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[ by Charles Cameron — terminology of war ]
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I have a question:

Do we have or need a term for the kind of situation where one nation, while ostensibly at peace with another, fights them by means that are plausibly deniable –- I’m thinking a campaign of sabotage, computer viruses, assassinations -– whose leaders when asked if they would care to deny them, smile like so many Cheshire Cats?

This certainly seems to be one mode of the continuation of politics by other means — and once war is declared, it would fold itself into war itself as covert and info ops — but I was wondering: is there a name for this, or do we perhaps need a name for it, in “peacetime”, as one of the forms of warfare?

I pinged Mark on this, since he’d know better than I, and he replied:

There is no legal term for such a state.

Individually, these actions either constitute “violations of sovereignty” or “criminal acts” depending on how the state chooses to interpret them, until they consider them “an act of war” (i.e. mining harbors, sabotage, assassination) and act diplomatically. Until then it is a state of “peace” under International Law.

Which leaves me wondering: is it about time we had a name for this kind of war, which the United States and / or Israel may plausibly – and deniably – be waging at against Iran as we speak?

Would it be useful to have a term for, and a legal doctrine about, campaigns of this sort?

[ by Charles Cameron, h/t Mike Few — bananas, cucumbers, tomatos and piano legs as sexual objects, reading the world as a book, Iraq recently, Shakespeare a while back, Robert Hooke ]
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Louis XV grand piano legs, hard maple. Image credit: http://www.balaams-ass.com/grandlegs.htm

MikeF in a comment on my post, Let me put my banana in your fruitbasket, pointed us to his Small Wars Journal article The Break Point: AQIZ Establishes the ISI in Zaganiayh, in which he reports that the Mujahedeen Shura Council in Iraq passed out propaganda pamphlets providing “instruction on the proper actions of good Muslims” in preparation for the establishment of an Islamic State of Iraq. One example of “proper actions” given was as follows:

One cannot eat tomatoes and cucumbers together because one is male and the other is female. This action is immoral. Failure to comply will result in death.

Think long and hard on that one!

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By way of light relief:

Frederick Marryat‘s 1839 book A Diary in America, in which he describes (as his title stipulates) American, not British, customs, seems to be the source of the idea that the (British, the urban legend having undergone a transatlantic metamorphosis here) Victorians covered the Legs (think: ankles, see diagram above) of their pianos for modesty’s sake.

Marryat, a credulous fellow as Matthew Sweet describes him in his Inventing the Victorians (p. xiii.), may well have been being teased when told this tale by his American friends. In any case, he reported that in an American girl’s school he visited, the head mistress “to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge” had “dressed all four limbs” of the school piano “in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!”

“Was this practice ever pursued, even in America?” Sweet asks sweetly, and answers himself: “Probably not.” And further, “whatever the case, the synecdochic relationship that now exists between Victorian sensibilities and the clothed piano leg is wholly fraudulent.”

Sweet is marvelous on this whole business, going on about it for pages. Most useful for my own purposes is his quotation from Richard Sennett‘s (1986) The Fall of Public Man, which argues:

that cultural change, leading to the covering of the piano legs, has its roots in the very notion that all phenomena speak, that human meanings are immanent in all phenomena.

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And a tad more seriously…

Interestingly enough, that very notion is indeed to be found in Islam, where the Qur’an asserts that nature is to be read like a scripture. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

The Quran refers constantly to the world of nature as well as to the human order. The sky and the mountains, the trees and animals in a sense participate in the Islamic revelation, through which the sacred quality of the cosmos and the natural order is reaffirmed. The sacred scripture of Islam refers to the phenomena of nature as ayat (“signs” or “portents”), the same term used for its verses and the signs that appear within the soul of human beings according to the famous verse: “We shall show our portents (ayat) upon the horizons and within themselves, until it be manifest unto them that it is the Truth” (41:53). Natural phenomena are not only phenomena in the current understanding of the term. They are signs that reveal a meaning beyond themselves. Nature is a book whose ayat are to be read like the ayat of the Quran; in fact, they can only be read thanks to the latter, for only revelation can unveil for fallen man the inner meaning of the cosmic text. Certain Muslim thinkers have referred to the cosmos as the “Quran of creation” or the “cosmic Quran” (al-Qur’an al-takwini), whereas the Quran that is read every day by Muslims is called the “recorded Quran” (al-Qur’an al-tadwini). The cosmos is the primordial revelation whose message is still written on the face of every mountain and tree leaf and is reflected through the light that shines from the sun, the moon, and the stars. But as far as Muslims are concerned, this message can only be read by virtue of the message revealed by “the recorded Quran.”

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This view is not solely an Islamic one: Duke Senior, exiled to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare‘s As You Like It (Act II Scene 1) declares:

And this our life: exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

And if Shakespeare be considered too worldly a source, here is Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century):

For this whole visible world is a book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine power … But just as some illiterate man who sees an open book looks at the figures but does not recognize the letters: just so the foolish natural man who does not perceive the things of God outwardly in these visible creatures the appearances but does not inwardly understand the reason. But he who is spiritual and can judge all things, while he considers outwardly the beauty of the work inwardly conceives how marvellous is the wisdom of the Creator.

More recently and less theologically, the scientist Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703), friend of Robert Boyle and discoverer of Hooke’s Law, wrote that in the interests of science it was:

much to be wisht for and indeavored that there might be made and kept in some Repository as full and compleat a Collection of all varieties of Natural Bodies as could be obtain’d, where an Inquirer might be able to have recourse, where he might peruse, and turn over, and spell, and read the Book of Nature, and observe the Orthography, Etymologia, Syntaxis, and Prosodia of Natures Grammar, and by which, as with a Dictionary, he might readily turn to and find the true Figures, Composition, Derivation, and Use of the Characters, Words, Phrases and Sentences of nature written with indelible, and most exact, and most expressive Letters, without which Books it will be very difficult to be thoroughly a Literatus in the Language and Sense of Nature.

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All of which is to say that it may be unwise to read spiritual texts in too literal a manner.

[ by Charles Cameron — vendetta, vengeance, an eye for an eye, compensation, forgiveness, and the question of limits ]
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I didn’t want this pair of events to slip by entirely unnoticed.

The first image above shows part of the “wanted” poster with which Rabbi Menachem Liebman offered a $100,000 reward to whoever would kill Huliad and Nidar Ramadan, recently released by Israeli authorities as part of the prisoner-swap for Gilad Shalit, who had previously been convicted of killing his own son, Shlomo Liebman, a settlement security guard.

The second, lower image is taken from the reciprocating offer of a $100,000 reward made by Dr Awad al-Qarni on Facebook, to whoever who would capture an(other) Israeli soldier.

These things tend to escalate.  According to this AllGov report, Prince Khaled bin Talal of Saudi Arabia commented that “Dr Awad al-Qarni said he was offering $100,000 to only take a prisoner but they [unnamed in the original Reuters report, but presumably Israelis] responded by offering $1 million to kill Awad al-Qarni” – and himself pledged an additional $900,000 to the bounty on the capture of Israeli soldiers, bringing the total to $1 million.

Accompanying this story on the AllGov site, appositely enough, was this illustrated quote from Mohandas Gandhi:

For those who have trouble killing Ramadan brothers or capturing Israeli soldiers, lesser rewards are also available in the United States: this article reports that a “$4,000 reward has been offered for the identity of the police officer who may have been responsible for the injuries sustained by former Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen” during the Oakland Occupy protests recently.

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Juvenal wrote Semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas Ultio — “revenge is the weak pleasure of a narrow mind”.

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Let’s think about this for a moment.

Lex talionis is the law of limited retribution – one eye for one eye – found (following similar texts in the code of Hammurabi) in the Mosaic law, Exodus 21.23-25 requiring “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”  The rabbis, however, commented that “inasmuch as the law seeks equity, its literal enforcement would frequently lead to gross inequity” [W Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p 571. n. 6.] – and chose to interpret the text as mandating equivalent monetary compensation for value lost.

Tit for tat is a common expression of the same idea, and has also been used in a technical sense in strategies for the iterative playing of Prisoners Dilemma games referred to in my previous post.

Christ‘s injunction in Matthew 5.38-39 reads:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Similarly in the Qur’an, 41:34-35, Muslims are instructed:

Nor can goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (evil) with what is better: Then will he between whom and thee was hatred become as it were thy friend and intimate!

Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, suggests in Journal of Discourses vol 2, pg 165-166 that such forbearance is appropriate the first time, but not thereafter:

Our enemies have prophesied that we would establish our religion by the sword; is it true? No, but if Missouri will not stay her cruel hand in her unhallowed persecutions against us, I restrain you not any longer: I say, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the authority of the Holy Priesthood, I this day turn the key that opens the heavens to restrain you no longer from this time forth. I will lead you to battle; and if you are not afraid to die, and feel disposed to spill your blood in your own defence, you will not offend me. Be not the aggressor—bear until they strike you on the one cheek; then offer the other and they will be sure to strike that then defend yourselves, and God will bear you off, and you shall stand forth clear before His tribunal.

The New Testament, however, suggests that this forbearance is not to be exercised only on the first occasion…  Thus in Matthew 18.21-22 we read:

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus said to him, I say not to you, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Also of interest is here the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Dalai Lama, who was asked how he would deal with a mosquito. “Brush it away,” he replied. “But what if it comes back?” “Brush it away again.” “But what if it comes back again?” “I crush it, and say ‘Come back as the Buddha!'”

For a detailed consideration of these issues in Islam, see Abdullah bin Hamid Ali‘s Islam and Turning the Other Cheek [.pdf], where this interesting discussion featuring the idea of forgiveness “seventy times” is also featured:

The Koran directs the Prophet — God’s mercy and peace be upon him — concerning the hypocrites, “Whether you ask for their forgiveness, or not, [their sin is unforgiveable]: if you ask seventy times for their forgiveness, Allah will not forgive them because they have rejected Allah and His messenger, and Allah guides not those who are perversely rebellious” (9: 80). After the death of the chief hypocrite, ‘Abd Allah ibn Ubayy, the Prophet — mercy and peace on him — saw no decisive prohibition in this verse against praying for hypocrites. This was, firstly, because outwardly the words give him a choice between asking forgiveness or not (Whether you ask for their forgiveness, or not…). Secondly, the verse mentions that God would not forgive even if he was to ask seventy times. His hope was that if he asked more than seventy times, it might be enough to secure forgiveness for Ibn Ubayy in spite of his open and insidious antagonism of the Prophet — mercy and peace on him. His companion, ‘Umar, contested this understanding of the Prophet’s — God’s mercy and peace be upon him. Later, the following verse was revealed confirming ‘Umar’s stance, “Nor do you ever pray for any of them that dies, nor stand at his grave; for they rejected Allah and His messenger, and died in a state of perverse rebellion” (9: 84)

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Perhaps Koholeth (Ecclesiastes 3.1) should have the last word:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven