© 2008, UrbisMedia
I have an old friend who speaks of the United Nations with derision and fear. He is not quite of the “UN black helicopter” fearing ilk, but expresses the oft-cited nonsense about “world government” and what that would mean to that vague notion called “the American way of life.” I’m never sure what he means by the “American way of life.” When I return from abroad, land at LAX, and am almost immediately confronted by our epidemic of gross obesity. Is the American way of life “super-sized” people stuffing themselves into their over-sized automobiles purchased on outsized debt, I wonder?
My friend likes things the way they are—the USA, fat, militarily and economically, chanting “No. 1 in the world” even as our precious dollar shrinks in value and we fall behind in other measures. The UN, as he falsely sees it, is a threat to that. He feels the same way about the World Court, probably because it would, or should, indict his “hero,” George W. Bush, for war crimes. It doesn’t matter to him that the UN brings humanitarian aid to places in distress, or the World Court tries to bring some justice to bear on those who commit crimes against humanity. At one and the same time he fears them and jokes that they are ineffectual—the UN in terms of the level of agreement required from its members, and the court from its lack of power for apprehension of indicted criminals.
For my old friend, a good strong America is the best answer to the world’s ills, and exemplar of success, and a stern disciplinarian to those who don’t see things in our good Capitalistic-Christian way. It therefore probably needs not to be stated that he heartily approves of the Bush foreign policy and military adventures. He would approve of the third-stage rationale of the Bush administration that the purpose of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to free its people of the tyranny of its brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. Of course I think he is a right-wing whack job who believes that foreign policy should have names like Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. Torture at Guantanamo and incidents like Abu Ghraib don’t bother him all that much.
But lately, I have been distressed to find myself thinking a little bit like him. It seems more and more evident to me that somewhere between arguable war criminals like George W. Bush and the ineffectual UN and limited apprehension powers of the World Court there is need for an international power to deal with what I choose to call “brutocracy.”
It is increasingly distressing that in several places in the world civilizes nation states have stood by and done virtually nothing while brutal dictators have committed the most appalling atrocities upon their own peoples. Nothing was ever done about Idi Amin in Uganda, and the world watched with morbid fascination and Hutus hacked the limbs off Tutus as though it were some sick reality television show. Currently, Robert Mugabe is starving his own people in plain sight and the genocide in Somalia continues despite the feeble protestations of the so-called champions of human rights. Most recently, the military junta of Burma refused humanitarian aid from many countries, among them the USA, while its cyclone victims starved and succumbed to injury and disease. Elsewhere, and in the past, there have been numerous examples of “brutocracies” in South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Their dictatorial governments maintain armies—often with the weapons supplied by “good” governments—for the purpose of conducting war on their own people. Such is the purpose of Burma’s junta.
Of course, many of these regimes get a free pass on human atrocities because we are well aware that business and other economic interests, or the dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” supersede humanitarian principles. Indeed, there are enough circumstances in which their rise to or maintenance with the aid and complicity of the “good governments of the world.
But, when we must see our own government sit idly and impotently by—a government that clearly and recently has imposed its will upon Afghanistan and Iraq—and watch as these brutocracies starve, torture and murder their own people, some of us might wonder whether force is justified to “take out” these brutacracies, including the extermination of their leaders. Instead, the military might of America stood off shore in the Andaman Sea waiting for “permission” to bring aid to the cyclone victims. It was “discussed” that they might simply bring the aid to them without permission of the junta, but that was rejected. Permission would have been forthcoming had some of the residences of the junta in its private “capitol city” been surgically taken out with cruise missiles or predators. But then that was just my fantasy.
My old friend might well say that that such was the express purpose his “hero” justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But such a brief does not hold true. Iraq was initially justified on the purported presence of “weapons of mass destruction” which were, even if they did exist, not of imminent threat or in use (the gassing of the Kurdish village was the use of a weapon that is heinous, but not really a weapon of mass destruction). In actuality, the invasion of occupation of Iraq has resulted in more Iraqi deaths than occurred in the decades long reign of Saddam Hussein. And conveniently “forgotten” is that Hussein was an “ally” of America and, as is well-know to people with functioning brains, the invasion of Iraq was based on a foundation of lies and deceit, for interests that seem far more economic than humanitarian.
So here we are, between the proverbial rock and hard place, needing to rely upon governments with the power to eliminate and deter brutocracies, but not the will to do so unless in it in their interest to do so. Somalia, Zimbabwe and Burma apparently do not have the fossil fuels to justify such interventions. The hard place is any reliance—if the recent visit of General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon is indicative—of organizations such as the UN to affect much of a remedy. Somewhere between impotence and selfish omnipotence many innocent people are dying.
Yet, if we can fly a “detainee” to a remote place of torture in the middle of the night, and take another out with a predator on a road in Yemen we can certainly eliminate a “human weapon of mass destruction” with a surgical strike and save the lives of millions of innocent people. Unless, it seems, that weapon is named Osama bin Laden.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.10.2008)