Tuesday - January 20, 2004

Category Image Iraq from an Australian Perspective


I just finished reading a very touching essay by an Australian about the war . One of the better quotes is,

The price of freedom is high. You might think you would not sacrifice your life for it, but maybe you don't have to. After all, 20-year-old Americans are doing it for you, every day.

The author, Caroline Overton, made me think again of how privileged we are in the United States. I often wonder at the perspective of others who benefit from what we do, and what they think when we have elections or make new policy.

It must make them anxious whenever we have an election. People in other countries have a significant interest in what we do. After all, our military arsenal includes some extremely potent weapons, we have the ability to wreak havoc on the world, without even deploying any troops. Heck, we don't even need to deploy any aircraft. They have every reason to want us to make rational decisions.

Alternatively, we could take all of our troops back home from wherever they are in the world. All our soldiers, sailors and Marines in Japan could be sent home permanently within a month. There are a good number of Japanese that would dearly love to get ahold of the real estate that we would leave unoccupied, but I suspect that the horror of being outside of our umbrella would also be a matter of great interest to them.

So while we argue back and forth about issues like health care, welfare, immigration, and the price of oil in Peoria, the rest of the world looks on and wonders how we will behave in our stewardship of the Earth.

Yes, we are hated by our enemies, and even by countries that call themselves allies, but no matter whether they like us or what we do, they know that we are the ones keeping the world safe, for better or for ill.

It must feel horrible to be so helpless by not being able to participate in our political process. They must be maddened when they read of us getting side tracked by OJ Simpson or Monica Lewinski when there are more important matters to tend to. They must think us loopy sometimes, and they'd be right.

But the people in those countries are no different than we are. I'll bet there are some twenty year old Australians, or even forty year olds, who want to help out. There must be people whose hearts stir at seeing a brutal dictator being pulled out of a hole in the ground and want to help, but just happen to live in other countries.

I'm not saying that we should let them do so any more freely than they are allowed to already. We can't let anymore Taliban in our military than we already have! We have good cause to be careful whom we allow to be in our military and I don't know that we should change what we do in this regard. Perhaps there will come a time for a foreign legion of sorts, that is we could do like the British did in WWII by equipping and controlling Polish brigades.

Of course, the French Foreign Legion was famous, but not for what we would like to associate with the American military. I wonder if we could do it right.

I don't mean to speak lightly of the Australian or any other nation's military. The Aussies especially have a well equipped military that has fought alongside us in every major conflict we have been in for 100 years. I just wonder if Australians or people from other nations wish that they could have a more direct impact on leading our military. There is surely someone in Australia who has the capabiility of Patton or Bradley, who have fewer opportunities to develop or use those talents without being an American. Maybe there is an Australian Ronald Reagan or a Turkish John Kennedy out there with the ability to garner world wide support for policies that make the world safer and freer. It's possible but more difficult to have that impact from Down Under than from Washington.

So far, the United States has changed the world in many, many ways. Not just with our internal government, but with our international relations as well. Throughout history nations with hegemony have kept control over their neighbors by forcing them to pay tribute. The wealth of those vassal states is bled to feed the avarice of the hegemonic power. The United States is backwards. Our vassals, well let's call them allies, don't pay tribute to us. For the most part we pay them. In Europe, we had the Marshall Plan, and although it has ended and we no longer give to most European nations they became our allies from that program. We now militarily occupy their nations but at no cost to them, we pay them to use their bases and protect them.

Now we've overthrown the Iraqi government and we're paying to rebuild that country.

This is a revolution in international affairs. It's happened before, I'm sure, but not as sustained as what we've doing for the past fifty years. We, the people of the United States, are so prosperous that we have rebuilt Europe, Japan, and much of the Far East. We have learned the lesson that if we make the investment in paying to enable a nation to be free, its citizens will create enough wealth among themselves to bolster our own economy. Rather than beat them down, we built them up and made ourselves stronger as a result. Many of those countries had a long history of prosperity, but there was no guarantee that they would have returned to prosperity without our acquiescence. For instance, the Czechs have historically been very capitalist and prosperous, but under the Soviet boot they were dirt poor. I've known enough Czechs and Slovaks to know how miserable they were until just a few short years ago.

We've helped our allies out a lot over the years, and from some like the Australians we've always gotten enthusiasm for us in return. As a people and a nation, we could not ask for more reliable friends.

And for someone living in Australia, a continent far from most of the rest of the world but still interacting with us economically and culturally, what can they do as individuals to join in and help us? They can't vote. Joining our military is possible but not practical. All they can really do is speak their mind and voice their support.

Thank you, Caroline Overton, Tim Blair and the rest of our Australian friends for speaking up and telling the world your support for us. It means a lot to us. I hope that we never fail to live up to your expectations.

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