All Those Countries Where THEY Live, And What They Have To Do With US

This post was originally written on 3/25/2012

  Hopefully if you are reading this, it's because you followed the link here from my piece on Foreign Affairs.  Not that you can't just read this blog all by it's lonesome, but this one is kind of an addendum to that one, so I'll link it for you HERE in case you wanna backtrack before going on.

     Okay, so we already covered that the options that the US Federal Government has as far as Foreign Affairs go are basically Wars and Treaties.  That's the two choices that they have that actually require anyone to DO anything.  There is also a third option, which is for the Federal Government to just ignore other countries entirely.  This is an option that really doesn't get exercised enough, in my opinion.  Later on in this piece I'll go on to give some details about the role that the US government should be playing in some of the countries that it is piddling around with now, and that have people all worked up during the 2012 election cycle, but first I'm going to cover a little more general information first.

     At the dawn of time, whenever you happen to believe that was, all the human beings that were living on the face of the Earth were pretty much equal in the situations that they were dealing with.  Everybody, no matter where in the world they called home, was just getting through the day trying not to get hurt or eaten by wild animals, cause those things usually equaled death, and death is not cool.  As time went on, different groups of people (there's always a group of people- we're social animals) figured out different things that made it easier to get through the day without people getting hurt or eaten.  That's what society is.  More time passed, and the groups got bigger and started to run into each other from time to time, and different territories were established.  That's because groups of people are instinctively suspicious of other groups of people.  As long as each group stayed in their own territory, things were okay.  Cross over into another group's territory and get caught doing it, there's gonna be a fight.

     These different territories were the precursors to the countries that we have today.  For some reasons that I'm not going to get into here, the different people who lived in the different territories ended up looking a lot like the people who lived in the territories close to them, and a lot different than the people in territories farther away from them.  That explains your different racial types without getting into any arguments about science and stuff.  Because the groups in these different territories pretty much avoided each other, the groups picked up different skills at different speeds.  A lot depended on what type of physical environment the group lived in as to what skills got developed more.  Live near water, master fishing.  Live where big tasty meaty animals like to live, master hunting.  Live where lots of tasty plants like to grow, master farming.  Get it?  Keep in mind that not all environments are created equal either, cause that's going to be important later.

Thomas Edison, creative guy.

     Another thing that influenced the type of skills each group learned and how quickly they learned it was the intelligence and personality of those who led the groups.  Creative leaders led to more creativity within the group. Dull leaders discouraged people who made them look dumb.  Asshole leaders just pushed people around so that all they had time to focus on was basic survival skills.  A couple of asshole leaders in territories that were right next to each other could keep their groups fighting with each other so much that even basic survival was a hard thing to keep on top of.

     In addition to the environment and the leaders, this thing called religion was evolving right along with the societies.  Religion is all about answering the questions of what made everything and what the purpose of it all is.  Not all religions are created equal either.  Some are loose and adapt to changes in the people and the information that they learn from tinkering with their environment, others are rigid and state that one particular set of "facts" is true and the rules based on those facts should be followed to the letter.  Religion is something that some people are very drawn to, and when those people also happen to be the leaders of their group, that religion is usually followed by all the people in that group as well.  Sometimes, OR ELSE.

Walls-good defense strategy.

     Countries were developed as groups got big enough and learned enough stuff to settle down in one place within their territory, since now it was a lot clearer exactly where the people of the different groups were living and could be expected to not want others wandering through.  The borders of all the different countries that the world has seen in it's history are subject to change, but in general the country a group claims is made up of as much land as they can manage to keep other people out of.  Once a country with borders and a settled population gets established a form of government typically springs up, with organized leaders who make the rules and settle the disputes of all the people in that country.  Settled people tend to breed a lot more people too, cause it's easier to do when you're not moving around all the time.

     There are a lot of different ways that leaders of a country can run their government, and a lot of different ways that the people of the country can participate in their government.  There are general types of government, like communism, fascism, democracy, monarchy, theocracy, etc. but each country on the planet has developed it's own government over time with different leaders putting their own stamp on things until you end up with the countries and governments and populations that we have today.  In some ways the US is unique, because the people who set it up got a complete do over by coming to a land that not too many people had ever heard of, conquering the people that lived here, and writing up a whole new set of rules using the bits and pieces of what other governments had tried that they happened to like.  Other, more established, countries had to transition more gradually into the systems of government that they have by dealing with the people who still lived in their countries who liked the way things were before.

Bunch of Radical Progressives!  Bah!

     So now we have all these different countries, all kinds of different skills and governments (and religions) and, as of 1783, a brand new country on the scene that is trying out a radical experiment by letting their people choose the government and change it on a regular basis.  By this point, it could definitely be said that some places in the world were better to be born in than others.  Note that I didn't say certain people were better than others, because they aren't.  Take a baby that just fell out of it's mother, anywhere in the world, and there is nothing that separates that baby from any other baby anywhere else except for appearance.  Take that baby and drop it into the arms of some random mother (would have to be mother, cause fathers can't lactate) back at the dawn of time, and that kid isn't going to be any more advanced than any of the other babies that were born at the dawn of time.

     Even in 1783, there wasn't a huge difference between the lives of someone who lived in the jungles of Africa and the people who lived in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.  Both people were using the things in their environment that they had either made or traded something for to feed, clothe (liberal use of the word) and shelter themselves in order to stay alive.  Boston guy probably had better tools, but not anything that Africa guy couldn't replicate if he had a sample to study.  Since that time, however, some countries and their people have learned a lot of new things and have gotten a lot more advanced than others.  The reasons that they have are due to them having a good environment that provided them with what they needed, and having reasonable leaders who let people figure out how to make new stuff.  Less advanced people and countries have stayed that way because the environments that they live in provide less of what they need to stay alive, and because their leaders have been assholes who had other plans for the people besides letting them sit around and tinker with shit.

     Think about how many things we have in the US that run on electricity, either plugged into the wall or on a battery.  If no one had ever discovered electricity or how to create and manage it, we could kiss all that stuff goodbye.  There are countless other inventions that have been built upon to create the things that we use and build upon to make even more stuff.  That is the difference between us and less developed countries.  Our system of government and our leaders have allowed our people the freedom to learn and grow and experiment.  Theirs have not.  Very few of us who are living in America today can take any of the credit for ours being a "superior" or even a more developed country than Afghanistan or any of the other countries that we view as being so different than ours.  The people who came to this country before us did the work, we're just reaping the benefits.  And no one can argue that the men and women who founded this country did so in the hopes of creating a more perfect society, they just didn't like what they were living with before and wanted out.  It wasn't until circumstances came together and the time was right for our forebears to get themselves and their little society organized that some guys had a stroke of genius.  We're lucky, plain and simple.

     The result of all the progress made by our forebears and the creative geniuses among us is that the US, along with some other countries who've progressed right along with us, are now big shots on the global stage, and we're having to deal with other countries that have progressed as well in their own very different ways.  The average life of the people in every country in the world really isn't all that different, but the ideologies and goals of their governments sure are, and those governments spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether they want to make wars or make treaties with all the other governments of all the other countries.

     The US, over here all by its lonesome by virtue of luck and design, has emerged as a superpower that every other government in the world has an opinion about.  Some of those governments hate us because we promote a system of government that is very different than theirs.  Some of those governments want to be us, but are frustrated because they cannot accomplish in a short time what took us two centuries to achieve.  And some of those governments would really really like to make a whole lot of money off of selling stuff to the people who live here.  The leaders of those countries sometimes get pissy when we don't want to buy.  In every single one of those countries, there are people who agree and disagree with their governments and have various amounts of power to influence their fellow citizens to agree with their opinions.  The elected members of the Federal Government, for decades- hell, the better part of a century-  has been trying to figure out what we're supposed to do about all these different countries.

     This election cycle, the focus is on our relations with Afghanistan, China, Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, North Korea, and Palestine.  I'm going to move on and give my thoughts on each situation.

AFGHANISTAN and IRAQ

     Afghanistan is a mess that we're in because of a number of different factors.  First and foremost is the fact that living in Afghanistan is a group of people who call themselves the Taliban.  They are a group of people who want to be in control of the government of Afghanistan, and whose leaders have taught them that the entire US is evil, and that it is perfectly reasonable based on the beliefs of their religion to try and kill everyone in the US.  Not every person living in Afghanistan is a member of the Taliban, and not all of them want us dead either.  Nor does the religion that the Taliban teaches to it's members deal only with killing Americans.  That little gem is the twisted mindfuck of a guy named Osama Bin Laden and the friends he led his group with.

     Two days before my 21st birthday, some of the people who belonged to Bin Laden's Taliban hijacked some planes and used them to kill 2,977 Americans in New York City, Pennsylvania, and D.C.  This was not a traditional declaration of war on the US by the government of another country on behalf of all of it's citizens, this was a terrorist attack directed by a handful of men and carried out by 19 individuals.  This attack was devastating to us as Americans.  I spent that entire day waiting anxiously for news of whether my boyfriend's father, who lived in New York and regularly did business at the WTC, was okay.  I was one of the one's lucky enough to get good news that night.  Many others were not.

     Following those attacks on our citizens, the President who was serving at that time made the decision to send our military forces into the countries of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq in order to seek out and destroy anyone who may have had a hand in those attacks.  Ostensibly, our goals were also to help free the Afghani government of the unwanted influence of the Taliban, and to depose the leader of Iraq and find and destroy any weapons of mass destruction that were suspected to be in the possession of either the Taliban or the Iraqi government.  Both of these wars have been justified as Defending Our Country from those who attacked us, and who will attack us again.

     More than 2 million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 10 1/2 years. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are both dead, along with well over a hundred thousand other people from our military, their militaries, and their civilians. The focus of our military forces has been switched to providing security, training, and humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq in the hopes that they will be able to rebuild the messes that are left from the wars fought in their countries and move on to be, well, more like us.  Meanwhile, the Taliban still exists with new leaders who still don't like us, and it turns out that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction hidden in Saddam or Osama's basements after all.  The question that a lot of people are asking is whether has all been worth it, and was there a better way?  A whole lot of people also wonder whether it is the duty of the US military to clean up the messes in other countries or to even try to help/make those countries just like ours.

CHINA

     China is one of those countries that we have had issues with for a very long time.  On the surface, they seem to be our complete opposite, as far as governments and people go.  For one thing, they're Asian, which means they don't look anything like any of the people who came and settled here to get this country started.  For another thing, they are a REALLY old country.  They've been settled in and doing their thing for almost as long as some people believe the Earth has existed.  They're also huge, sitting on a continual stretch of land that is bigger than ours.  They have us beat in population too, with about 4 times as many people.

     The fear has always been that China, by sheer virtue of numbers. would some day take it upon themselves to just take over everything in the world and there wouldn't be anything any of us round eyed folks could do to stop them.  At least that was the case up until the discovery of nuclear weapons.  A-bombs tend to level the playing field a bit.  Now the worry is that they are going to own us by undercutting our labor force and producing every product known to man at a cheaper price with their ginormous pool of workers, then using the profits they make to buy all of our debt until they can repossess our entire country.

     Militarily, China has never been quite as big a threat as people feared, because all that land and that big ass population presents them with some challenges to balance out any advantage.  Basically, a lot of their land sucks, and all those people have gotta be fed.  Their form of government (communism, where everyone works for the good of the whole and gets a relatively equal share) has made them a little lazy about encouraging advances in technology that would make it easier for them to make the land they have feed all their people too.  It has served their purposes to keep their population involved in manual labor, so they haven't invested in too many labor saving machines.  This means that if they just pulled a shit ton of their people off of the job to go take over the world, rations would start getting scarce before the rear line of troops even crossed their own border.

     The economic threat?  That one's a little more real.  Communist country or not, China has gotten really good at playing capitalist when it comes to dealing with everyone except for their own citizens.  They know that other countries are still worried about that big ass military force too, so they drive a hard bargain in treaty situations.  Overall, the threat posed by China is smaller than it was in our grandparents day though, and it's getting even smaller as they keep losing allies who are totally committed to the communist ideal.  What we have to do now is start figuring out how to break the American addiction to cheap Chinese goods and even cheaper Chinese labor.

CUBA

     Cuba's another country that we've been bickering with for a long ass time.  The problem centers around the leader of the country, Fidel Castro, who just happens to be an asshole.  Recently he was replaced by his brother Raul who, by all accounts, is also an asshole.  These two are also a big time fans of the whole communism thing, and with Cuba being 90 miles or so from the coast of Florida, well, they're a big Red thorn in our side.  We've been worried since Castro first gained power and declared Cuba to be communist that they might attack us, either with or without the help of Russia -which was the Mother of all communist countries, and of whom we are always suspicious because they became a communist country after some communists overthrew Russia's government and killed their royal family in a really gruesome way.  Technically Russia has been democratic for about two decades now, and we're on half-assed decent terms with them now.

     The thing to keep in mind about Cuba is that Castro (both of them) and the other higher ups in their government are really freaking old.  Russia probably isn't going to back Cuba up in any military action that they start against us, cause Russia has a whole lot of countries that aren't going to take any saber rattling from them laying down.  It doesn't seem like the Cuban government has the overwhelming support of it's citizens either, since a whole bunch of them have always been willing to get in rickety boats and risk a little ocean voyage up to Florida.  I think that as long as the US doesn't try to go down there and take over Cuba and make it our own little island getaway, this situation deserves to be left alone to play out for a bit.


IRAN

     Iran is a real hot spot.  Whole lot of issues going on there.  We've got the stuff we want angle, the allies angle, the different type of government than we have angle, and the asshole leaders both big and small angle, all rolled up into one sandy little package.

     Number one on the list is the fact that Iran has oil.  Lots of it, and control of a waterway that other countries who have lots of it use to ship it to us when we want to buy some.   When we're trying to negotiate with Iran about stuff, we impose sanctions on countries who want to do business with us who buy oil from Iran, which means they sell less of it and take a hit in the pocketbook.  When they want to scare us, they threaten to block the Strait of Hormuz and make it impossible for us and a lot of other countries to get the oil that other nations want to sell us.

    Next on the list is that Iran is right next door to Iraq, where we got rid of Saddam Hussein and are hoping to see another country like us pop up.  Iran, on the other hand, would probably prefer to see another country that is more like theirs emerge from that rubble, or possibly even own that real estate themselves because Iraq has more oil they could sell.  While we've been in Iraq, we've set up a shitload of military bases just over the Iraqi border from Iran, and some Iranians wonder whether they are our next target.  Part of that is because they have some leaders who tell them that's exactly what our plans are, and partly because we have some idiots of our own who've stated that it wouldn't be a bad idea.

     Third up is the allies thing.  Especially with regard to Israel.  The US is politically allied with Israel, which means we've promised to have their back if anyone picks on them, and Iran is politically allied with countries like Lebanon and Palestine.  Iran specifically gives cash and supplies to groups in those countries who have serious beefs with Israel.  Right now, Israel is screaming that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb to drop on them, and they think that the US and Israel should go to war with Iran and stop them before they build one.

Bit of an ass.

     Finally we've got the asshole leaders thing.  In this case, the country is actually a theocracy, which means that the rules everyone has to follow are the ones laid out in a religious text- in this case the Koran because the leaders are followers of Islam.  In addition to the religious bigwigs, Iran has got a semi-secular government that is supposed to handle the day to day running of the government, and the guy who is in charge of that is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  He meets with other government leaders (when they'll take his calls) and is supposed to answer to their religious grand poohbah, Ali Khamenei.  Ahmadinejad is definitely an asshole in the sense that man makes people want to punch him almost every time he speaks, but it's hard to tell whether Iranians think he's an asshole because Americans are generally not invited into Iran to ask them.  Khameni seems to be mostly interested in making sure that Iranians hold true to the basics of their religion, and might not be an asshole at all.  It seems that he and Ahmadinejad have some differences of opinion, that's for sure.

     The underlying problem with Iran is a religious one.  Islam and Judaism, the religions believed in and practiced by almost all of the citizens in Iran (and some other countries) and Israel respectively, both make claims about their believers being the favoritest people of God ever.  Followers of these two religions have been arguing over which religion has that one right pretty much since the first time one of their followers made the claim to a follower of the other religion.  And it's gotten really UGLY at times.  One of the things that has been written into the Islamic religion is that part of being a good Muslim (another word for Islam) is not putting up with any lies about God or the Prophet Mohammed (a guy they think God talked to around 1400 years ago) from anybody.  Judaism just so happens to have declared Mohammed a nut, and it makes that chosen people claim- both not cool by the standards of Islam.

     You're basically talking about a blood feud there that is going to go on as long as neither side is willing to say their religion is wrong.  It's not the people, it's the religion, and historical events have led to some rather pissy attitudes from people on both sides.  We'll get into more about that later, but before I move on, I'm going to point out that Islam (and Iranians or other people who really really believe in Islam) doesn't really have a problem with America for the different religion reason.  For the most part they think we're all Christians, and Islam doesn't have a big beef with Christianity.  Some of the more rigid adherents of Islam think that anyone who doesn't believe in Islam is going to hell, but for the most part the problem that the believers have is with the idea that we are A.) trying to make everybody in the world be like us, and B.) That we're siding with those damn Israelites!  Only the really extreme Muslims think that us letting our women drive and wear bikinis, and people drinking and stuff, marks us for extermination.  To counter that, we have extremists of other faiths who still think that "witches" should be burned at the stake.

NORTH KOREA

     Talk about unfinished business.  My great grandfather lost an arm in Korea back in the 50's.  Came home to his 10 kids and went on to be the best one armed auto mechanic in the tri-state area.  Here we have another shining example of that whole Balance of Power thing.  Korea had ended up split in half, with the North being communist and the South being a democracy.  A bunch of countries (mainly us) sent a bunch of troops over there to try and make the whole country either or, and ended up leaving it split in half.  I'm pretty sure we still have a base with troops in South Korea just to make sure that it stays like us.

     Back in 1994, a whackadoodle named Kim Jong-il took over as President of North Korea, and for a while it looked like he was going to be a fairly reasonable guy.  He signed some treaties with the US during Clinton's administration, was making an effort to get along with South Korea, and made noises about wanting to improve relations and stuff.  Then he admitted that he hadn't quite followed the terms of the treaty he signed with Clinton, made it clear that he thought Bush II was a dick, and tested some nuclear weapons underground.  All reports say that he treated his people like crap, and he and Bush don't seem to have liked each other or wanted to play nice at all.  By the time Obama made it into office, their were rumors that the man might not even be alive anymore, and he was definitely ill.  He pretty much stopped talking to the US and then died last year.

     Kim Jong-il was replaced by his son, Kim Jong-un, who- holy shit is younger than I am!  Sorry.  Back to the point.  Kim Jong-un seems to be following in his father's footsteps with treating his people like crap, but it is important to note that technically the government of North Korea is a triumvirate,  which means that while Kim is really the one in charge, he's supposed to be hashing out details with two other people and coming to an agreement.  He's also following in his father's footsteps, kind of like a monarchy system, so the impetus to make drastic changes in policy and practice aren't there the way that they are in our type of elected government.  It is possible that sometime in the future, Kim the younger could come into his own as a leader and be much different than his father.  That could be for better or worse, true, but this one is a wait and see for me.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

     I screwed up my nice neat alphabetical order here, but I thought we needed a breather before jumping back into the religion thing again.  Fasten your seatbelts, cause there's a lot of religion involved with this one.

     For those of you who don't already know, Israel is a country founded by the Jewish people, for the Jewish people over in the Middle East.  A bunch of countries sat down after WWII and agreed to let them have it because frankly, they needed some place to call home.  It just so happened that the place they wanted was the land around Jerusalem cause that they used to have before they started getting chased all over the world by people who didn't like them.  It's kind of hard to say no to a people who've just lost 6 million or so members of their group, so despite the possible problems involved with giving them the Holy Land, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Byelorussia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxumbourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Phillipines, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, Union of South Africa, USSR, USA, Uruguay, and Venezuela voted to give it to them.


     Judaism is a really old religion whose followers have be spouting the One God belief since Old Testament times.  Not exactly Adam and Eve, but close.  The religion predates Jesus.  Among the beliefs that are held by Jewish people is the belief that they are God's own chosen people.  This pisses some people off.  Another belief that they have is that Jesus was just a guy, not a miracle son of God.  This pisses some more people off.  Then there's the fact that some Jewish leaders were instrumental in getting Jesus hung up there on that cross (they convinced the Romans to do it cause they said he was a heretic, and the Romans did it to appease them and keep them happy under Roman rule) THAT really pisses some more people off. Then there's the thing about how you can only be considered a Jewish person if your mother was a Jewish person.  That makes Judaism the only religion that is also a blood tied race of people, which serves the double purpose of making them seem a little snooty and elitist, and makes them easy to target as a group because their religion is "in their blood" not just in their heads.  Again with the kinda pissing some people off.


     With all that pissing people off, the Jewish folks have been subject to a whole lot of persecution for several centuries.  Islamic societies hated them and treated them like shit, Christian societies hated them and treated them like shit.  Catholics hated them and treated them like shit.  For a long time they just took it and  waited for God to take care of his Chosen People and provide for them, and they moved around, spread out and kinda kept their heads down.  They ended up all over the place, stuck mainly to themselves, and didn't blend too awful much into the different societies they lived in because you have to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish, so Jewish guys who want Jewish kids had to marry a nice Jewish girl.  Then came Hitler, and the whole game changed.


     Unfortunately for the Jewish people living in and around Germany when Hitler took over running the show there, Hitler REALLY didn't like Jewish people.  He had a lot of excuses for why he didn't like them, but the bottom line is that Hitler didn't really like very many people, and somewhere along the way some Jewish person must have pissed him off and painted a big ole target on the backs of every Jew as far as he was concerned.  It didn't help matters that your average racially indigenous German looked different than your average Jewish German.  Jewish people, by sticking to themselves, were still inheriting the physical characteristics of their ancestors who'd come from the Middle East, and Germans were descended from people who'd come from places that were colder and bred paler people.  Jewish communities also felt less of a pinch from overall crappy economic conditions because they were insulated and pretty self sufficient.  Having special rules about how your food has to be handled, and having different Sabbath days than everyone else will do that to a community.  Being different somehow makes it easier for people to justify hating you.


     So Hitler decided to "cleanse" the Jewish people of Germany, and the countries that Germany conquered while he was running the show, by killing them or working them to death.  He convinced or terrorized a whole lot of people into helping him do it, too.  As much as I'd like to say that know one could walk away from learning about WWII and the Holocaust without being horrified, I know that there are still plenty of people who can.  I'm not one of them, but there are people who don't think that it's real or that it wasn't as bad as it's portrayed, or that it wasn't a big deal.  It was a very big deal.

     Back to the creation of Israel.  The Jewish people needed a place of their own to go after WWII, and a bunch of countries agreed to give them part of the land that the British had control of in Palestine, so Israel was born in 1947.  The problem was that there were already people living in Palestine, and those people were not Jewish.  The people who were living there were Arab and believed in Islam (Arab generally describes people who are from the Middle East, but doesn't necessarily mean that they believe in the Islamic religion, kind of like how not all Americans are Christians.)  Big problem.  As soon as the British cleared out in 1948, Israel, Palestine (what was left of it) and some other Arab countries went to war.


     The problem was two-fold.  For starters, The Palestinians wanted their damn land back, and didn't figure that those other countries had any right to vote on giving it away.  Didn't matter to them if it had belonged to the followers of a different religion back in the day, cause their families had been there for a long ass time, and the people living there NOW aren't the ones who chased off the people who lived their before.  It's kind of like if a bunch of countries were to vote and decide that we had to move out and give the Native Americans back all the land we stole from them.  Yeah, that would go over REAL well.  The even bigger issue was that Jerusalem, which Israel really wanted to call their capital and which is a pretty honking big deal of a holy place according to Judaism, just happens to be a pretty honking big deal of a holy city in Islam and Christianity too.  That's cause all three religions are working from the same basic story, just with different embellishments and endings.  For the Jewish folks, it was the capital of their homeland, For the followers of Islam its a special place that Mohammed visited, for the Christians, oh yeah, it's where Jesus died (and rose again, I presume.)

Wow.  That's shiny.

     A couple of wars have been fought in that area trying to gain total control of Jerusalem, kill off all the people on the other side, and generally just for spite.  A whole bunch of different countries have tried to get everyone involved to sit down and sign some treaties, kiss and make up, and basically just get the fuck along, but the leaders in charge of the countries that all want that damn Holy Land aren't real interested in finding common ground, so progress has been slow- to put it mildly.  As it stands and has stood for about 35 years, Israelis are living on their side of the border they share with Palestine and creeping as close to it as they can get, Palestinians aren't real interested in moving away from that border or Jerusalem (which Israel has been occupying and calling their capital even though no one else agrees with them for 35 years).  All in all, one big fucking mess.


     There really isn't anything that any government of any country is going to be able to do to fix this problem, because there is no way to make people stop believing in the religions that their ancestors have followed for thousands of years, except to let them grow out of those beliefs on their own.  Regardless of who has been right or wrong or which people has treated the other people worse in history, the folks who are living in Israel and Palestine and Iran, etc. TODAY are not those people.  The people who live there TODAY are all a little bit wrong, and they are all fighting a fight that was started by their great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents.  It's all well and good to say that we'll have Israel's back if another country invades them, but it's bullshit to say that we're going to help them fight a war if they take it upon themselves to throw the first bomb in that war- especially if they are justifying it on the basis that some words scratched into rocks thousands of years ago tells them that God believes they have the right to whatever it is they're fighting over.


HUMANITARIAN RELIEF

Good Folks- Not Military.

     Of concern to many Americans is the use of our military forces for "Humanitarian Relief" in foreign countries.  The general idea is that the US and other developed countries who do things the "right" way should be sending in troops to keep assholes from treating their people like crap, and helping those poor people build themselves up until they act more like us and have some of the cool shit we have, like a Mcdonald's.  The call to provide humanitarian relief often happens to come from the same countries where we have recently fought a war with the government of a country (or some group who wants to be the government of a country) in the name of Defending Our Country.  We hear a lot of talk about "Human Right's Violations" and "Third World Living Conditions" and stuff like that, then we have soldiers being deployed to help the ordinary citizens of a country catch up on all the good shit they've missed out while their environment and their leaders were keeping them from discovering that good shit for themselves.


     No one can say that it's not a very nice thing to do to help people who are less fortunate than oneself.  Charity and helping your fellow man are AWESOME.  It's just not something that the US military should be used for.  Our Constitution does not specifically outline the purposes to which the use of our military forces may be applied, but the preamble to that document does state what the purpose of it's authors was for writing it:

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this 

Constitution for the United States of America."

     It's a bit of a stretch to argue that building infrastructure and training the military forces of a separate sovereign nation on their soil, or physically defending one set of foreign citizens from another set of foreign citizens,  hauling food into to feed the citizens of a foreign country, or any of the other tasks that are described as providing "Humanitarian Relief" meets the criteria for defending Americans or promoting our welfare.  Securing the blessings of liberty to their posterity means future generations- as in future generations who live under the government created by the Constitution, which only applies to people living in territory that is recognized as belonging to the US.

     There has to be a line drawn somewhere, and I believe that line is drawn around the borders of the lands where American citizens live, work, and pay taxes towards the support of the US Federal Government.  The government created by the Constitution exists to lead the people who elect and support it.  With regards to our military-  a force that is funded from the contributions of a free citizenry for the purpose of defending our interests and our lives- our interests need to be more narrowly defined AS our lives.  If there is a credible and imminent threat to the lives of Americans who are allowed to participate in our system of government (or will be when they're old enough) then by all means, rally the troops and kick some ass.  Anything beyond that needs to be a voluntary choice on the behalf of each individual American.

     There are plenty of Americans who are socially conscious and globally aware.  These people will give their money, their time, and in some cases their lives, to help those less fortunate than themselves.  They usually don't do it expecting anything back in return either, which is a lot more likely to foster goodwill towards Americans than sending armed troops into a foreign country to "fix" it.  There are plenty of these Americans who would contribute willingly to a fund or organization that was sponsored by the US government to carry out missions of "Humanitarian Relief"  We should not all be forced to support a military force that exists to meet our needs to carry out these missions of mercy. My fellow citizens and I pledge our allegiance to the US by continuing to live in this country and following the laws our Constitutional government creates, not to any other sovereign nation.  In committing our military to meeting the needs of allied countries, my contribution towards supporting that military, and my allegiance, is being given to a foreign government or people without my consent.

     As far as maintaining good global relations, it never pays off in the end to buy your friends.  The moment that you stop buying them, if you haven't found some way to make them like you in the meantime, they stop being your friend.  A lot of times, just stopping the payments is enough to make them really not like you.  The US was founded on the idea that we were going to be the country that was just right for everybody who was willing to follow the rules and get along despite their differences.  Those ideals have led to America becoming a pretty happening place, but we didn't get here over night, and what we have isn't something that can just be copied.  For other countries to become what we are, their people are going to have to work their way through the process from whatever point in their own development they happen to be at.  When their people are ready, their best and brightest will take the reigns and steer them along.  

     What we can do to help them do that is continue to be a place where all the people of the world who are looking for a fresh start can come and learn how it's done.  Keep sending the money and the volunteers who are willing to give their time and effort to help those who wish to help themselves and their neighbors.  Be willing to accept them, learn from them, and let them learn from us.  This is not a role for our government, and it cannot be forced.  It is a role for our citizens, and it is a process that takes time.  We've seen it happen in other countries throughout the world over the last 225 years, and it will continue to happen in more countries as we head into the future- maybe not all of them, but many.  

     Human beings are adaptive.  We are all born with the ability to recognize those things that will make our lives easier, and once something has been created, it's really hard for people to resist the temptation to put it to use.  No matter how backwards you think a society is, all it takes to change the course of it's history is the introduction of a time saving device, or a tool that can be used to make a task easier.  The more of these things that are created and spread throughout the world, the better the chances that the people who use them will have to move forward.  Restrictive governments gain their power from controlling the means of survival and success that their people need, the more that people throughout the world connect and learn from each other how to take control of those means for themselves as individuals, the less power those restrictive governments will have.  

Not one of the great minds of our time.

     No person or government can possibly save all the lives that will be lost in the process of moving the entire global population forward, and it is foolhardy for them to try and accomplish such an impossible task.  But if we allow individuals to work on the little bits that they can manage, a little bit at a time, it will happen.  Probably faster than it would if governments tried to force it to happen.