A Just Cause, Not a Just War

This article has so many stupid things in it, especially in light of the last couple of days where most of it has been proven completely wrong, but I just wanted to comment on the author's suggestions:

Instead of using two planes a day to drop food on Afghanistan and 100 planes to drop bombs (which have been making it difficult for the trucks of the international agencies to bring in food), use 102 planes to bring food.

If we had done this instead of dropping bombs, we would eventually have planes being shot down. That's why we took out the air defenses first idiot. The Taliban could care less what was in the planes--they would shoot them down and claim victory. Then we'd look really, really stupid and other countries would start thinking about invading the US since we can't even have a decent military action in response to a direct attack on us and a refusal to surrender the only known suspect by a third world government.

Take the money allocated for our huge military machine and use it to combat starvation and disease around the world. One-third of our military budget would annually provide clean water and sanitation facilities for the billion people in the world who have none.

I'd love to know where he get's those figures from, since the logistics of setting up infrastructures in countries where there are no companies to contract out jobs to is daunting. You'd have to pay people in countries who know how to do it to go to places where they don't and build them. That isn't cheap, nor is paying to transport the people and equipment to do it. Otherwise, the money just dissapears down a rat hole in bribes and kickbacks and no actual work ever gets done. Is the author stupid or ignorant? Not only that, but now since we don't have a military(we gave up the money) and we look weak since we are bombing the terrorists with food(hey, how are we paying for the planes if our military budget is tied up building dams and water purification systems in remote countries?), we will surely be invaded by some third world country who wants the things we have and has been taking our money we gave them to build clean water supplies and using them to buy weapons and to build an army to conquer us. Good idea.

Withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, because their presence near the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina angers not just bin Laden (we need not care about angering him) but huge numbers of Arabs who are not terrorists.

Well, we don't have any troops left as we are busy funding the building of third world nation's armies and weapons to kill us, so this isn't really an issue, is it?

Stop the cruel sanctions on Iraq, which are killing more than a thousand children every week without doing anything to weaken Saddam Hussein's tyrannical hold over the country.

Whose idiotic idea was it it put sanction on Iraq in the first place? Oh wait! It was some idiot who said we shouldn't fight a war with them, but we should just punish them economically since it would kill fewer people. Well, ten years and millions of deaths later, maybe it would have killed and hurt less people if we just invaded the damn country and killed Saddam. Now that we've let the hate build up over ten years, he wants to remove them just like that and thinks Saddam won't try to pull a bin laden on us. But then why wouldn't he, since if they kill lots of innocent Americans, they will probably just get food dropped on them.

Insist that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, something that many Israelis also think is right, and which will make Israel more secure than it is now.

And if they don't do this, what are we going to do -- invade? Why don't we just drop food on them every day until they come around to our way of thinking? But, since we don't have an army, we're spending all out money dropping food on Afghanistan and Iraq and paying third world countris to build armies that will eventually invade and kill us, I don't really think the Isrealis will want to take our advice. Bomb them with food! (Kosher, of course--we don;t want anyone mad at us!)

In short, let us pull back from being a military superpower, and become a humanitarian superpower.

And, after the third world countries loot and pillage the United States, maybe we will be able to for a coalition government with our third world conquerers. All hail the overlords we worship thee! But wait, do you think journalists will still be able to advise the new coalition government on proper world actions?

I agree with most of the author's comments regarding the current war on terrorism, which, as it turns out, has morphed into a war against our constitutional liberties. We have not apprehended or killed a single terrorist, but we have managed to kill or displace thousands of innocent Afghanis, while on the home front our president and his lapdog legislators work feverishly to dismantle our most cherished civil liberties. We're very close to becoming a police state, and the Republicans are its chief architect.

Unfortunately, the author descends into shallow liberal thinking when he talks about eliminating world poverty by raiding the paychecks of U.S. taxpayers. If the impoverished countries of the world are serious about wiping out poverty, they need to adopt a capitalist economic system and a favorable tax structure that attracts foreign investment. A stable government also is essential. No corporation in its right mind is going to invest assets in Zimbabwe or Afghanistan.

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