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The Crowe's Nest |
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We have created five million Iraqi orphans since our illegal attack and invasion of Iraq nearly five years ago. That is a staggering fact; but, to me, even more amazing is that the majority of the God-loving, church-going, prayer-believing people in this country apparently do not give a tinker’s damn. They may claim they care, but if the majority of the people in America really cared about such an ugly fact as the creation of five million Iraqi orphans, they would react to it in a fashion that would be heard all the way up to the U.S. Congress and the White House. The majority of Americans show much more concern and outrage about what they term “illegal aliens” (or in other words, Mexicans) who are already in this country or who are trying to cross the border into the land of milk and honey. The majority of Americans either believe that we were right in attacking and occupying Iraq for all these years; or that, even if we were wrong to attack them, it is now right to continue the occupation until the mission is completed and victory is won. The thing that makes this such a wondrous mystery is that this majority includes Democrat and Republican, rich and poor, the ignorant and uneducated along with the scholars and the brightest minds; all marching to the beat of the same drum. At some point, somewhere along the line, America lost its vision and its way as the leader nation among the world of nations. It fell into a dark ditch without realizing it and continues marching merrily along without the slightest comprehension that it is blindly following the path that can lead only to self-destruction and world war if it continues in the direction that it’s heading. It is a marvel so astonishing that it might be considered a miracle without explanation that as we march into this new year of 2008, we are still marching in pretty much the same way as the Romans and other empires marched thousands of years ago, as if it were our intellectual duty and our God-given charge to rule the world by our military might. There was a time in the history of the world when such aggressive ways of behaving worked for those nations that were so powerful militarily that they could actually have their way with neighboring nations and force them to submit to their desires. But those days - if the scholars and historians and philosophers, politicians, statesmen and thinkers had been watching closely – went up in the smoky, mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Those days are gone for good. America and her major alliances have just not realized it yet. We can claim that we’re in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to create democracies, because democracies don’t attack their neighbors, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are a democracy that will break international law and attack a weak nation without just cause just because we are powerful enough to do it. We are a democracy that spends more money on its military operations and weapons than all other nations combined, and we have been engaged in more wars and military actions since World War II than any other nation in the world. Just because we say that democracies are good citizens in the class that don’t attack their neighbors, does not make it so. In fact it is not so. America has proven that it is not so and continues to prove it every day. There should have been heads poking up many years ago out of this dark ditch that we’ve been traveling. It shouldn’t have been that hard to look up ahead and see where the rule of the gun was leading us. It’s good to know history and to learn from it, but it is also just as important to have enough imagination and vision to realize that the human condition and the situations of nations around the world must go through changes just as certain and sure as one day turns into another. A new day has been dawning for years, but America has not yet awakened to it. As the most powerful leader nation in the world, we should have realized many years ago that a true leader leads through wisdom and by peaceful means, not by force and subjugation and misuse of power. The American people may not have noticed or cared that we pushed the United Nations and International Law aside when we attacked Iraq, but that fact will live on in history as long as history continues to be recorded. The American people may not have noticed, but instead of helping the United Nations work for world peace the way it was intended, our government has used it to suit our purposes – breaking its laws when we wanted and using our power to enforce its laws on those we wanted to punish. Iraq is an example, we used our power to enforce a decade of United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and then we pushed the United Nations aside to attack Iraq. America and her alliances have allowed Israel all these years to occupy territory that did not rightfully belong to her under International Law and the United Nations charter, which has been the cause of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict all this time and the greatest cause even today of the roiling and continuous bloody turbulence in the Middle East. America, through her power and influence manages a free pass for Israel and herself to break International Law, but uses her power and influence to bring the lash to the backs of those nations she believes to be in need of a United Nations back-lashing. This is not the way for a leader of nations to behave. There can be no possibility of any kind of peaceful progress this way. And that is what we are missing in America. We do not have a vision for peaceful progress in the world. We do not realize yet that we can no longer treat the lesser and weaker nations of the world as second-class citizens subject to our authority and our demands, while making the hollow claim that we represent the International Community. The International Community may be cowed by America’s power and military might but it is not too difficult for any nation in the world to realize that America, for all her pretensions, has always been completely and totally consumed by her own self-interests. We’re not fooling the nations of the world, we just have the biggest boots and the biggest guns for now. The most damaging fact of all is that America has simply lost its goodness, but doesn’t know it. If a nation does not know that it is in the wrong, it has lost its goodness and its ability to know. How else can we explain the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens who have perished because of our illegal and unprovoked attack and invasion of their country, and the fact that America’s people, her masses, have not shown any shame or outrage about it? If the American people were shamed and outraged, our soldiers would be home, and Bush, Cheney, Rice and the others responsible would be on trial, facing charges of high crimes and misdemeanors for the parts they played in leading us into this illegal and immoral war. We can’t explain these horrors away by claiming that it was all in defense of our freedom and way of life and in direct response to the Al-Qaeda attack of 9/11. Bush still claims it and the majority may still go along with it, but that doesn’t make it so and it will not pass the muster of history. And neither will we be able to explain it away as necessary collateral damage in our War on Terror. Just because we call it that, doesn’t make it so. We haven’t fought any war on terror. We’ve just made war and created terror in doing it. The fact is when a nation turns morally wrong, everything goes wrong, beginning with our wisdom and turning us from intelligent and logical thinkers into a rather dumb and slow-minded nation that still believes that the nation with the biggest guns will face down all the evil doers and win in the end. It’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to lose this one big time and take the rest of the world with us, if we don’t stop and rid ourselves of our he-man attitude that we can conquer all by the sword and with the Lord on our side. Just because we say that the Lord is on our side, doesn’t make it so. The most incredible and yet most simple fact of all, which is what makes this whole situation that we’ve gotten ourselves in so insane, is that world peace is not really such a hard thing to accomplish, if we would only try wisdom and apply a little moral logic to the situations faced by the world’s nations at this point in history. What does any nation of people want, regardless of the people and regardless of the nation? They want their own homeland without any outsiders ruling over them. They want to be treated with respect and with friendship. They want to be left alone to exercise their own freedom without any other nation telling them what they can and cannot do. For America, of all the nations in the world, that shouldn’t be such a hard concept to understand. America, if she would save herself, needs to give up her aggressive, Roman Empire ways and become the true leader of nations that she could be if she tried, treating all other nations in a fair and equal way, respectful of their sovereignty and independence. To be a friend, one must act like a friend. To be concerned, one must show concern. To be a peacemaker, one must make peace. To gain respect, one must show respect. Those are simple concepts that individuals have practiced for thousands of years. Why should that not be the way for all nations of the world to behave, especially America? What’s keeping us from it? That’s the great, wondrous mystery of our day.
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