Why War?
Today is loud with the cacophony of war. Suddenly there is an old conflict escalated anew, another front long simmering broken wide with bombs and missiles, threatening, justifying rhetoric, military targets destroyed, but also cities attacked — schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, factories, and civil life — the urban hearts of nations rendered into rubble. People are dying. Innocent people are dying. Why?
The Middle East has been, and clearly will remain, a disrupted place. Called “the cradle of civilization,” the place of origin for three of the major religions of the world, a crossroads for trade in goods, people, and ideas, a source for sacred texts, a site for sacred places to congregate and worship, an entwined system for education and learning. In my youth, I spent time exploring that region slowly with awe over the beauty, the history, and the culture that flourished there in a harsh, dry climate where it is very hard for things to grow. When you follow the courses of the Jordan, Tigres and Euphrates Rivers, you are following a line of life through a desert, deserted world, where the new monuments of civilization, the great cities worldwide, even the unexpected contemporary oases of Qatar and Doha seem impossible, a capital-driven expression of the modernist absurd.
Islam started there. Judaism was born there. Christianity was begun there. Three great religions that spread worldwide to provide belief and meaning in a world with little other comfort or safety from surviving day to day. Those doctrines and beliefs, encoded into instruction, encapsulated systems of idea, in so many ways similar, but in so many other ways different, coded as ideologies, assertions of identity, rules of conduct, immutable laws that affirmed their beliefs and disenfranchised the non-believers.
Those forces have been at each other for centuries. The stories are legend. The martyrs celebrated. The historical places enshrined. I wonder about the eternal ironies as we experience in our times similar conflicts of ideological certainties unwilling to respect, even acknowledge the other.
Why war? Why this war in the Middle East today? I am no validated historian, but, I say, that if you go back to the beginning at the origins of all the conflict, regardless of the theology and justice, it was all about the water. It was all about those rivers, and access to the sea, that was the source of life….and of the conflict, then and again now. It about who controls the water, the flow required to sustain the cities, the settlements, the agriculture, the necessary supply that everyone who lives there, then and now, needs to endure. No water? no food, no health, no life. It is not oil that matters, not even the wealth derived; it is the environment that, in the dispute and anger and destruction, is being destroyed, inevitably to render the victors as sick and destitute and displaced as the victimized. It is a sorry desiccated tale of ego and despair.
Each of the religions in conflict there has reverence in ritual for the healing powers of water. That drink from the river or the sea tastes the same in every swallow by every man, woman, and child who scoops it up as the water of life. Am I being romantic and ridiculous? I don’t think so. What if our water disappeared, appropriated by others who justify their taking in the context of religious nationalism and body/soul affirmation? What would we do if your water was taken away? What if access to our village well was taken away? What if we had no water for our crops and gardens, our animals, our children? What we do then?
Make war? Or share the water?
Water is peace. Water is life. Water is the future. Water is the natural order of things.
PETER NEILL is founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory, a web-based resource for science-based information and educational resources committed to the health and future of climate and ocean. Peter is host of World Ocean Radio, a weekly syndicated radio show and podcast upon which this blog is inspired.
