The Cost of Stability
Is the Price Too High?
The countries formed by Russia, Britain, France and the United States, among others, in the Middle East at the end of World War II were rather arbitrary. Little care was taken in defining their borders, causing a mixture of ethnic types and language groups in each of the excessively large countries that were formed. The big countries, potientially powerful, were also difficult to control.
But they were rich in oil, so they were worth controlling by any means possible. That meant brutal force, secret police to suppress any hint of opposition and other measures. Changes of government were frequent and violent, but the new governments, generally as violent and repressive as the ones they replaced, were often recognized immediately in the name of stability.
Stability has been very expensive. It has cost many lives. Perhaps too many.
So lets have a war and do away with stability, start taking over governments because their leaders are nasty, violent people ... exactly what we trained them to be.
We know almost nothing about the people in the countries involved. That is, the people making the decisions to go to war know (and care) almost nothing about them. Any new government they set up will be formed for reasons just as bad as those for forming the original government: control of the country's resources.
But if we screw up badly enough, perhaps the people of the area will finally have enough and will take their countries away from us, dividing them up among themselves. We'll resist, but eventually we'll lose.
And in the long run, everybody will win.
After everything blows up and reaches its own form of stability, not imposed from the outside, in perhaps a century or so, perhaps things will settle down.
Of course, the best alternative to starting a war is simple to remove the sanctions we've set up against our enemies and stop paying our dubious friends, letting war happen all by itself. We could even sit back and watch from a distance, not even having to participate. It is likely to be over faster if we wade in, though.
We won't make any friends no matter how we do it.
Comments (4)
This is why it's difficult for me to get behind either war or peace. When you know what they're doing it's hard to get caught up in their game.
There is another alternative - and that is for people to stop pursuing greed and dominance...and to start embracing other cultures. (The chance of that happening in my lifetime is about a million to one, though.)
Obviously, America has no right to any oil in Iraq - it is so far removed from their own country, that they have no claim on it at all.
I agree that Saddam needs to be removed from power - but interfering in the politics of another country is no way of doing it...and definitely not without international agreement. (Otherwise it will just look like we have an irrational President running the country.)
Heaven forbid...
You are right - we do not understand the cultures of these countries, so we do not know what we are doing. Unfortunately, that is not going to stop us from doing it. The Americanization of the world is a bad thing.
Our current administration has me absolutely livid right now!
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