The Three Wars and The Alternative Consciousness

Sometimes, we are seized by a moralistic tendency to generate an ideal version of reality in which good unites with good to confront evil which, in turn, also unites with evil. On both sides, what is smaller and belongs to lower rank lines up behind what is larger and of a higher rank. However, such a “reality” never becomes real reality, as it is a wishful aspiration whose beautiful symmetry draws us in only to throw us into distress and frustration. What if we applied this solemn principle to Ukraine, for instance, and demanded that the Ukrainians refuse aid from Western countries because of the West’s bad position on the war in Gaza? Or if we demanded that nations suffering under the weight of their own disasters turn their attention to another just cause?
The Arab Levant has long complied with this proposal, which is, in essence, a dictate derived from police state regimes’ nationalist rhetoric that they have been imposed on their peoples to build their power and ensure longevity. In accordance with this dictate, Iraqis and Syrians, as they were languishing in Baathist prisons, were asked to confront colonialism and Zionism. These regimes were successful in this endeavor, and they were rewarded with long lives. On top of that, they transformed their dictate into a collective mindset through which everyone approached politics. As a result, we now see others, driven by lofty considerations and good intentions, arriving at similar conclusions, whether in practice or in theory.
However, if it is true that just causes eventually intersect somewhere “in the end,” the fact remains that the function of politics is to carve out this path that could, one day, lead us to this vague “end.” Mind you, this journey is brimming with twists and turns, and contradictions, even among the proponents of the just causes themselves, might surround it. The world- with its countries, interests, forms of consciousness, and reasons for conflict- has always been stronger than grand notions of good against evil. Believers who had embraced the same religions morphed into sects and factions, and that was long before communists who believed they had been fighting the same evil splintered into Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodians...
It has been argued, in a previous column, that three wars are raging in the Levant simultaneously: a war Israel is waging on Gaza, a war Iran and its militias are waging on the Levant, and a third war between Israel and Iran.
The first war, with its genocidal dimension, targets Palestinian national existence after the October 7 operation had opened the door to such a campaign. Its extreme levels of brutality and vengeance call for a conscientious and ethical stance in solidarity with the civilian victims that helps bring an end to their slaughter, just as it calls for solidarity with Palestinian national identity.
As for the second war, it targets a region that stretches from Iraq to Lebanon by transforming its societies into Iran’s own version of Lebensraum (living space), and its armies into militias and mercenaries, as well as by depriving its nations of any hope for a dignified future. This war also has a genocidal dimension, which we saw on full display in Syria, and in more subtle and “gentler” forms in other countries that are being systematically sucked dry.
The third war falls into the category of struggles for influence between two expansionist countries.
These wars intersect at several points, but they are neither a single war nor identical wars.
The most useful, and most accurate, approach to understanding them is to view them independently and compositely at the same time. Indeed, the hypothesis of a single cause, for which other causes dissolve and disappear, misrepresents reality in more than one sense. Its distortion is most evident in its obfuscation of contentious issues that are contentious because they had branched out into multiple wars and causes.
The concept of a single cause allows us to understand one thing and deprives us of awareness of many other things tied to local histories, the course of conflicts, the genesis of hostilities, and the various alignments of the various actors involved. It also makes us forget how foreign intervention can be rejected in one place and required in another. Even when it is said, in a concession to reality, that there is a central cause but it does not negate other causes, our lived experience suggests otherwise. When one war is granted the authority to issue fatwas regarding other wars, we are expected, sooner or later, to turn a blind eye (if not outright forgive) to those who are “capably” fighting in the supposedly central war. Many have recently acquitted those who had killed them in other wars.
In the mixing of everything with everything else, an extension of a tradition that has crushed countries, peoples, and the sovereignty of nations, countries are dragged into wars against their will. The imposition of such wars transforms into a threat to the little that is left of these countries’ national unity. Meanwhile, blatant lies are tasked with fabricating the outcomes of these wars. We must pretend to accept these lies, just as we are made to overlook the Resistance Axis rulers who had played a role in fueling strife and then went quiet when this strife lit the fuse of war. But all of these concerns become trivial when compared to the central war!
For this reason, it might be wiser to couple our duty to be in solidarity with Gaza with mutual acknowledgment of the multiplicity of causes and their particularities. If they are not grounded in a particular country, a specific lived experience, and a certain mood, positions are little more than short lived whims. Recognizing the danger inherent to ignoring these particularities is, by definition, not typically among the tasks of a legalistic mindset, nor is it something that a student at an American university is likely to do. It seems that the people of the region who have learned from their experiences are best qualified to understand and address such an issue.