Editor,
“We can no longer be the world’s policeman.” You hear this on both sides of the aisle these days, with such a supercilious and reluctant air!
Really? Who asked us to be the world’s policeman in the first place? Who gave us any kind of badge? Who deputized us to barge into one domestic squabble after another across thousands of miles with guns blazing, shooting first and asking questions later?
Has even the United Nations ever begged us to invade all these countries we have unilaterally occupied, and “solve the world’s problems”? Most recently, did it ignore our own historical violation of the global ban on chemical weapons with the napalm and Agent Orange we deployed in Vietnam, and depleted uranium in Iraq, and beg only us to police the chemical weapons in Syria?
No, we want to strike, because it is Syria’s act that is the “moral outrage.”
If any of us bothered to read the news as printed abroad, it’s more like other nations sullenly demand we stay home and deal with our own high numbers of violence and incarceration, of rape and murder in our own gun-crazy culture.
But we the American people go with what we have been spoon-fed by Big Media at home, so it is not surprising that after we have occupied this or that country for a good long while, we go, “If we left now, they will not be able to police themselves,” or, “They are so relieved to have us here, for their security,” even “They are so fragile, us leaving them to themselves will mean their country, no, the whole region will fall apart!”
Really? When was the last time their men, women and children, terrified 24/7/365 by the sounds of our killer drones above their beds, demanded we keep suffocating them with our boots and pressing their necks into their own ground even a day longer, other than the corrupt puppet we may have installed as their leader? When was the first time?
But we keep marching in with the deluded arrogance that self-governance with their own choice of governing style is something their “uncivilized” society is not capable of, even though we have so oppressed and ravaged and shot them up for so long. But no, we want only to “win their hearts and minds.”
Such statements that we make, time and again before and during one occupation after another, are reminiscent of the time of the British Empire, when civilizing India was called “the white man’s burden,” and the country was to be a British protectorate, all the while exploited while ruled in a manner akin to modern neo-fascism.
But what do we care? To the contrary, so many of our conservatives, have a serious crush on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the last holdout against the Brits leaving India. But Gandhi kept demanding they leave. He said, “Leave India in God’s hands, in modern parlance, to anarchy; and that anarchy may lead to internecine warfare for a time, or to unrestricted dacoities. From these a true India will arise in place of the false one we see.” And it did.
Today we have an empire in the form of the American military projecting power through hundreds of bases in every corner of the world. Those spun out by political spin yearn for the day the term “militarism” is as chilling as “terrorism,” and nations living in the fearful shadow of these bases protest collectively.
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For your average policeman, preemptive killing is checked by an internal affairs department. Globally for a self-proclaimed “world’s policeman,” this translates to the International Criminal Court. But we are not a signatory to this body, so we can go into any other country at will like a SWAT team, sans accountability, immune from war crime prosecution.
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
