Walk On!

Another bites the dust. Another Cana­dian sol­dier killed in Afghanistan, the 67^th. Amer­i­cans casu­alty ? 427 sol­diers, if no one dies by tomor­row. Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom ? Yeah, right.

We some­how got used to it. I can’t remem­ber a time when, flick­ing though the TV chan­nels, I wouldn’t see fuzzy footage of cities cov­ered by thick layer of dust, tanks, and sud­denly a bomb explodes. Sol­diers run­ning away, pic­ture of an hos­pi­tal some­where and some wounded kids lay­ing on a bed, passerby tes­ti­fy­ing “the car just blew up” or “my house is destroyed”. Casu­al­ties. Such a mod­est word for so many deaths.

The war again ter­ror. Gee, I won­der how they feel over there but I’m guess­ing any­thing but safe.

We all remem­ber how it started. The World Trade Cen­ter attacks. “None of us will ever for­get this day, yet we go for­ward to defend free­dom and all that is good and just in our world”, said Bush.

Al Quaeda and its lead­ers were to go down. Oper­a­tion “infi­nite Jus­tice”, as it was to be called in the after­maths of 9/11. Sounds more like a revenge than a care­fully designed plan. But who could blame the USA ? The attacks were sud­den, shock­ing and full of hate. The USA looked like the idol with feet of clay and most of the world backed the mourn­ing coun­try. Ter­ror­ism isn’t fair. The world stared at the footage of the planes crash­ing into the WTC. Let’s catch the bad guys. Oh, sorry : let’s use the act of col­lec­tive self-defense pro­vided for under Arti­cle 51 of the UN Char­ter (sounds more proper this way).

But it didn’t go as planned. Osama was nowhere to be found. Mean­while, sol­diers were killed, civil­ians were bombed (clean war is a nice con­cept on paper) and detainees were sent to Guan­tanamo Bay – not that we knew what was going on there. Tough beast. And we were the hunters.

And then it was Irak. All the pre­texts were good : Irak was devel­op­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion, there were a strong bond between Sad­dam and Al Qaeda. Yipee com­rade, the dic­ta­tor is dead – where are the weapons, where is Osama ? Still look­ing for them. Man, the “axis of evil” was deceptive.

I can’t pos­si­bly sup­port the ter­ror­ists nor I can sup­port the Tal­ibans, Sad­dam Hussein’s dic­ta­tor­ship, North Korea’s hard liner sys­tem or reli­gious zealots, who­ever they are. But bomb­ing coun­tries hardly helps, espe­cially when there are no post-invasion plans.

Here’s the deal we’re offer­ing to most coun­tries we don’t like : we were here first, we rule the world, we know what’s right and what’s wrong – deal with it. A few decades ago, it was per­fectly fine for the USA, the USSR, the UK, France, China etc. to develop atomic weapons. Once we real­ized our stu­pid­ity (blow­ing the planet is basi­cally a no-win sit­u­a­tion, right ?) we all hap­pily signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. The treaty men­tion com­plete dis­ar­ma­ment that liq­ui­dates nuclear weapons but we didn’t read that line and failed to meet our oblig­a­tions. Not that it mat­ters, right ? The very same treaty enti­tles us to go to war against the coun­tries who don’t respect it.We think we’re within our right. We think our civ­i­liza­tion is more advanced, we think we are tol­er­ant and open-minded. We believe in our democ­racy and free­dom. Only prob­lem is, we set the rules.

I was happy to see women vot­ing dur­ing the Afghan pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. I’m not happy to see Mus­lims tar­geted as ter­ror­ists all over the world. I was glad to see a dic­ta­tor­ship falling. I wasn’t happy when this same dic­ta­tor was hanged, nor that I was happy to see human right abuses in Irak. War isn’t about bring­ing our won­der­ful civ­i­liza­tion to a bunch of oppressed cit­i­zens. If war there is, it should be for the peo­ple and for their right to self-determination.

But it seems that recently, our per­sonal inter­ests col­lided a bit too much with the nation’s legit­i­mate right to self-determination. I still remem­ber when the Tal­ibans ordered the demo­li­tion of the two stat­ues of Bud­dhas at Bamiyan in March 2001. At the time, it was just a news briefs. No one cared about the Tal­ibans, even though they had been in power for a few years already. For­eign pow­ers were at first sup­port­ive of them as a mat­ter of fact. It wouldn’t have been for 9/11, would have we gone at war against them ? Did we actu­ally care about women’s right there ?

I’m not sure where we’re going with these wars. I’m hop­ing Iran won’t be next. I’m hop­ing we won’t go towards a war of civ­i­liza­tion, because I can tell you fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians worry me as much as fun­da­men­tal­ist Mus­lim. I’m hop­ing for a bet­ter bal­ance of power in this world because the west­ern world also has a lot to learn. I’m hop­ing we won’t fight blindly against every­thing we don’t agree to or we don’t under­stand. I’m hop­ing we will stop using the force to push for our goals.

Basi­cally, I’m an Utopian. Oh well.

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