Sadly Wars To Tend To Settle Things

I was really impressed with this editorial. Far from the editorials of the Washington Post or the LA Times this one actually makes some sense, in no way bashes the troops or the Politicians who made the decision to send them to war. Makes a nice change huh??

Sadly, wars do tend to settle things Friday, April 27, 2007 AT the Anzac Day march I stood next to a woman who told me her husband was a Vietnam veteran, but was not marching. She said that after he came back from Vietnam his friends and workmates gave him such a terrible time that he rejoined the army. It was that or commit suicide, she said (writes Pamela Bone). But he never marched on Anzac Day. The reason was, she told me, that in a jungle in Vietnam her husband had been confronted by a boy holding a gun, pointing it at him, ready to shoot. So her husband had shot and killed the boy, and that action had ruined his life. Ask yourself what you would do if faced by a child who was going to kill you unless you killed him first. If it were me, I might think, if I had time to think, that since I was old and the child was young, that it was fairer that I let him kill me. But then, if I were a soldier, I might think that by letting him live I would be allowing him to go on and kill my mates. Then, I might think, what if I shot him in the foot, so as to disable him but not to kill him? But what if my shot went astray and I did kill him? There is no good choice. There are no easy answers, though many would say the answer is that we should not have been in Vietnam in the first place, as we should not be in Iraq. It is possible that the teenage girls who painted the war memorial at Bathurst, NSW, with the words “Anzac murderers” are not deep thinkers. For them it is simple. War is bad. We are against war, therefore we are good. You can hardly blame them, being so young. But it is not only the young who think like this. Is it possible to talk about war without in the same sentence using the word futility? “The futility of war”: it is written over and over again. War is not only bad, it is futile. It never solves anything. But if war doesn’t solve things - and of course we all know wars have sometimes solved things, at whatever terrible cost - what does? What is to be done, for example, about Sudan, where the ethnic cleansing of the people of Darfur continues unhindered? What is to be done about Zimbabwe, where the megalomaniacal Robert Mugabe continues to starve and torture his people with impunity? What is to be done about the secret regimes of Burma and North Korea, whose horrific human rights abuses rarely touch our consciousness? When people of good conscience hear about these atrocities, the cry goes out: do something! Do something, yes; but what? Diplomacy? Sanctions? Certainly. In the case of Darfur, Australians should be urging the Government to use its voice in the UN - and its bilateral relationship with China, which is the chief supplier of arms to Sudan - to exert pressure on the military regime of Omar al-Bashir. But when diplomacy doesn’t work, as it often doesn’t, and when sanctions don’t work, as they hardly ever do, what then? Sanctions worked eventually against the apartheid regime in South Africa because white chaps couldn’t bear other white chaps refusing to play cricket with them. But we are not always dealing with sensitive white chaps and Sudan is trying to paint the issue as Sudanese sovereignty against white imperialists. According to a new international opinion poll, majorities in 12 countries believe the UN Security Council has “the responsibility to authorise the use of military force to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide, even against the will of their own government”. In the US, 74 per cent of respondents agreed; in France, 54 per cent agreed; in India, 51 per cent agreed. Surprisingly, 76 per cent of Chinese agreed the UN had a responsibility to intervene to prevent mass crimes. However, asked whether their own countries should contribute to an international force to stop the killing in Darfur, most respondents in all countries except France and the US disagreed. Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, writing on the Open Democracy website, describes the poll as heartening. “People around the world do feel a fundamental obligation to halt mass atrocities wherever they occur, by whatever means necessary. In short, the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine (or ‘R2P’ as it is coming to be abbreviated) has gained real street credibility,” he wrote. He added that, “despite the obvious appeal of a full-scale non-consensual ground invasion of Sudan aimed at protecting the people of Darfur once and for all”, most analysts believed this would do more harm than good. As it probably would. But it seems to me that international public opinion is in a bind. We don’t want war in principle but we don’t want dictators to be allowed to carry out genocide either. If there has to be a war to prevent genocide, we want the UN to authorise it, but we’d prefer our own country was not involved in it. As to the question of what is to be done when the UN won’t authorise a war to stop genocide, there seems to be no answer at all. All wars are not the same, of course. Saddam Hussein, it turns out, was probably no threat to us. But would it have been wrong to fight Adolf Hitler if all the Nazis were doing was killing Jews rather than threatening the rest of the world? Saddam was a genocidal dictator, perhaps the 21st century’s worst so far, but he was certainly not the only one. It is easy to point to Iraq and say war is wrong. Saying what should be done about genocidal dictators is much harder. Pamela Bone, a Melbourne writer, is author of Bad Hair Days (Melbourne University Publishing, September).

What do you think??

A_C