Kemstone's Journal

I’ve remained silent on the Libya issue until now for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that it’s taken me a long time to settle on a position. Even now my opinion is highly nuanced and subject to change as the situation develops and more information comes to light. Normally I’ll only write a blog post when I feel very strongly about something or I have an opinion that I don’t see being expressed much elsewhere, but since this is a rather significant event in modern American history I feel obliged to write down my thoughts even if they’re neither unique nor firmly held.

The question of whether the United States should have gotten involved in the conflict between Gadhafi and the rebels seeking to overthrow him can be approached from two basic standpoints: intentions and consequences. If we take the stated intentions of President Obama at face-value, it seems we did the right thing going in. Gadhafi did promise to murder many thousands of his own people, and if the prevention of genocide isn’t a justifiable reason to use military force then I don’t know what is. I think we have a moral obligation to prevent genocide wherever and whenever we can.

However, it’s hard to justify intervening in Libya when we didn’t also intervene in Rwanda, the Sudan, and Darfur. It calls our motives into question when we selectively intervene like this, and the fact that Libya has oil while these other countries don’t taints the entire moral calculation as to whether or not our intentions here are correct.

But when all is said and done, oil or no oil, consistency or inconsistency, I think it’s better to have done something than to have done nothing. As one commentator said, I’d rather prevent some genocide some of the time than to prevent no genocide any time.

As for judging the rightness of our actions based on the consequences, this is almost impossible at this early stage. We may help the rebels topple Gadhafi and pave the way for a bourgeoning democracy, in which case history will judge our actions quite kindly. We might fail to oust Gadhafi and genocide will occur anyway, in which case all we’ll have done is waste a lot of resources. And we might find ourselves locked in yet another quagmire from which we can’t seem to extract ourselves no matter how many allies initially went in with us, in which case we’ll have another Iraq- or Afghanistan-like situation on our hands and we’ll have to judge Obama just as harshly as we judged Bush for getting us into a mess with no clear plan for getting us out.

But for now, we seem to have prevented Gadhafi from murdering thousands of his own people, so from a standpoint of consequences I would still judge our actions correct at the moment.

Of course it’s even more complicated when you consider some of the side-issues involved here. For one, I think we did the right thing by acting under the banner of the United Nations, letting France make the first move and handing off leadership as soon as possible. The last thing we want is to reinforce the perception of those in the Muslim world that we’ll use any excuse we can to drop bombs on Muslim countries. I think that if we play our cards right, this could really help us change the narrative of Muslim perceptions of the United States. In this case, at least, we are siding with the people against their brutal dictator. If we did this more consistently, I think it would be a far more effective tactic in the “war on terror” than any occupation ever could.

However, we can’t escape the possibility that this whole thing could backfire. If we help the rebels topple Gadhafi and then pull out and say, “you’re on your own” and the situation descends into chaos and violence, we might very well be blamed. Once you extend your hand to help one side win a fight, it could look very bad for us to pull our hand away when the initial fight is over. Conversely, if we stick around to help the freed Libyans in the aftermath of their revolution, we could be perceived as once again meddling in affairs we have no business sticking our noses in. Making sure this is a multi-national operation will help to mitigate that perception, but I worry we may soon find ourselves in a lose-lose situation.

Then there’s the issue of whether Barack Obama should have sought congressional approval for this military action. I am personally very uncomfortable with the idea of the imperial presidency, so I would have liked to see some discussion about this before we went in. I don’t like how the president can just plunge our nation into an international conflict without giving our representatives a chance to debate the merits in public and the media a chance to delve into the details for the sake of the public’s understanding.

From a pragmatist’s standpoint, however, I understand why this particular president would have chosen to bypass this particular congress at this particular moment in American politics. The Republicans will seize any opportunity to weaken the president no matter what the consequences, and handing them a chance to obstruct this military action for the sake of scoring political points would not have been worth the potential loss of tens of thousands of Libyan lives. Still, I would rather have seen some more discussion about this before we went in, and I’m very wary of the idea that any future president can bomb any country for any reason without seeking the approval of the American people in any way.

The final point I want to make is perhaps the only opinion I hold with 100% conviction, and that is that every American with a shred of respect for logic has to admit that the Republican Party has no interest in either ideological consistency or what is best for this country. I don’t think anyone who is honest with themselves could believe that had George W. Bush done the exact same thing in this situation, the Republicans who are currently criticizing Obama wouldn’t have supported him 100%. It should be abundantly clear to any rational person that Republicans and the commentators on Fox News will criticize Obama for anything, for any reason, no matter how much it contradicts positions they’ve previously held.

Either he shouldn’t have intervened at all, he should have intervened sooner, or in Newt Gingrich’s case both—depending on which day you ask. Some who cheered for the Iraq invasion now jeer American intervention as though they’ve always been opposed to it. Some who derided anyone who criticized Bush’s policies at a time of war as “unpatriotic” and accused them of “demoralizing the troops” are the very same people who are now criticizing Obama’s policies at a time or war. Somehow it doesn’t “embolden the enemy” to criticize a Democratic president at a time of war, only a Republican.

And last but certainly not least by far—any Republican who called for intervention (either before or after the actual intervention) should be forced to explain to the American people why we can afford to pay for foreign military campaigns but we have to cut pay for middle-class workers, take away food stamps and heating assistance from the poor, slash Social Security and Medicare, de-fund NPR, bust up the unions, and do all of these other things they insist we must do for the sake of “fiscal responsibility”. If we can afford to send hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles to Northern Africa, I think we can afford to hand out a few food stamps.

So these are my thoughts on the Libya question at this point in time. I rarely support the president these days, but on this one I think he did the right thing (although I do have my reservations about his failure to involve Congress). I’m not an ideological pacifist or an isolationist—I do think violence can be justified to prevent more violence and I do think stronger nations ought to defend weaker ones—and I think this falls into the narrow category of morally justifiable military actions. I just wish we were more consistent.

It is positively inspiring to see what’s happening in Tunisia and Egypt these days. When the Tunisian people successfully ousted their corrupt rulers, the Ben Ali family, I wrote about how this may be just the tip of the iceberg in a new global era of human rights through a series of revolutions brought about by the unprecedented powers of communication available to ordinary people through the internet. Inspired by their success, the Egyptian people are now attempting a revolution of their own and appear to be right on the verge of ousting their own leader, Mubarak.

If this trend continues, there is good reason to be optimistic about humanity’s long-term future. The internet contributed enormously to help the people of Tunisia and Egypt get a clearer view of what life was like outside their countries and show them that things could be better. It’s what allowed them to read leaked documents confirming that their governments were corrupt, and it’s what allowed them to organize their uprisings and get the word out to the rest of the world. If the internet can help to facilitate this much change after only a couple of decades in existence, imagine what it has the potential to do over the course of the next century.

I won’t delve into the details of what’s happening in Egypt. The Huffington Post has a great live feed of the latest news as it breaks, and this piece by an Egyptian who returned there from America in the midst of the uprising paints a wonderfully vivid picture of the situation on the ground for those who are interested. I only want to make a point that I hope I start hearing more often in the American media:

This should prove once and for all that United States military force is not required to advance the ideals of freedom and democracy elsewhere in the world. When people suffer under corrupt or brutal regimes and those regimes continuously ignore the plight of the people while their abuses of power grow more and more egregious, eventually a tipping point is reached and the people rise up against them. True democracy can only established from the ground up—it can’t be imposed by an external force.

When weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq, the people responsible for that invasion started pretending that the actual justification was to liberate the Iraqi people, and now they claim that because Saddam Hussein is gone the whole operation can be considered a success. Something similar can be said about Afghanistan—while 9/11 was the initial reason for going in, our rationale for staying there now is to prevent the Afghan people from having to suffer under the brutal rule of the Taliban.

Well, the events in Egypt and Tunisia should blow giant holes straight through these justifications, as one can easily imagine the Iraqi people eventually overthrowing Saddam Hussein themselves, or the Afghan people eventually rising up against the Taliban and achieving for themselves the goal that the United States is supposedly aiming to achieve for them. Both revolutions could conceivably result in far fewer civilian casualties than those we’ve inflicted, as neither the governments of Iraq or Afghanistan nor their oppressed peoples have F-16s or predator drones.

While we all would love to see the people of the Middle East enjoy the same kinds of freedoms we have, trying to force these ideals on societies that may not be ready for them almost always results in disaster. And more importantly, the regimes that we have set up in these countries are not really any more democratic than those they replaced. They may be less brutal, but they are still corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the people. We didn’t bring real democracy to these people—we merely replaced their old leaders with leaders more willing to play ball with us.

Revolutions that happen organically may not be in the best interests of the United States, but we have to accept that. Indeed, this particular revolution in Egypt is quite the inconvenience for our government today, as Mubarak was one of those leaders willing to play ball. If a new regime takes power, it may not cooperate so easily but it will be far more legitimate.

For a revolution to succeed it must be driven by the will of the people. We may wish that the people of the Middle East would hurry up and demand their basic human rights for the poor, for women, homosexuals, non-Muslims, and every other oppressed group, but rather than try to force these changes through military might we ought to be patient and trust that these changes will happen on their own just as they happened here. The people out in the streets of Egypt today are the younger generation who grew up with the internet and who are well aware of how much better life can be for their fellow citizens. As time goes on this knowledge will become more widespread, more universally accepted, and eventually a tipping point will be reached in each and every society in which the people demand fundamental changes. At least that’s what we should hope for.

[If you share my hope for a worldwide transformation over the next century, I hope you’ll consider joining Revolution Earth.]

Trouble is hardly ever not brewing on the Korean peninsula, but things have been heating up recently. As the crazed über-narcissistic dictator Kim Jong Il hands the reins of power over to his young and presumably equally narcissistic son Kim Jong Un, North Korea seems to be itching for war with their South Korean enemies. Between the testing of nuclear missiles and this past week’s artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine this escalating into full-scale war.

If that happens, I’ll do something I’ve never done before in my lifetime and advocate for the U.S. military to get involved in the conflict. The South Koreans are our allies and it would be wrong of us to stand idly by as the Kims of North Korea attempt to kill millions of them and subjugate the rest. Those living under the North Korean regime have been handed one of the unluckiest lots in life imaginable, and it would be a moral error to let that regime expand and doom another population to the same fate. It would be just as wrong as letting Adolf Hitler conquer Europe.

I say this as someone who vehemently opposed the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan before it started. I didn’t think conventional military tactics were the right approach to stopping terrorism. A nation-state didn’t attack us on 9/11. A small group of people who hate us did, and dropping bombs on their fellow Muslims and killing innocent civilians seemed like the most counter-productive response possible. That would only lead to more terrorism, and more hatred of the U.S. internationally.

Now, if war breaks out in the Korean peninsula it will be an entirely different matter. North Korea is an actual nation-state with an actual military made up of actual soldiers. An act of aggression on their part against South Korea would absolutely call for military intervention. We’d be fighting a country as opposed to an ideology.

The potential benefits of such a scenario are actually enormous. If the U.S. is suddenly confronted with a real war against a real enemy, it would have a clarifying effect on the wars of the last decade. The very juxtaposition of these two types of wars would highlight their differences in a way that we’ve never seen before in our history, and even without having to reflect on it too hard both liberals and conservatives alike would be able to understand why one kind is justified and the other is not.

A war against a Hitler-like aggressor with an actual military would bring the country together like it hasn’t been since WWII, and our political parties might just put aside their bickering for a brief historical moment to deal with a real threat to world peace (though I admit that’s a pretty big might, seeing as how the Republicans have shown us that they’re not above playing politics with matters of international security).

It would also give us a good reason to completely pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, as we couldn’t possibly fight three wars on three fronts at the same time. This would then lead to a restoration of the image of America abroad, as the rest of the world will see us actually doing what we’ve only been pretending to do for the last few decades: defending freedom.

A war fought for noble purposes as opposed to one fought for corporate profits would go a long way to restoring the world’s faith in America, and Americans’ faith in themselves.

All that said, I do not believe such a restoration would be worth the loss of so many Korean lives and the lives of American soldiers, so I sincerely hope that North Korea is just flexing its muscles and that the ultimate result of the death of Kim Jong Il will be peace rather than war.

I wish I’d never heard her name. From the moment I read about her story two years ago, all I’ve wanted to do is forget it. I initially hated the blogger from whom I first heard about it, wishing he’d made the point he wanted to make without using such a mind-numbingly horrific story to do so. But as the months went by I kept hearing about her, each time confronted with new and increasingly sickening details about the event. I was bound to hear about her at some point, and as long as her story is out there I’ll never be able to forget it. It’s already so firmly entrenched within the neural fibers of my brain that it can never come out—images of the scene as I picture it all-too-frequently flash before my mind with only the slightest hint of an association, dragging me down to depths that can take minutes, hours or even days to recover from.

I last heard the story on a recent podcast of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, and while that was two nights ago I still find myself looking at the world through darkened lenses because of it. The only thing I can do is to write about it and hope to find some clarity through that.

If anyone reading this doesn’t know the story of Aisha, you might want to consider not reading this and sparing yourself the psychological/emotional torture that I’ve been enduring since the story was sprung upon me without warning. I’m writing this mostly for myself, and for anyone else who might be struggling with the same feelings and for whom a written account of another person’s thoughts might be helpful.

Almost everyone is aware of the practice of “honor killings” in which Muslim women are murdered for adultery. Nearly every week there’s another story in the news about a woman killed by her own family for being with another man. Sometimes no actual adultery is committed—the woman need only be alone in a room with a man who isn’t her husband to earn a death sentence. Occasionally the punishment will be as sickening as mutilation or as horrifying as being buried alive, as some young teenage girls recently were because they dared to flirt with boys their own age.

And yet nothing is worse than what happened to poor Aisha. Her story remains the single most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of thing that makes me look at humanity and almost wish that our species had never evolved to the point where we became capable of such things.

Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was a 13-year-old Somali girl who committed the ‘unforgivable crime’ of being gang-raped by three men and then reporting it to the local authorities in the Kiyasmu region, the al-Shabab militia. Under certain interpretations of Islam, letting oneself be raped is akin to adultery, and the punishment for adultery in Kiyasmu is death by stoning.

On October 27, 2008, Aisha was dragged before a crowd of over 1,000 spectators in a stadium at the southern port of Kiyasmu where she would be buried up to her neck in a hole in the ground while 50 men threw stones at her head until she died. While she was being dragged to her death, she reportedly shouted and pleaded with her executioners “No! I won’t go! Don’t kill me!” No mercy was shown to her.

During the execution, at least a few of the spectators showed some humanity and attempted to save her, but the militia opened fire and killed a boy who was a bystander. The rest of the crowd sat and watched.

At one point they pulled Aisha from the ground and nurses were instructed to determine whether or not she was still alive. They announced that she was, and she was put back in the hole for the stoning to continue. One can only hope that by this point her body was in such a state of shock that she could no longer feel anything. One can only hope.

Every time I hear this story I get the most sickening feeling in my gut, I feel like my insides are burning and that that my brain might tear itself apart in blind rage. I just want to find the al-Shabab militia members who sentenced Aisha to death and the men who stoned her and pummel each of them to death one by one. But that would accomplish nothing. Aisha is dead and no vengeance will bring her back. She had to undergo that experience and it will never be erased.

Part of the reason this disturbs me so much has to do with the way I look at reality. Time is a relative thing, so everything that happens exists permanently. Subjective experience is a part of the universe, so all experiences exist permanently as well. I also think that the nature of consciousness might be universal, in that the same Being—call it God, the Brahmam-Atman, or whatever it may be—is at the centre of the awareness of everyone and everything that is aware. What happens to one of us happens to all of us—we only perceive different events through different minds.

So whenever I hear about a tragedy, I imagine the experience from the point of view of the victims. I can usually find some kind of “at least” in the situation. As in, “at least he was strong enough to face death bravely,” or “at least she was old enough to accept her fate” but with children it’s a different story. The only “at least” I can find when something bad happens to children is “at least they were too young to understand what was happening.”

But Aisha was 13—old enough to understand death but far too young to make peace with it. She was also female—and in a patriarchal culture, no one would have bothered to help her cultivate the qualities of strength and bravery that would have been encouraged in male children.

No, Aisha was as vulnerable a victim as there can be. And to imagine the horror from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl of being buried up to your neck, desperately trying to claw your way out of the ground but unable to move an inch, lying there helpless as heavy stones fly at your face, each new crack in your skull producing an eternity of agony and bringing you one step closer to a death of which you are terrified, the pain and fear too overwhelming to comprehend.

This experience is a part of the universe and it always will be. And that almost makes me wish the universe never existed at all. Better to have eternal nothingness than a single moment such as that…

But what really makes this story so unbearable to me is the setting. This event happened in a stadium of a thousand people, and while at least a few were horrified enough to try and put a stop to it, the majority of spectators must have felt…what?

Were they enjoying it? Did most of them get some sick macabre sort of pleasure out of watching a poor defenseless girl cry out in horror as her life was ripped away from her? Did they actually feel that justice was being served—that this adulteress, despised by Allah, was getting what she deserved?

That’s the thought that keeps me up at night, because that is one of the great unsolvable questions of humanity at this stage in history. Many people would hear this story and blame it on Islam, but the problem goes much deeper than that. The practice of honor killings may have been integrated into some versions of Islam but it almost certainly pre-dates the religion, going all the way back to tribal existence. This is an element of the culture in that part of the world that goes unquestioned by what may be most of the people there, including the women. When asked whether they approve of the practice of honor killings, it might be the case that this cultural tradition is so firmly ingrained in their minds that a majority of them would insist on its moral correctness.

I once considered myself a moral relativist, but not anymore. Just because something is accepted in another culture does not make it right. There is a certain amount of happiness and suffering brought about by every action, and certain actions cause a degree of suffering so great that the scale could never be balanced. Aisha’s death was so horrible that no amount of satisfaction on the part of the executioners or spectators who felt that justice had been served could outweigh it. This is as black-and-white as it comes. No matter what culture or time period you’re talking about, this kind of thing is plain wrong.

And yet, what can any of us do about it? Some suggest that a Western military presence in the region serves this very purpose. If we can bring stable democracies to these areas in which women are given the power to help shape their societies, eventually these practices will end.

But I’m for leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever I may feel in my heart, I know in my mind that staying would cause more overall harm than good. As much as I would desperately like to change their culture, I consider it the height of arrogance to think ourselves capable of doing so. You can’t change thousands of years of tradition by rolling in with tanks and shooting everything that looks threatening. If centuries of colonialism taught us anything, it’s that more just societies can’t be imposed from above. They can only transform from within.

But how long before the women in these societies awaken enough to question their cultural traditions and feel strong enough to fight against them? How many more innocent girls are to be buried alive or stoned to death before such things are resting firmly in the trash-bin of history where they belong?

The only shred of positive thinking I can muster from Aisha’s story is that it may serve as some kind of wake-up call within the collective human consciousness. I never met this girl. I don’t even have any idea what she looked like. I never knew she existed until she no longer did. But if I can feel such powerful emotions over the manner in which she died, then others can too.

I said that I wished I’d never heard of her, and that may still be true. I didn’t want to have to face the reality that we live in such a world where an event like her death can happen, and that I’m a member of a species that is capable of doing such a thing. But perhaps more people need to be confronted with this reality. More people need to know about Aisha, to lose sleep over her, to picture her crying face sticking up from a hole in the ground whenever a random comment triggers the firing of those neurons.

Only by confronting the horror can we hope to one day be rid of it. It’s either that or wait until the planet rids itself of us. But for Aisha’s sake I have to hope it’s the former. If the human species wipes itself out, at least these kinds of horrors will stop but it will all have been for naught. If we can come together and forge a global society in which the murder of children is not tolerated by anyone, at least such deaths won’t have been in vain. And if there is any truth to the idea of immortal souls, I can only hope that Aisha’s will be able to see what we’ve done and to know that her suffering did not go unnoticed—that the cries she let out as death took her in that stadium did not fall on deaf ears.

One can only hope.

The argument for American troops remaining in Afghanistan is essentially that Afghanistan needs our help. Without a strong U.S. military presence there, the Taliban will retake control, impose brutal Sharia law on all the citizens, and life for the Afghan people will be much worse than if we stay.

If that was all there was to it, I’d be saying we should stay. If we had the capability to really make Afghanistan a better country through our military presence, then I’d be the first to advocate intervening in their affairs. Not only that, but I’d also call for us to intervene in Somalia, Darfur, and everywhere else where people are suffering at the hands of brutal, corrupt, or nonexistent governments.

I’m not opposed to the idea of American Interventionism—I simply recognize that there is no “America” anymore, at least not in the sense that most people believe.

In the prophetic 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky spells it out brilliantly in the pivotal scene in which network chairman Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale, his news-anchor-turned-crusader-for-America, how the world really works:

For those who still believe that America can and should spread its ideals throughout the world and bring peace and democracy to all, I would emphasize these words:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.

…

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

There is “America” and there is America. “America” is the land of the free, home of the brave, champion of human rights and individual liberty, and crusader for the rights of man worldwide. America, on the other hand, is a governmental structure which has made itself extremely well-suited to Big Business interests. Multi-national corporations can do extremely well by putting America to good use. Tax-loopholes, virtually no regulation, and the strongest military the world has ever seen.

The only flaw in Arthur Jensen’s speech is this:

And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.

In all fairness to Chayefsky, this is what the corporate titans who really control the world probably tell themselves to justify their actions—that when all the world is a business there will be no need for war. But they ignore one important thing: war is great business.

Military and defense contractors, oil companies, drug-lords, corrupt government officials, and a slew of multi-national corporations all stand to make loads of money through continued American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is their bidding that our troops are doing there. American interventionism is actually corporate interventionism conducted through America.

But what if “America” actually existed? What if, as a nation, we collectively decided to intervene in countries that needed our help? What if instead of deploying armies of soldiers equipped with guns and bombs, we deployed armies of doctors equipped with medical supplies?

If you have the time, I’d strongly recommending watching this clip from the Young Turks’ “Rethink Reviews” segment in which documentary-film critic Jonathan Kim discusses the film “Living in Emergency” (about Doctors Without Borders) with Cenk Uygur (discussion begins at 4:49):

Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that does exactly the kind of intervention I wish America would do—sending doctors into impoverished nations and war-zones to offer humanitarian assistance to the people who need it most.

For those of you without the time or patience to sit through the whole clip, here is what Doctors With Borders did in 2006 alone:

• Held more than 9 million out-patient consultations
• Hospitalized half a million patients
• Delivered 99,000 babies
• Treated 1.8 million people for malaria
• Treated 150,000 malnourished children
• Provided 100,000 people with HIV and AIDS retro-virus therapy
• Vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis
• Conducted 64,000 surgeries

They did this with a team of 20,000-26,000 doctors and nurses who work for free, either out of the goodness of their hearts or to pad their resumes. Either way, they do an amazing amount of good with an amazingly small amount of resources.

Here are the statistics that will blow your mind:

• In 2006, the United States spend about $2 billion per week in Iraq.
• Doctors Without Borders runs with a budget of about $400 million per year.
• For the price of a week in Iraq, we could have either funded Doctors Without Borders for five years, or quintupled the size of Doctors Without Borders and ran it for one year.

• It’s estimated that there are at most 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and we have about 100,000 soldiers there at a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year.
• This means we have about 1,000 troops per Al Qaeda member, which means we are spending $1 billion per Al Qaeda member.
• This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 2.5 years.
• National priorities: We can either chase one Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan for a year or fund Doctors Without Borders for two and a half years.

• This fiscal year, we’re spending $167 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 417.5 years.

Do I even need to spell it out? If the idea behind American Interventionism is to improve the lot of humanity on a global scale, there are far better ways of doing it than dropping bombs on civilians. If the main argument for staying in Afghanistan is that we’re helping the Afghan people, it is undeniable that the money could be spent in much wiser ways to help much more people. Not necessarily by funding Doctors Without Borders, but by modeling our overseas interventions as humanitarian rather than military campaigns.

Obviously, security is important and we need to have soldiers to protect the doctors we deploy as well as to support the national governments of countries threatened by violent insurgency. But right now the focus is far more on the cost of weapons than the cost of medical supplies.

The entire justification for the Global War on Terror is to fight the enemy overseas to keep America safe at home. But by making this an almost purely military endeavor, we’re only boosting the perception that America is an Empire and we’re occupying these foreign countries out of our own selfish interests. As such, more terrorists are recruited and we lose the support of allies who were otherwise willing to help us in the fight against violent extremism.

But if we spent the same amount of money on medicine and infrastructure as we do on weapons, the perception would be completely different. Our international image would be unassailable, and we’d once again be looked up to by the rest of the world with respect and admiration. What Muslim kid is going to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to fight the country that built his school or cured his father of a terminal illness? Terrorist organizations would find themselves obsolete within a matter of years.

Unfortunately, this is never going to happen, precisely because “America” as it was once understood no longer exists. We may be the most powerful nation-state on earth, but we’re not the most powerful entity. The multi-national corporations have all the power, and it’s in their best interests to keep the engines of war churning, to keep third-world nations impoverished, and to keep the peoples of the world divided, distrustful, and hateful of each other.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

You can’t meddle with the primal forces of nature.