughts. What lessons for disaster management can be drawn
from the observation of contemporary warfare? Where do the parallels lie?
For both Iraq and Afghanistan, the management of natural disasters is
subordinate to the termination of conflict. Peace and security are preconditions for
the development of civil society and hence for civil protection. Commonly, hazard
mitigation follows a path from spontaneity to organization, with the latter often being
post hoc and therefore a fudge concocted to remedy inefficiencies. The alternative
requires forecasting of hazards, foresight in preparing for them and an adequate
consensus on the need for prior planning. Such a situation is not easily aimed at, as
the power structure of society, with its hierarchies and oligarchies, does not often
favour grass roots groups against the elite (Wisner et al. 1977), and ordinary citizens
seldom control the means of production. It follows that democracy, and not any
subversion of it, is at the heart of hazard mitigation (Blocker et al. 1991, Wolensky
and Miller 1983). Imposed solutions are implicitly flawed.
In Western societies one great challenge of the 21st century is to democratise
disaster management (Platt 1999, US NRC 1996). The aims of this process are to
encourage people to take responsibility for their own risk behaviour and safety, to
achieve a more participatory approach to disasters, to improve equity in relief,
reconstruction and recovery, to share decision-making, and to ensure that
democracy is safeguarded during the disruptive aftermath of disaster. In an age in
which 'disinformation' has replaced propaganda, we can only hope that the natural
disasters of the future will not suffer from the same disingenuousness as is
systematically applied to modern wars (Chomsky 1994).
It is often said that "there are no votes in sewage disposal". Likewise, political
capital is difficult to garner from disaster prevention. This is the result of the common
lapsus memoriæ between one disaster impact and the next. Bad emergency
preparedness often results from the historical shallowness that such fecklessness
promotes: many of the lessons of past catastrophes are all too easily forgotten. In
this respect, we must be honest with ourselves about history: a balanced view is
needed with historical depth, not with cognitive dissonance (Brehm and Cohen 1962,
cf. Hansen and Condon 1989).
As we move from the civil defence model, in which things are done on
people's behalf, to the civil protection model, in which people should be involved,
changes are required in attitude, political culture, organisation and method
(Alexander 2002). Good emergency preparedness needs institutions that are strong
on leadership but responsive and accommodating to their stakeholders, the public.
Dissent is as valuable in consensus in the case of wars of questionable justification.
Consensus is needed more than dissent in civil protection, but engagement is
needed first. People must face up to issues and vested interests, while leaders must
see the problem from the point of view of the beneficiaries (or victims).
Modern disasters are not 'acts of God' in any legal or operational sense; like
warfare they are acts of people. Opinions differ regarding the extent of culpability,
and students of disaster have expressed varying degrees of moral outrage (cf.
Bankoff 2001, Boyce 2000, Horlick-Jones 1995). Though in other respects it differs,
seen in this light the problem of natural disasters begins to merge with that of
warfare. It achieves almost complete synthesis in the modern 'complex emergency'
(Macrae and Zwi 1992).
The paradox of natural disasters in the early 21st century is that they are
converging with warfare in terms of causes, ethics, and operations. In Afghanistan
and Iraq, peace and stability are necessary preconditions for organising disaster
prevention. But elsewhere the threat of terrorism and the prevailing ethos of security
are beginning to override any consensus about fighting a common enemy--the flood,
earthquake or hurricane--that was once considered to be morally neutral. Warfare
thrives upon the polarisation of society: "Man's inhumanity to man / Makes countless
thousands mourn", as Robert Burns put it. Other forms of disaster should not fall
victim to that polarisation, for there has never been as much need for solidarity in the
world as there is now.
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