War isn't funny

War is not funny. Instead, I say it's hilarious. Who would say such a daft thing about an event that it nearly always utterly tragic? Because, as I tell my students, if you don't laugh you'll end up crying.

I am slowly putting together a database of small conflicts of varying types for a much larger project on defeat. This entails lots of small wars in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America. Many of these conflicts are fought on a decidedly small scale with less than 5000 combatants on either side and lots of old Soviet and American equipment. They're also deadly because most are not the result of state on state action but based on tribal, ethnic or religious loyalties. When a war is tribal/ethnic/religious in nature that's your ticket to the sort of black humor that forces you laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Take Libya-Chad, mid-1980s. For nearly 15 years Gaddafi was hard at work trying to make his Southern neighbor into a follower state. Chad was already in disarray from the civil strife that occurred when authoritarian leader Francois Tombalbaye's rather dictatorial handle on things ignited a series of attacks and coup attempts, leading to his assassination in the early '70s.Gaddafi has supported various northern factions with weapons deliveries and, eventually, direct intervention. Chad was, for Muammar, his chance to attain regional hegemony with his oil money. By the early 1980s any stability Libya had brought to Chad dissipated when Libyan Army units were withdrawn to the Aouzou strip, a patch of desert that Gaddafi had forced Chad to succeed. The coalition Government was left to its own devices to fight the former leader, Habre, and his group who had been exiled in Dafur. By 1986-87 Habre and his FAN had succeeded in re-conquering Southern Chad. Best of all, FAN and Habre were dedicated anti-Gaddafi fighters. Habre' then began to transform what had been a 15 year civil struggle into a war of unity against Libyan invaders. Using fast moving battle groups Harbe's FANT (Chadian National Armed Forces) systematically destroyed or forced the withdrawal of all Libyan bases in Northern Chad. Even better, they began to make attacks on airbases deep inside Southern Libya.

Libya-Chad is a gut-buster. Gaddafi rotated his support between several groups and ultimately finds them all united behind an anti-Libyan group that uses Libyan presence as a source of unity. You can't make this up. God, Gaddafi must have been pissed. Think of all that expensive Soviet hardware that was used against Libyan forces, the same hardware Gaddafi has supplied to Chad in the last seven or eight years. That's the best part, all that support was eventually turned against him and used more effectively than Libya could ever hope for.

The 1987 war was appropriately named "The Toyota War" and gave the third world it's most potent weapon: the Technical. Find any pictures from the Libyan Civil War and you'll see hundreds of them with every conceivable weapon mounted. That's irony for you, the very weapon that banished Gaddafi from Chad was also used in his ultimate downfall.

Now there are depressing conflicts, wars that simply are dark with very little humor. The Sudan internal war, for example, is extremely depressing in the never ending massacres, small stakes and the inability for anybody to stop it, or even care. Luckily we have the likes of Gaddafi, Idi Amin, and others to perk us up, make us laugh and realize that we can find that streak of dark humor in war. We just need to look for it.