Step in the Ring

In response to War vs. Peace

by Stefan Raets

There are two types of people in this world: those who have experienced war firsthand, maybe by living through it or losing a loved one, and those who still believe that war is a necessary aspect of life. I don’t believe it is possible to continue living under the illusion that war can be anything but evil, once you’ve come in close contact with it. Many people in the U.S. have never lived through a war. Seeing it on TV is a very different experience from seeing it in your backyard. I firmly believe that people’s eagerness to advocate war would diminish quickly once they’ve seen tanks rolling down their own streets and spent a night cowering in a basement, hoping the bombs will miss their own homes.

Of course, in this day and age, there is a third group: those people who have found a way to gain benefit from waging war. The Halliburtons and Blackwaters of the world, who stand to gain billions of dollars on the backs of the pain and suffering of innocent people, would clearly rather see war than peace rule the world. The big oil companies definitely have a stake in making sure we continue to have access to the largest reserves of oil in the world. The big defense companies and arms manufacturers would lose tremendous amounts of money if they couldn’t continue to supply the war machine with the tools of its trade.

Unfortunately, we are living in an age where this last group of people – the war profiteers – have a high amount of influence on the U.S. administration. I don’t think anyone would argue that the American participation in the first and second world wars helped keep our entire civilization free from tyranny. Even the toppling of the Afghan Taliban, in the wake of 9/11, could be called a necessary response to the worst act of terrorism of our age (even if the sad truth is that a previous U.S. administration originally helped sponsor them). Still, George W. Bush had the majority of the country behind him in 2001. As Naomi Klein shows in this excellent video, the administration then took a disastrously wrong turn when taking advantage of the state of shock the entire country was in.

The invasion of Iraq was an entirely unnecessary and illegal act of war, falsely justified by what is now known to be manufactured and false evidence of the production of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi regime. While Saddam Hussein was clearly no angel, there are worse dictators still living and reigning freely. Unspeakable atrocities are being committed in various other countries, but since there are no significant oil reserves there, the U.S. is doing nothing meaningful to stop them.

George W. Bush, already the president with the lowest approval ratings ever in a second term, will go down in history as the man who privatized the war machine. Billions upon billions of U.S. tax dollars have been handed out in the form of government contracts to security firms and contractors, resulting in the sad paradox that mercenaries are making more money than poor American kids who enlisted in peacetime, hoping to get a decent education. Thousands of them have died, not to mention countless thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, because of the folly of one man.

Photograph by Elaine Vigneault. Some rights reserved.

It’s now widely accepted, even by conservative historians, that George W. Bush will go down in the history books as the worst president this country has ever seen. It’s almost incomprehensible how someone who shortly after 9/11 had 90% approval ratings was able to make such a mockery of himself in just a few years, not to mention ruining our country’s image on the world stage. In the face of the tremendous political disaster that has befallen the GOP because of George W. Bush, the hopes of seeing a Republican voted into the White House in 2008 are slim. Realizing this, GOP presidential candidates wisely treat his name like a four letter word, so rarely is it used during primary debates. We can only hope all of this will help mute the current saber-rattling emanating from the White House.

If we have to make a choice between war and peace, the only sane choice is peace – unless you have no understanding of what war is like, or unless you stand to make a profit.

Submitted by Stefan Raets. Stefan is a refugee from the corporate world. When he isn’t reading or writing, he’s probably feeding or diapering his newborn son.

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