Neoconservatism's Lack of understand and compassion
By: Rambling Man122887 Published On: 8/2/2006 12:00:47 AM
The three greatest tests we are facing now are in the Environment, Global war, and the income inequality. On all three of these issues the United States Government is moving in the wrong direction. In this post I will only focus on Global War. I say Global war because I believe the world as a whole needs to make a concrete effort for global peace and when one takes a nationalistic view one looses sight of this goal, and has an us vs them mentality. This is why Bush and many in the US have looked at the death of 40,000 innocent Iraqi civilians as excusable for the sake of victory, while 2, 500 U.S. soldiers is a tragedy. The real truth from a humanitarian perspective is that this enormous loss of life is a great tragedy. The Iraqi death toll cannot be overlooked; civilian deaths are unacceptable and hurt the US cause. Because Iraq is in a civil war, the US is killing more and more civilians. To make matters worse, Donald Rumsfeld and the military do not seem to care. They refuse to give a body count of the Iraqi civilians because they are more concerned with protecting the administration+óGé¼Gäós political image then actually helping the Iraqi people. As a result, the Iraqi people are treated as subhuman, and they view the US presence as the problem. To see more about the rampant civilian casualty rate look at "What's an Iraqi Life Worth?", by Andrew J. Bacevich (appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section July 9th). The way the US treats civilians in Iraq represents a logical error in the premise for the war on terror and the war in Iraq. The Bush Administration and its supporters believe that we can bring peace to the world through our military power by destroying Al Qaeda and people whom we perceive as a threat. However, the logic of this plan falters because the Administration assumes that we can violently eliminate these terrorist groups and simultaneously bring peace to the region. But violence begets more violence and we cannot expect to make the world a better place by killing people. The death of Zarqawi did not end the insurgency, in fact violence has increased since his death. The Administration views terrorists as separate tumors that can be weeded out but terrorists arise because of the violence in society. Witness the Israeli-Lebanese Wars, and how the ongoing violence in the Middle East has encouraged this violence further. The second error in the logic in militarism is that a moral democracy can be created by the point of the gun. A democracy is peaceful and we can not force people into democracy through violence. We assume because we have a moral democracy our military might is automatically moral as well. This is not true. Might does not make right. We did not beat Saddam because we were a free society and he was a despot, we beat him because we spend trillions on our military and have the biggest and most powerful army in the world. Our aggressive militarism will encourage other nations to build up their armies, like our nuclear weapons spur other nations to seek nuclear weapons. Since Bush rattled his saber at the +óGé¼+ôaxis of evil+óGé¼-¥ in 2002, Iran and North Korea have increased their military build up, because they recognized that the Administration viewed national strength soley based on military power. Meanwhile, Iraq is a blood bath, because we thought we could build a stable country at the point of a gun.
Comments
You make some good points. (Lowell - 8/2/2006 6:02:49 AM)
How about some hard returns and paragraph breaks? Thanks.