Tsunami Vs. Saddam
Okay, forgive me for being flip, but I wanted to point something out.
The tsunami is being called one of the worst natural disasters ever. Nearly 200,000 are confirmed dead, and that number is likely to climb. Aside from the flooding, people are also dying because of disease, lack of clean water sources, and being stranded. All in all it's one of the most horrible things that's likely to ever happen. Entire tribes and communities or nationalities have been wiped out.
Rightfully so, the world is responding with volunteers, supplies, and dollars. There is virtually no country that hasn't promised or already given a large sum of money to help in the relief efforts. Anyone who might be dumb enough to publicly state we should do nothing to help would be ridiculed and spat upon. This is being called a tragedy that will unite the world behind the cause of helping to care for our less fortunate neighbors.
Now, a lot of this kind of outpouring happened in the world when the U.S. was attacked by terrorists on 09.11.01. Thousands of our citizens were lost to the tragedy, and the world responded with money, prayers, tears, and volunteers.
Take a deep breath now.....here we go: Why is it so much easier for the world to feel sorry for victims of the tsunami and 9/11 than for victims of Saddam's vicious regime? In the handful of years prior to our invasion of Iraq, a couple hundred thousand died in a genocide perpetrated by Saddam. He and his Republican Guard regularly killed citizens for flimsy reasons. His sons imprisoned the soccer team for losing a game, and routinely picked random female citizens to rape and murder. On the day we invaded, most of the people of southern Iraq had gone months without water, using mud puddles as their main source of water. The people of Iraq were persecuted, victimized, robbed, starved, and murdered. Why are these folks less worthy of the world saving them than the tsunami victims?
I remember hearing celebrities and regular Joe's saying things like "I'm against the war in Iraq because I don't wanna see any of our soldiers die." The implication in statements like that is "but I really don't care if thousands of them Iraqis die...so long as none are Americans." And that's just crap.
Sure, we were told of Saddam's impending threat posed to our country at the outset of war, and the suffering of his country's people was not given to us as a major reason for invading. Sure, there are political sides to the Iraq conflict, where liberal yahoos think we're only in it for oil and conservative yahoos think our intentions were 100% noble.
But at the end of the day, when you lay down all the facts.....our invasion saved thousands of lives...and stopped the reign of a man that would certainly have killed and incapacitated thousands more in the years to come. And for me, that's how I sleep at night. I know Iraq, dangerous as it may now be, is still a better place under infant democracy than it would ever have been under tyrannical rule.
It's an honest question I've been asking the last few days. How can a natural disaster and a dictator both cause famine, death, and disease (by the thousands and tens of thousands)...and yet only one of them is a cause worthy of us rushing to defeat it? We should be concerned about the world's human population whenever they are starving or dying, regardless of the cause of that suffering.
It's almost sickening to listen to people here and abroad (France, I'm talking to you) who were just adamant that the U.S. do nothing in Iraq to help their dying people but are now equally adamant that the U.S. do everything in its power to help the dying tsunami victims. Victims are victims, and we should care about them and strive to help make their survival easier without limiting our dollar and time amounts spent based on the cause of that suffering. The victims in Iraq had no more power or ability to save themselves from Saddam's attacks than the victims of the tsunami had to stop the earthquake.
I know that if hundreds of thousands of Americans were facing death, I would want the world to help us out, whether that death was coming in the form of a firey asteroid collision or in the form of a ruthless dictator.
posted by Kennelworthy @ 1/04/2005 02:32:00 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I think that this is a very good thought. The question it should raise, though, is if we followed your reasoning why would we have started in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands died in the Sudan during the worst of the bloodshed. The amount of people who died in the tsunami is roughly equivalent to the amount of children who die from malnutrition and disease in Africa every two weeks.
The problem is not that we attacked Iraq. The problem is that we chose to put that much effort and money into Iraq when they were other places of such significantly greater suffering.
Yeah. Right on. I wasn't really trying to get into political views on Iraq and such, but more trying to get at the heart of how we as humans (and we as Americans) react to the suffering of others.
We invade Iraq (granted, not for the given reason of easing suffering) but we do not invade communist North Korea. We virtually ignore the Sudan. We were in Kosovo and Somalia and Bosnia, but kept talking for years about Israel making peace with Arrafat (who was a very, very bad man).
Certainly the tsunami is a horrifying and astounding tragedy, and I wonder if there's enough money and aid in the world to help everyone suffering in its wake. But whenever people are involved, and other governments are involved in causing that suffering, that's when politics seems to enter the picture.
If a giant sandstorm in Iraq had killed a couple hundred Kurds, instead of Sadaam doing it, would we or would we not have rushed right in there with our giant red crosses and our dollars?
I just thought it was interesting. Really, if at the end of the day we believe ourselves to be caring, compassionate, and generous....then I think we have to take a long hard look at how we choose to wield those things. We ought to value the innocent Iraqi's life (both the innocent Iraqi killed by our errant bombs as well as the innocent Iraqi killed by Sadaam and his henchmen) as one that is equal to that of a U.S. soldier or citizen. Human life is either valuable to us or it is not. We seem, as a country--even as a world--to want to try and pick and choose our charity cases based on what suits our needs or emotions, when I would like to see us trying equally hard to ease the suffering of anyone anywhere who suffers.
Hey, we have our first angry Liberal! Welcome! I'm honored. Don't forget, that for every angry Lib who starts spouting bad logic in an aggressive voice, another Bush voter is born. It's kind of like how an angel gets its wings whenever a bell rings.
Let's not forget those who have died, of course, but let's also not forget that much of the information coming from that site is suspect. Here is just one of the many places that I've found online that makes one think the death toll is actually a smaller number:
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/simple/index.php/t6480.html
When you start counting health related deaths that would have occurred otherwise, and rely on media that is suspect, such as Al Jazeera, you have a number that is largely inaccurate.
Also, in the cold horrible calculation of war, it is sometimes right to compare expected deaths without war to the suspected deaths within war. In this case, sadly, Sadaam would have killed much more were he still in power. I believe that we chose the lesser of two evils.
There are arguments against the war in Iraq, but this is not one of them.
agreed, there is something wrong with the passions of people (mainly american) that they don't understand the whole picture. human nature to be compassionate drive the general public to try and heal/take over in situations of disaster or catostrophic event. our human nature, now, doesn't accept war as a means to heal/save in events that are equally catastrophic (i.e. genocide).
historians say to remember your history or you are bound to repeat yourself. shall we drawn a parallel of saddam to hitler. if you remember your WWII history well, concentration camps were not the reason we went to war, but it was this, a discovered attrocity that reveals the true tyrant/evil of that man and his regime. it is this discovery that people point too to show what true evil we were fighting. saddam from what we know now, the genocide he has promoted is just as awful, but people can't seem to see their deaths. if you read some of the iraqi blogs out there you can see some different pictures than what we are presented by our general public friends who don't care to see the greater picture.
one asks, why iraq first, sudan and north korea do the same things.. i agree. if we were to look at the middle east, iraq is a position of strategy in a network of terror. the true effects of enabling an opportunity for a free iraq will not be seen for years down the road. i hope people still remember what their perspective is now versus then, when the wounds of war start to heal and iraq is a free country.
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