Generally speaking, I'm a pragmatic pacifist. I'm not sure if everybody's noticed it or not, but the United States has started every war that it's been involved in since 1945. Were any of those wars worth it?
A realistic assessment of the monetary costs of those wars seems to indicate that more good could've been accomplished if we'd spent the money on things like malaria nets and vaccines and blankets and bags of rice and hand pumps for wells and mules and stuff. And that's not counting the U.S. soldiers who've died (and we generally count those) or the foreign civilians we kill (and we generally don't count those). War is rarely beneficial. But even in those instances where the outcomes are good, better outcomes could be had for cheaper if we didn't use violence as our principle form of foreign involvement.
For example, the Kosovo war cost about $45 Billion in 1999 dollars. Feeding the world would cost about $30 Billion this year. And, of course, the United States recently hit the $500 Billion mark for spending in Iraq.
Or, my foreign policy in brief: Rice Meal > Cluster Bombs
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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The President's request for the FY 2009 Defense Budget including war spending and defense spending outside of DoD is $1.083 Trillion. Meanwhile our Secretary of Defense said... "The Foreign Service is not the Foreign Legion, and the U.S. military should never be mistaken for a Peace Corps with guns," he also said "we cannot kill or capture our way to victory."
Pacificsm takes more courage than any warrior ever had and is therefore very unlikely to be broadly practical. It requires a viewpoint that sees all nations as equally deserving of respect. It requires rationality unseen on the international stage at the governmental level. How do we get there from here?
Peace is really more profitable than war, in general, but war profits a certain group of people far more then peace profits them.
And those are the people in charge.
There are those people out there that are inclined to fuck people up for no rational reason. Those non-rational reasons are dangerous and misguided, but realistically speaking, the world isn't going to be able to change those minds before military force is required. That's why we have soldiers, and I respect that.
A lot of violence, though, is perpetrated because of need or in the name of more nebulous things like 'freedom' or 'sovereignty'. We can provide or facilitate this more often then not, but we keep resorting to war for ideological or political reasons. Or, if you're cynical like me, for financial ones.
And there's little more nauseating to me then the idea that someone will be murdered because someone else makes money off it.
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