The French and their European partners

Still, despite the confidence of the French Defence Minister,

concrete action looks far away. The U.N. Security Council

resolution calls on the Malian government and ECOWAS, a bloc

of West African states that includes Mali, to jointly prepare

a plan to retake the country’s north. While ECOWAS nations

all share concerns over the havoc in Mali spreading across

its borders, there are pronounced deficits in trust between

various parties. Moreover, as related in a report published

in late September by the International Crisis Group, a

Brussels-based think tank, the ECOWAS armies are accustomed

mostly to conflict in forested areas and will need

considerable help to launch a successful campaign in the

Malian Sahel. The bloc, says the ICG report, “displays a

rhetorical ambition that goes beyond its capacity to deliver.

”

The French and their European partners say they will provide

training and logistical support to the Malian army, but will

not put any boots on the ground. Though it’s clear that most

Western countries, especially the U.S., have no desire to get

mired in yet another military imbroglio abroad, many analysts

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have difficulty imagining a successful operation into

northern Mali without direct foreign—specifically French—

assistance, involving possible air strikes and intelligence

sharing. Considering the operational difficulties France

faced during last year’s Libyan mission, it’s all the more

likely the U.S. would be dragged into Mali’s conflict to

some extent.

The abject mess the Malian army finds itself in doesn’t

help, either: in March, disaffected units led by Captain

Amadou Sanogo toppled the civilian government. A quashed

counter-coup in April involving some of its most crack

regiments led to more fissures in the military. Power in the

capital, Bamako, is now awkwardly shared by a civilian

president and prime minister installed by ECOWAS as well as

Sanogo, ensconced in the barracks town of Kati in Bamako’s

environs. At the same time, an emboldened ethnic Touareg

insurgency, joined by Islamist factions and armed with

weapons lifted from Muammar Gaddafi‘s arsenals in Libya,

swept through the country’s restive north and declared it an

independent country.

along with Ellen Spiro

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One surprise about the picture is that the co-director, along with Ellen Spiro, was Phil Donahue, who has smiled in many a television viewer's home. He and Spiro have put together a well-shot, adroitly edited work that will, as usual, have very little of the effect that the makers wanted it to have.
But it does summon a disturbing question. As with Vietnam, objection to Iraq raises the matter of basic validity. An argument against Body of War might be that it attacks only what it considers to be an unjust war, not war itself. (During the Vietnam War, it was unpopular to say that young people were protesting the war--understandably enough--to save their own skins. When the risk to them diminished, so did the antiwar protests.) If Donahue and Spiro supported the Iraq war, would they have made a film about a wounded soldier?


My Brother Is an Only Child joins the growing list of inexplicable titles. This Italian film deals with the lives of two brothers in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they have sharp differences, and though the conclusion is violent, nothing justifies the alienation that the title suggests.
All through the picture, I kept being reminded of The Best of Youth (2003), a three-hour film that dealt with young Italians maturing and changing. The screenplay of that picture was not good enough for its cast and direction: the script wobbled, while everything else was steadfast. I felt the same about My Brother. When I looked at its credits, I saw that two of the screenplay's three authors were Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, who had written The Best of Youth.

it was quite possible for an individual soldier to be

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Hospital nurses and visitors, Whitman best known among them, tried to notify kin of soldiers' fates, and an entrepreneurial cohort of paid agents emerged in the Union and the Confederacy offering to find missing soldiers for a fee. But family members often had to take matters into their own hands, running personal advertisements or--like Whitman initially did in search of his brother George-- traveling to hospitals and battlefields in desperate hope of news. By the middle of the war, the United States Sanitary Commission began to organize the work of information collection and dissemination, not to mention of handling the dead, for those in the North--a harbinger of death's bureaucratic and state- building manifestations. Yet for all this, as Faust poignantly observes, it was quite possible for an individual soldier to be "entirely lost--a circumstance many civilians found difficult to fathom."


II.
Most of the soldiers who died during the Civil War succumbed to disease rather than to battle wounds. Still, the body counts (killed and wounded) after battles and campaigns seem staggering and ever escalating: 3,600 at the First Bull Run, 20,000 at Shiloh, 30,000 during the Seven Days, 23,000 at Antietam, as many as 51,000 at Gettysburg, almost 70,000 during the Virginia campaigns in the spring of 1864. Greater firepower and accuracy, chiefly through the advent of muzzle-loading rifles, help to explain the new lethality of battle; so, too, do the intimacy and ferocity of the battlefields, where soldiers fought and shot their way through woods, thickets, and scrub at relatively close range. The overwhelming majority of those killed or wounded (more than 90 percent, Faust tells us) were hit by mini-balls, some shot from the rifles of sharpshooters who gained reputations as cold-blooded murderers. Although many soldiers struggled with the necessity of killing--this was part of the "work" of death, too, demanding, as Orestes Brownson put it, "the harder courage" and posing a number of cultural problems (and there is some evidence of soldiers failing to discharge their weapons), "vengeance came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty and self-defense in legitimating violence."