Thursday, June 7, 2012 by Common Dreams
'The Butter Battle Book' from Kabul
“On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall …
… my grandfather took me out to the wall.”
… my grandfather took me out to the wall.”
KABUL -- When we arrived at the museum, two legless men wheeled
themselves past us, traveling in wooden carts operated by a hand held
steering device. Inside Kabul’s OMAR museum, which houses ordnance and
land mines used in Afghanistan over four decades of warfare, there were
many more pictures of legless, armless and eyeless survivors of land
mine explosions lining the walls. The OMAR organization bravely
collects and defuses abandoned mines and cluster bomblets before they
can produce more casualties such as these (and casualties that are far,
far worse) among men, women, and children in Afghanistan.
And my mind, I suspect as a sort of defense mechanism, started going back repeatedly, as I studied the exhibits, to The Butter Battle Book.
Generations who were raised (or are raising others) on the children’s
books of Theodore Giesel aka “Dr. Seuss” may have recognized, above,
the opening lines of “The Butter Battle Book,” Dr. Seuss’s delightful
yet alarming parable of the cold war and its fragile nuclear stalemate,
with only the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) holding off
attempts by either side to exterminate the other, as an arms race
spiraled towards a potential World War III.
In Seuss’s story, the little boy’s grandfather schools him in the
rightness of their nation’s principles, and assures his grandson that at
last “the boys in the back room” have come up with the ultimate weapon,
so that the “Yooks”, who eat their bread butter-side-up, can finally
triumph over the “Zooks”, who eat theirs butter-side-down. He narrates
the arms race up to this point, from relatively harmless snick-berry switches through elephant-mounted slingshots to long-legged blue-goo spraying machines,
and how the hated Zooks would match each newfangled victory-promising
invention, inspiring the Yooks to escalate. “I’m here to say that if
Yooks can goo Zooks, you’d better forget it, ‘cause Zooks can goo
Yooks!” As his story unfolds, the grandfather cycles through shame and
elation depending on whether he is behind or in front of the latest
weapon, but when both sides develop the “bitsy big-boy boomeroo,”
fleeing to underground shelters in case it is deployed, even the
belligerent grandfather, perched atop the wall staring down his Zook
nemesis, is given cause to look nervous as the book unresolvedly ends: “’Grandpa’,
I shouted. ‘Be careful! Oh, gee! Who’s going to drop it? Will you?
Or will he…?’ ‘Be patient,’ said Grandpa. ‘We’ll see. We will see…’”
The book is bright, clever and shrewdly truthful. A simplification,
certainly, but to be comprehensible maps have to be simpler than the
terrain. There in the museum, memories of bringing Seuss’s colorful
and fanciful approach toward war and destruction into classes I taught,
three decades ago, helped me cope with the abject realities presented
by each curated display. How can anyone comprehend the actual madness
of developing round after ever-more-lethal round of sophisticated
explosives and killing devices, and in particular this selection of
devices, whether laid as a trap in the ground or rained from the skies
over a land that has taken its place among the poorest and most
desperate nations on Earth?
The dreary, rusted displays of murder devices, each encased in its
dusty glass box, all bore labels identifying the countries that had
manufactured each weapon and the relative explosive potential of each.
We learned that Afghanistan’s countryside is still littered with
remnants of HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) tracer missiles and rockets
made by the Chinese and the Soviets, High Explosive Anti-Personnel
projectiles from China, cluster munitions made by the Italians, Czechs,
Chinese and Russians, Soviet fragmentation bombs, Soviet plastic
explosive fragmentation bombs, US Claymore fragmentation bombs, plastic
land mines from Iran and Pakistan, British and Egyptian anti-tank
mines, plastic explosives from Italy, Belgium and Pakistan, plus mortar
bombs, rocket propelled grenade launchers and, displayed on shelves but
a few inches above the floor, the disused rifles, bullets and swords
from back at the start of this escalation, in the simpler, "snick-berry
switch" days of one-on-one small-scale violence.
A caption next to a dismantled mine explains how, upon activation of
the mine by an unwary soldier or grown or youthful civilian, a part
called the initiator (a small copper cartridge) would be pierced by a
striker pin causing a flame to pass through a hole to the
explosive-packed detonation chamber: the large hollow space we could see
on the left.
Another display case of bomblets from a cluster bomb noted that in
2001 the U.S. had dropped unnumbered cluster bombs each consisting of
exactly 202 bomblets. Many of the bomblets would not explode on
landfall but would wait years to be stepped on, or picked up, or else
driven over or ploughed through by an unsuspecting victim. They looked
like yellow building blocks that any unschooled child might take for a
plaything, as many had.
Our guide, a Pashtoon man from Jalalabad, had worked in mine
clearance for four years and then at the museum for three years. He
seemed friendly to us, but had admonished our friend Farhad, as we later
learned, that he had no right to befriend foreigners. “These
foreigners are not our friends,” he had told Farhad. “They are infidels.
They are coming only for their own benefit and not for the benefit of
the people, and they are only in the country to cause destruction and to
steal from us.”
"The crises in climate stability and global
health that international cooperation might have delayed or prevented...
crises we ignored in order to fight our butter battle. And our
resource wars brought us the chain of escalating economic detonations
that seems far from over."
We’re in Kabul, visiting with the young activists of the Afghan Peace
Volunteers, for the purpose of helping describe the consequences of war
as experienced by ordinary Afghans. But nearly every Westerner in the
country is there under the presumption of offering necessary help, and
Afghans understandably bristle when they see that many of them foster
unsustainable projects while earning large salaries. So why should he
have trusted us? Was he aware that the U.S. is spending 2 billion
dollars per week to maintain our part of the occupation of his country,
preparing and all-too-often employing a devastating arsenal of
state-of-the-art weapons, with even cyberspace wars planned to guarantee
U.S. control of resources and politics in his country?
I wonder what tiny fraction of U.S. weapon expenditure is devoted to
the never-ending work of mine clearance and disposal which so taxes the
resources, courage and dedication of the sparsely funded OMAR group.
Our guide insisted that before leaving we should all climb into a
very old plane parked outside the museum. Once inside, we realized that
the plane’s cabin had been converted into a classroom where children
visiting the museum were shown films about land mines – how villages
could go about clearing them, and how children could avoid them. They
were encouraged never to touch a land mine, to identify partially
exposed mines on sight, and to understand how terrible these weapons
are. With shock I remembered visiting the Intrepid Museum years before,
a converted U.S. aircraft carrier that is still moored at its pier in
Manhattan, and feeling outraged that the school teachers who had brought
their students there would allow the children to climb into the tiny
coin-operated facsimile bomber aircraft that let them aim bombs, using a
joystick, not even at individual humans but at whole countries, at maps
of Iraq and Central Asia, allowing them to imagine bombing whole
peoples, for fun, without seeing a single human face.
Elsewhere in Kabul, just before heading to the OMAR museum, we’d
informally met with a man whom we’d known for some time and who
confessed that in his earlier life he had been involved with gun running
and weapon distribution. It had been a desperately needed way to feed
his family. Now, he told us, he never wants his children to become
involved in handling, much less smuggling or employing weapons. His
life has changed - he has cultivated several gardens and is proud to
supply his family with food that he has grown himself.
Our guest nevertheless seemed quite savvy about weapon distribution
in Afghanistan today. He readily estimated percentages of ethnic
populations, within Afghanistan, that are armed. The butter-side ups
have this many – the butter-side-downs have these. So many of the
weapons had been handed out, first to this favored ally and then to
that, by the occupying forces who have so much more force to apply, and
much more than buttered bread to eat, but the same rapacious hunger for
victory and an apparent willingness to encourage any amount of
internecine warfare to divide the country and thereby satisfy its own
long-term aim of dominance.
Our next visit was with a group of university students hosting one of
many regular debates about current events relevant to Afghanistan. For
several hours, they engaged in thoughtful discussion about whether or
not Afghan people will be more secure now that an agreement has been
made to allow - at the minimum - ten more years of U.S. military
occupation, in and outside bases scattered across Afghanistan. One
student said that Afghans have no choice but to accept the forces, but
that the militarism contributes to an atmosphere in which everyone is
waiting for World War III.
It's a cliché, but in many ways World War III is starting, is already
underway. It's happening now. The crises in climate stability and
global health that international cooperation might have delayed or
prevented; incurable TB appearing as predicted in the slums of India,
uncontainable in the absence of anything resembling a healthcare system
and destined for worldwide spread; global warming data exceeding our
former worst-case scenarios. These were crises we ignored in order to
fight our butter battle. And our resource wars brought us the chain of
escalating economic detonations that seems far from over.
