“The onslaught was relentless. I have never seen this in
the last three decades of ethnic conflict.”
Sri Lankan Villager, April 2006
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No opposing massed armies – with tens of thousands of infantry, hundreds and hundreds of heavily armored tanks, long-range artillery lined hub to hub and supported by flotillas of combat aircraft so numerous they block the sun – took to the field of battle in 2006. Nonetheless, the number of overt armed interventions by an outside power in another nation’s civil war increased, reversing a trend away from internationalized conventional armed conflict and transforming civil war into regional war.
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Civil strife in Sudan’s western area of Darfur feeds unrest in Chad and Central African Republic.
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Ugandan and Rwandan rebels continue to use southern Sudan and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as bases from which to launch attacks.
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The never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict engulfed the Levant in a 33-day war between Hezbollah and Israel, with Lebanese and Israeli civilians bearing the brunt of the effects.
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Somalia’s weak transitional government swept to power in the last two weeks of the year, propelled by Ethiopian tanks and planes.
Similarly, while luck, reason, and even loss of nerve have spared the world a repetition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 2006 saw North Korea apparently testing and Iran steadily mastering the technology needed to develop a nuclear device. The Bush administration’s response to North Korea and Iran, unlike in Iraq, has been diplomatic, not military. The supreme irony in this is that no nuclear weapons existed or were actively being pursued in the war this White House chose to fight. Once again, therefore, as in the Cold War, conventional and not nuclear arms prove to be the real weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, throughout the globe, war remained a consummate human experience in 2006, as the war count shows.
