Calling a spade a spade

The situation in Syria, or rather the world's response to the situation in Syria, is such bosh. Words, words, words. According to this national spokesperson and that, what the Bashar Assad regime is doing is "totally unacceptable." Yeah, so? So what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Wring our hands and say the murder of innocent women and children must stop. Yeah? Or what?

I keep hearing people saying there's the danger of civil war in Syria. What do they think has been going on for months now?

I am not saying the United States should rush in where angels fear to tread. I am as tired of our being embroiled in one military engagement after another as everyone else is. And we certainly should not do anything unilateral; any action should be made in conjunction with the global community. We cannot be the police of the world, particularly not of that part of the world, where we are almost universally despised.

But I would like the stupid, hypocritical talk to stop. We, Europe, everyone else, are apparently going to let those poor people just get ground down by their ruling faction; no Arab Spring for them. Let's stop pretending our "sanctions" are going to force Assad to bow out; let's stop pretending there is anything we can do, short of military intervention, which no one wants to commit to. Members of the Arab League are apparently slipping weapons to the opposition, helping them to that extent. That may be the most we can hope for. The rest of us are going to wait to see what happens. So let's do that, and stop talking about it!

As a substitute for the next war

What I can’t figure out is why we keep having wars. Usually after a war we end up helping the defeated country, e.g., Japan, Germany, after the Second World War, Iraq even as I type. It’s only a matter of time before American tourists are visiting the place, e.g., Vietnam. So why don’t we just skip the war, and go directly to help mode? Afghanistan would be a good place to start. Instead of pulling all those soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan – which is what Senator Obama is proposing to do at once, Senator McCain proposes to do as soon as the war in Iraq is “won” (definition still to be determined) – instead of this out of the frying pan into the fire strategy, why not pour economic advisors into the country? Preferably economic advisors who can speak the language (and why isn’t there a push in this country for students to learn Arabic, Farsi, Korean, the languages of those areas that are proving most problematic for the U.S.?), economic advisors who could help develop the local economy. In Afghanistan, for example, there’s the problem of so many farmers growing poppies for the drug trade which the bad guys use to finance their nefarious deeds. What could they grow instead? In Columbia, Ecuador and Peru it’s the coca growers, feeding the cocaine trade. What could we help them grow instead?

As the current world-wide financial crisis is serving to illustrate, everything comes down to economics (well, actually, everything really comes down to biochemistry, but let’s talk a notch or two above that). As much as I hate to admit it, being so uninterested in business as I am, healthy trade really does make the world go round. We need to be helping the poverty-stricken areas of the world develop the means to join the rest of us in (healthy, not damaging) trade. With an improved standard of living they would have more to lose, and when you have something to lose you are less inclined to kiss it all good-by by blowing yourself and various innocent bystanders up.

While I don’t question for a moment that there are, indeed, evil people out there, some of the fanatical Muslim persuasion, most people, whatever their religion, whatever their country, want to live in peace and safety with their families. They want to be able to support those families, take care of them, make sure that everyone has enough to eat, decent housing, access to good health care when they get sick. If we directed our attention to helping them achieve those goals, without trying to convert them (after all, how do you feel when a Jehovah’s Witness comes knocking at your door?), without our usual swaggering assumption that we’re the greatest nation in the world and of course everyone must want to be like us, or should want to be like us...if, in short, our foreign policy more closely resembled the work of private aid organizations that don’t have a hidden agenda, that just want to help those in this world who are struggling with extreme poverty, I suspect it would go a long way in that winning-the-hearts-and-minds campaign they’ve been waging lately in Iraq.