Internationally Obscure Policy
In the golden years of
Now, in the past decade and half, where has our peacekeeping gone? We have only a handful of soldiers in
Society today needs to shift its focus of the armed forces. The days of conquest are over. We no longer steal slaves from our enemies. We cannot take territory. The idea that there is a clash of civilizations or ideologies is nothing but an arbitrary declaration by politicians who stand to gain votes from that position. War as it is no longer serves a purpose. Should there be another world war we will use nuclear weapons to devastate what would otherwise have been useful.
It is not that the military has no purpose whatsoever. The idea is that the military’s purpose has changed. In the early days of humanity, those who were armed were hunters. Later they became raiding forces. Then they became armies to capture land and resources. Now they become something else entirely.
I say to you that the sole purpose of the military is peacekeeping and disaster relief. Granted not all countries will agree to this and still commit themselves to armed conflict, but that does not entitle us to bereft ourselves of morals and commit to the same such acts. Peacekeeping is a mission that is honourable to all individuals. War creates displaced peoples, starvation and disease. It is never really a question of whether we should send soldiers to help them but rather how many we should send. An automatic placement of aid (but not combat) soldiers is preferable to doing nothing.
Disaster relief is another task well handled by the military to be a stop gap measure for more civil entities to take to the task. As we well saw in the tragedy of hurricane Katrina,
Peacekeeping and disaster relief is the new focus for the armed citizens of our society. The world is a global village and we cannot disregard this fact by blinding ourselves to other cultures with anti-immigration policies and firewall borders. We must content ourselves to the fact that we must help one another or continue to live in a society with a debilitating level of strife.
Ultra_punk
1 Comments:
Unfortunately, 9/11 forever changed the American view of the world. Now, the whole western civilization is tormented by the darkness of terrorism. The idealistic view of peace keeping has gone down along with the World Trade Center. Iraq is probably going to be another Vietnam War that Americans fought but never finished, except this time, there is much more dreadful repercussion to deal with. With so many suicide bombers dying everyday, it’s not hard to imagine what will happen when one day Iraq really has WMD. Bush may be strategically correct in fighting the war to help him in gaining popularity and winning another 4 years of presidency, but the damage done by his administration will continue in the years to come.
Under this political atmosphere, I think the peace keeping force will only be less and less reinforced by western governments around the globe as the emphasis shifts to the much more feared terrorist attacks.
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Anonymous, at 12:28 AM
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