IX
A chance encounter with an old friend last weekend helped me to formulate where I stand on the U.S. military effort to oust Saddam. My friend is a retired physician who spends his summers in Minnesota and winters in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s got a beautiful big house in each place; he dresses in spiffy tailored suits and silk ties; and he drives a nice car which I assume is nearly new. We met at a swanky Indian restaurant next to the Phoenix Arts Center where, after we had downed our three-course meal of chicken tikka, shrimp biryani, vegetable dishes and imported beer, we attended a concert of the Emerson Quartet. In other words, we enjoyed an evening the likes of which 99 percent of the earth’s inhabitants could never dream of having.
My friend is resolutely against the war to oust Saddam. “Bush just wants to kill the guy who tried to kill his father!” he said. “And for this petty reason he wants to drag the entire country into an incredibly dangerous and costly war that no other nation in the world will support!”
My rebuttal to my friend was this: “You’re right up to a point. But don’t you realize that you and I are living in the newest global empire, and all that’s happening now is that one cost of citizenship in the empire is coming due?”
X
From the flight deck of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln, which is heading now from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf region, a U.S. Air Force pilot told a TV journalist recently: “Our job is power projection. We have guys flying hundreds of miles off this ship to do the nation's business." The pilot’s voice was untinged by the reticent or embarrassed tones that characterized U.S. military pronouncements for three decades after the Vietnam War. It was the pure, unconflicted, pitch-perfect voice of the world’s newest global empire.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Very thoughtful and balanced look at the most difficult topic of our time. I very much like your ideas on personal responsibility. Thanks!
2 - rob
Nice utopian worldview, oh citizen, so full of holes I can't address it here, I should start my own blog, I suppose. Go out and do a few of those things you suggest, and if that causes Saddam to step aside and let his people live their lives freely, and causes terrorists to stop attacking us around the world, I will say you are correct. You won't of course, and neither Saddam nor the terrorists will either. In short, great ideas on paper, not likely in real life. You may have all the benevolent goodwill in the world, but not everyone does, and those people mean harm to others like you.
3 - Eric Olsen
It may be idealistic but I don't think it's utopian. The suggestion that we all try to be good neighbors is practical and idealistic at the same time, and is something we can all do to help.
4 - Tom
Interesting analysis, and one I applaud in principle. However, it seems to me that the assumption that "this war is for oil" is necessarily a bad thing might be just a tad irrational. In other words, so it's about oil. So what? As a good friend of mine put it, "If you thought about it for a while, you might find one or two reasons to put a steady, guaranteed supply of petroleum as the second most important natural resource need in the world, but most likely, you'd have to put it right at the top of the list."
Surprisingly, the "humanitarian angle" still works admirably well even from this perspective. Not only do we liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator (which, by the way, is still a noble pursuit regardless of whether it is a primary casus belli.) but we at least partially secure the Arabian Peninsulaand all its vast oil reserves. Now when we do that, we guarantee that 1) Oil is available all over the world for direct concerns such as moving products to and from markets, thereby directly keeping world infrastructure alive, and 2) America's infrastructure is kept alive and working at a reasonable level of efficiency.
Now, the first point is self-explanatory, but the second, as self-serving (not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily) as it seems, also has a profound effect across the world. To wit: if the American economy is damaged, you can expect worldwide economic devastation. A dip in the stock market here gives brokers in London and Tokyo the cold shivers. A fluctuation in price here means people in our enormously affluent market quit buying quite so much, which means that folks in Venezuela experience untold economic hardship. People starve. Riots occur.
Now, as a global citizen, I view this little matter to be just as much a reason for action as any other. "No blood for oil?" Ha. Strategically guaranteeing that a madman can't choke off a significant part of the world's petroleum supplies, and that he can't destroy those reserves, AND that he can't indulge his expansionist tendencies to cover the Arabian Peninsula may be the most humanitarian approach we could possibly take.
Would you believe I'm not even a Republican? :)