Fundamentalism (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 05, 2008, 11:44 (5658 days ago) @ David Turell

David thinks I am wrong about Iraq, and asks: "If there is a mass killer in a shopping mall do you gun him down, or turn the other cheek and get shot yourself? Are we our brother's keeper?" - You are right that this is a question of international ethics, and there is no simple answer. But firstly, what you do not do is rush into the mall, all guns blazing, slaughtering hundreds of innocent bystanders in order to get the killer. This is what the Americans and British have done, and I feel no pride in the fact that it is now us, and not Saddam, who are responsible directly or indirectly for the millions of Iraqi dead, injured, orphaned or displaced. I wonder how many of your fellow citizens also consider the deaths of 4000 US soldiers (not to mention 30,000 injured) a price worth paying. - Secondly, the war was not started in order to bring down a brutal dictator. Our leaders informed us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ... probably an outright lie, but at best an abject failure of intelligence. They claimed that he could use them within 45 minutes, and then they proceeded to give him weeks' notice that they were planning to invade. What made them so sure that he wouldn't use them during the build-up? "Regime change" was the excuse brought in when the WMD line was exposed as a total fraud (as was the claim that Saddam had links with Al-Qaida). - You ask about Darfur and the Congo, and one could add a dozen more such cases (e.g. Burma, Tibet, Zimbabwe). You are right that the UN seems toothless, just as the League of Nations was, but I'm not convinced that a consortium of the most powerful states acting "as a world policeman" is the answer. The falsehoods on which the invasion of Iraq was based raise the problem connected with being "our brother's keeper". What happens when a powerful state is motivated by a mixture of self-interest, greed, ignorance, and not by the humanitarian code that ought to govern us all? Countries are only as honest as their leaders, and Iraq is an example of the terrible consequences of such ill-motivated interference. What you call the most powerful states were mainly opposed to the invasion (e.g. France, Russia, Germany), but Britain and America went ahead all the same, so who would control this "world policeman"? George W. Bush? Vladimir Putin? Hu Jintao? - Of course we shouldn't stand idly by and watch Darfur and the Congo tear themselves to pieces, but the solution is not for American and British soldiers to go in with guns blazing, as they did in Iraq. For all its faults and weaknesses, I see the UN as the only hope ... through diplomacy, humanitarian aid, and eventually perhaps peacekeeping forces that are strong enough to maintain a balance. Powerful individual countries like the US, the UK, Russia, China cannot be trusted to act in the interests of other nations. It has to be an international body, and the UN is the only one we have.