SERIES OF POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEPHEN SAIDEMAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Stephen Saideman has given us a disgusting piece of analysis which I can only describe as a foreign-policy version of gutter literature.
The quality of thinking here is stunningly impoverished and utterly lacking in ethics.
This makes you wonder just how some of our universities grant such sinecures.
But then I remember the baffling case of Margaret Somerville, perhaps Canada's most tedious and irrelevant academic.
And then I consider the case of the ghastly Michael Ignatieff, a man who blubbered stuff about human rights at the same time he advocated torture and NAZI-like invasion of another country.
Clearly, holding a position as a professor at a major university today is no guarantee of original thought, nor even of clear thought.
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"Canadians don't appreciate or understand what we have here in our country, we just see the cost, not the rewards of helping others."
A ridiculous observation.
The author is blinded by his immediate experience and lack of broader knowledge.
The fact is that the world is full of backward abuse. Take your pick.
In rural India they still burn brides, and forty million widows in India live in misery because of the way the culture treats widows.
And many of those forty million are teenagers or not much older, having been child brides married off at 12 or 14 for financial considerations of a family, often to a much older man who dies a few years later.
These women cannot even eat certain food, cannot remarry, must wear only certain colors, and are left alone to eventually die in poverty.
Shall I go on about rural areas of South America? Or Pakistan? Or Bangladesh?
God, American propaganda has been so effective, it is still quoted as a reason for squandering billions and killing the citizens of a country where we do not belong.
Women are abused throughout the poor and backward world, and that includes several billion people.
America did not go to Afghanistan to free women or any other Don Quixote nonsense.
It went there to kill, something which it has done a great deal of, including killing children.
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The behavior of other NATO countries is the sharpest argument about this pointless war.
No one will commit troops and equipment in any significant numbers.
Do they not understand what a terrible place Afghanistan is? Of course, they do, but they also know the West has no real strategic interests there.
And they know too that the "mission" cannot succeed, except in killing people and creating Potemkin village projects.
They make only token commitments to give the Pentagon a fig leaf of "coalition forces" and to keep Washington from taking reprisals.
You cannot remake a society with an army. Indeed you cannot remake a society at all.
The best we can ever do is give well-thought-out assistance, monetary and technical, and offer trade concessions.
A backward place must outgrow its backwardness. And B-52s sure do not help.
America went to Afghanistan for vengeance, and then realized it didn't know what to do beyond terrorizing the local population.
We can only hope Obama is able to reach some kind of theatrical arrangement that covers his inevitable backing out, soon.
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“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1933
