Human rights and war are antithetical

Al-Jazeera America had a good essay on so-called military hawks for human rights. I was once a proponent of humanitarian-based military intervention until I realized its fundamental flaw. Its premised upon a scenario that never actually happen in reality. 

Human rights groups may want action based on moral principles but countries always and only act in self-interest. The fact that countries act in this sort of amoral fashion is not inherently bad but it also means that the utopian principle on which humanitarian intervention is based does not happen. Liberal hawks may say, "Who cares about an impure motive if it causes a moral result?" The problem is that the impure motive makes the moral result far less likely to occur and, in many cases, may even result in a bloodshed and destruction worse than what was there before - a 'cure that's worse than the disease' scenario.

Once countries launch military interventions based on self-interest, it affects both how they act and how their actions (and thus perceived motives) are received by the domestic populations. When their motives are questioned, this compromises a 'humanitarian intervention's' chances of achieving even the self-interested goals, let alone the moral ones.

An impartial United Nations' army would be the only chance for the humanitarian intervention principle to be successfully achieved, but such an international army will never be formed in the real world.

Why are chemical weapons deaths worse than conventional weapons deaths?

Discussion topic: the UN estimates that approximately 100,000 people have been killed during the Syrian civil war (not all by Assad’s forces) with conventional weapons over the course of a few years. There has been no serious discussion of a response by external military powers in that time period.

Yet a single attack of chemical weapons that kills a small fraction of that number of people “necessitates” a global (ie: western) military response, we are told.

So why is it that the 1400 deaths caused by chemical weapons is more “morally repugnant,” to use Sec. of State Kerry’s phrase, than the 100,000 deaths that preceded it by conventional weapons?

If the answer is some piece of paper called a treaty, then the follow up question is why does that piece of paper value chemical weapons deaths more? Why does it view those deaths as more of a threat when, by any objective measurement, conventional weapons cause far more deaths and are much more of a threat to international stability?

95% of US taxpayer money to rebuild Iraq disappears into black hole

Just to give you an idea of the gargantuan level of corruption and unaccountability in the purported effort to reconstruct Iraq after the US aggression.

  

According to Yes! magazine...

Amount of oil and gas money designated by the US for rebuilding Iraq after the 2003 invasion: $9.2 billion

Amount the US Department of Defense was unable to properly account for: $8.7 billion

Muslim Americans twice as likely to oppose attacks on civilians than Catholics, Protestants

Poll cited by Yes! magazine:

% of Muslim Americans who say military attacks on civilians is never justified: 78

% of Catholic Americans who agree: 39

% of Protestant Americans who agree: 38

Obama's illegal war in Libya

Here are a couple of articles regarding Pres. Obama's illegal war in Libya...

-Obama rejects top lawyers' legal views on Libya (that the war required Congressional approval): Salon.com

-Obama is bringing America closer to the imperial presidency than Bush ever did: Foreign Policy.

The deceit of a warmonger

Since liberals rabidly denounced Bush's false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you'd think they'd at least notice Obama's false claims that our intervention in Libya is only to provide humanitarian relief, not to take sides in a civil war. But I guess you get a free pass to warmonger if you have a (D) after your name or have a Nobel Peace Prize on your resume.

Too bad liberals are more likely to get their panties in a twist about the inane rantings of trivial people like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin than anything that actually matters. And they are mystified why the regressive conservative agenda is advancing so fast.

Obama (secretly) deepens US involvement in Libyan civil war

According to Reuters, Pres. Obama has signed a ‘secret order’ authorizing covert US support for the rebels in Libya.

Nice move by the man who promised the most transparent administration in American history. So he breaks his promise on transparency (yet again) but his people aren't even competent enough to keep it secret.

Then again, this was also the same man who said the US attacks in Libya were solely to impose a no-fly zone and protect civilians and implement the UN mandate, not to take sides in the Libyan civil war.

Apparently, he'll say whatever he thinks will make neutered liberals feel warm and fuzzy.

Fortunately, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is not one of those. He asked why the president had time to consult with the international community before launching attacks on Libya but not the US Congress.

Incidentally, the folly of liberals supporting humanitarian interventionism (as I once did) is that it’s based on the premise that militaries can be primarily governed by humanitarian interests. It’s not their raison d’etre nor can it ever be.

Priorities

Four stories I read this week are very interesting when juxtaposed...

-North Country Public Radio is doing a series on New York’s crumbling infrastructure.

-School districts across the region are slashing teaching positions left and right.

-Districts in Glens Falls and Saranac Lake each closed an elementary school.

-President Obama ordered air strikes against Libya and our Hitler-of-the-month, with little objection from his fellow Democrats... thus illustrating that having a Nobel Peace Prize on your resumé seems to give you a free pass in launching wars. Mother Jones cites a CNN estimate that costs for the US to fully install a no-fly-zone over Libya could rise to some $800 million, and another $100 million a week to maintain it


We “can’t afford” badly needed improvements to our infrastructure.

We “can’t afford” to preserve teaching positions originally deemed important.

We “can’t afford” to keep community elementary schools open.

We “can afford” to wage wars against countries that pose no security threat to us.

Of course, the reality is the above questions are not at all about what we can and can’t afford. They are about what we choose to afford.

Our choices seem to indicate that destroying things abroad is more important use of our money than building things at home.

Dr. King's real agenda was controversial... and remains so

When a great many Americans think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago last week, they associate him almost exclusively with efforts to bring down the apartheid-esque Jim Crow laws. The struggle to end government-imposed racism.

Many Americans are simply aware of this because the establishment wants his legacy to begin and end with the "I have a dream" speech. The standard modern narrative of King is "He won civil rights for blacks and then he was killed. The end." He was made into a secular saint based on this narrow view which is now, thankfully, uncontroversial.

The reason for this historical revisionism is because the agenda of King and his colleagues was much broader than legal equality for blacks, which was important but only a first step. King's goals were fundamentally about human dignity and the war against the poor.

In the later years of his life, he displayed this by his strong opposition to the US Aggression in Vietnam. An Aggresion of which poor and working class people, both American and Vietnamese, were bearing the human cost almost exclusively. The situation is little different in today's Aggression. So King is reduced to his "I Have a Dream" speech to make sure the masses don't draw any parallels.

King is a person whose anti-establishment agenda has been whitewashed by the establishment so they could bask in the reflected glory of something saccharinized. Much has been done to Muhammad Ali.

And let's not forget that the whole reason King was in Memphis on that fateful April 1968 day was to fight a form of oppression against darker-skinned human beings that may not have been state-mandated but was no less nefarious.

A good supplement is this piece from The Los Angeles Times. It points out King's increasing frustration with white America. A white America that expected blacks to lick their boots in gratitude after they were promoted from third-class citizens to second-class.

And after state segregation started to be dismantled, some of the greatest hostility toward blacks was found as much in the north as in the much reviled south.

The LAT notes: After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "are now making demands that will cost the nation something. ... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

In other words, non-southern whites may have had no problem in blacks gaining equal de jure political rights, because northern blacks largely had that anyways. Nothing changed. But once blacks started to demand a humane wage or move into 'white' neighborhoods or 'infiltrate' white schools, northern whites wouldn't be so calm and King knew it.

Much of the social tension of the 70s, from fair housing laws to busing, bore ought King's predictions.

Aid to Africa wiped out by war

This essay is part of a (more or less) weekly feature on this blog that presents interesting stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, Israel, Iraq, North Korea and Iran.

I hate to succomb to Afro-pessimism. And I hate even more to write something that risks perpetuating crude western stereotypes about the continent. But at the same time, I can't read the news and be disingenuous about my reaction.

Pessimism in general is not in my nature. And having lived in West Africa, I know that the place has some of the most in innovative and resilient people in the world. I love the continent and its people and that's why events piss me off so much. I can't simply shrug my shoulders and say, "Ah, that's just the way people are there" because I know it's not true. At least not of the vast majority.

I am convinced that if the continent's post-colonial leaders had been just mediocre, if its leaders had simply stayed out of the way, then Africa would be in far better shape than it is now. Instead, it's been cursed with morons, megalomaniacs, gangsters, psychopaths and, at the best, mere crooks.

In recent weeks, I've read stories like this...

-Sudanese strongman Gen. Omar al-Bashir is preparing for a return to war in the south of the country. Perhaps the general is trying to prove his grim multitasking abilities by conducting a war and a genocide simultaneously;

-Renewed conflict in Somalia, primarily Mogadishu, has caused the homelessness of some one million people;

-The head of the DR Congo's army insists that a return to all-out war is the only solution to the crisis in the east of the country;

-There are rumbles that Ethiopia and Eritrea may start another installment of the 'world's stupidest war';

-The Nigerian parliament is trying to reverse the handover of the Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon. The handover was agreed by former president Olesegun Obasanjo after the International Court of Justice ruled that the land belonged to Cameroon;

-As usual, Zimbabwe's collapsing dictatorship is whipping up hysteria, this time by accusing Britain of preparing to invade the country. This wouldn't be a surprise. After all, the UK already stands accused by the regime of manipulating the weather.

All this comes in the wake of a report showing how armed conflict has cost Africa nearly $300 billion during the period 1990-2005.

The non-governmental organization (NGO) Oxfam says the cost of conflict was equal to the amount of money received in aid during the same period.

Being on the board of an NGO, I follow development issues pretty closely and receive a lot of news from and about the NGO world. I always read about this or that charity damning the western world for not giving enough in development aid. They use words like 'shame' and 'disgrace' and 'pitiful.'

Incidentally, African leaders tend to be more focused on securing fairer trade deals that getting more western handouts.

I understand the tactic. NGOs are trying to appeal to liberal western guilt to get more money.

But the biggest problem isn't western 'stinginess' but a small minority of armed African thugs who hold the majority hostage.

There are many reasons aid hasn't improved things in Africa. Africans like to point to things like neo-colonialism, like foreign exploitation of natural resources, like unfair trade deals. And all of these are legitimate complaints.

But one of the biggest can't be addressed by blaming others.

Aid isn't contributing to African economies. It's merely replacing the money that's being lost because of insane wars. So the continent is staying stagnant in absolute terms and regressing in relative terms.

Africa's so-called intelligentsia likes blaming everything on Europe and the United States. And these parties hardly have clean hands on the continent. After all, where do the arms for all these armed conflicts come from?

However, the result is that anyone who ever was an anti-colonial freedom fighter (Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Ethiopia's Meles, Eritrea's Isaias) seems to get a free pass... no matter how gravely they've betrayed the ideas of their own 'liberation' struggles... no matter how much they've destroyed their own countries or their neighbor's.

The US government spent 'only' 0.14 percent of GNP (in 2003) on international development assistance. Bear in mind that this 'mere' 0.14 percent translated to $15.7 billion, by far the biggest of any country... and that PRIVATE donations by Americans accounts for another $15 billion.

People aren't being killed in the Central African Republic because the US provided 'only' $30.7 billion in aid instead of, say, $35 billion or $50 billion. Europeans aren't killing Sudanese in Darfur. Americans aren't killing Congolese in Kivu. Canadians aren't starving people in Bulawayo or making them homeless in Harare.

Ending all armed conflict won't instantaneously eradicate all poverty in Africa. But if you want to get out of a hole, the first step is to stop digging.

On non-violence

Normally, I post in these blogs my own thoughts. But today, I felt like publishing some of my favorite quotes. After how long this intro ended up, I decided to post the quotes separately.

Given the wars which the my government has chosen to fight at this moment in my name, it's not surprising that most of these quotes have to do with the folly of violence. I do not object to our military being used for the purpose of national self-defense. I just recognize that this is almost never it is deployed.

I've written before about those who initiate violence almost inevitably do so because they let ego get in the way of good judgement.

I'm repeatedly told that my generalized belief in non-violence as the best way to solve problems is naive. I believe the opposite is true.

As I wrote then: Look at all the damage and destruction and trauma that violence has caused over the millenia. And remember, I'm not just talking about militaristic violence, but physical and verbal violence as well. Societies and families torn apart. Progress stopped in its tracks. Millions of lives lost. Many times more lives ruined.

For anyone to believe that violence is a long-term solution to any problem given its miserable failure of a history, that's about the most naive thing anyone can possibly believe in.

When I was younger, I was a bit more casual about war. This is not to say I thought it was great. But I was a bit casual about the whole thing. The generally accepted framework in this country is to be casual about advocating military force against another country.

My 'Eureka' moment was really a period: the two years I spent in Guinea, West Africa. Guinea bordered two countries that were at war at the time: Liberia and Sierra Leone. There were over half a million refugees from those two countries living in Guinea. I became acquainted with several of them.

The wars in those countries were originally started for the purpose of overthrowing the corrupt military dictatorship in Sierra Leone and the fanatical Samuel Doe dictatorship in Liberia. But every single refugee I knew would gladly have returned to the days of the order of the strong man rather than the continuing nightmare that plagued their countries. I knew that Samuel Doe was a lunatic so to hear people saying they preferred him to the present of 1996 was an eye opening experience. But I suppose that even the corrupt military dictatorship in Sierra Leone didn't chop people's arms and hands off like the 'liberation' movement did.

Few Americans have experienced war and even fewer have experienced it as a civilian. But the simple human reality is this. The tyranny of chaos is worse that tyranny of authoritarianism. This is the law of unintended consequences that always applies to war, as the planners of the Iraq debacle are finding out.

My visit to a refugee camp was one of the most profound experiences of my life. The misery found at camps like that, not a shining democratic city on a hill or two bits of paper with a meaningless constitution on it, is the true face of war. The true face of war is hunger, suffering and despair. And the worst victims are not men with guns but unarmed women and children.

And this is where I truly learned that violence should only ever be used as an absolute last resort. Many people say this but few mean it. Violence should never be used because we get a little impatient or because someone said our president's mama wears combat boots or because we get our national nose out of joint or because the military-industrial complex needs a new enemy of the week or because the UN secretary-general won't carry our water or because weapons inspectors tell the truth instead of what we want to hear.

And most importantly, we should never, EVER impose the tyranny of chaos on innocent people who don't ask for it. We DON'T HAVE THAT RIGHT!

Violence doesn't end problems. It just creates new ones.



How to help:
If people want to support the troops, they can do so by getting them out of unnecessary harm's way. I think we should focus our efforts on helping those who we put in harm's way without the benefit of guns, flack jackets, tanks and backup. The casualties of war who don't have the American military-industrial complex behind them. The victims of war who never chose to be a part of it.

-The UN refugee agency
-The International Rescue Committee
-The American Refugee Committee
-The Red Cross
-Doctors Without Borders (MSF)