Some Non-Viral Thoughts

                   Some Non-Viral Thoughts

Perhaps there should be some agreed-upon statute of limitations where the destroying nation is no longer responsible for the damage it has done. So the Americans can walk away from Libya. Yalta leaves Eastern Europe to the furious Russians for their support of the West's dream of the U.N. and we remember the nice dream. At some point all should be, if not forgiven, less front-burner. Forgotten. Assigned to history.

I have been puzzling over the Middle East and the world's--especially the Europeans'--contribution to the current problems. Blame often falls on the Europeans' arbitrarily creating borders in dividing up the region after WW1 under Sykes-Picot. I think this is a straw man argument that deflects from a more important and larger responsibility these nations and their so-called leaders have: The winner of conflicts has responsibility to the peace.

An old article argued that European fomenting factionalism was a serious contributor to the wars of peace. "In Syria, the French cultivated the previously disenfranchised Alawite minority as an ally against the Sunni majority. This involved recruiting and promoting Alawite soldiers in the territory’s colonial army, thereby fostering their sense of identity as Alawites and bringing them into conflict with local residents of other ethnicities. The French pursued the same policy with Maronite Christians in Lebanon, just as the Belgians did with Tutsis in Rwanda and the British did with Muslims in India, Turks in Cyprus and innumerable other groups elsewhere.

"The militarization of these ethnic and religious identities, rather than the failure of perfectly placed state borders to alleviate tension between them, explains much of violence in the Middle East today. Blaming imperialism is usually sound politics and good comedy. But in this case, focusing on bad borders risks taking perpetual identity-based violence as a given, resulting in policies that ultimately exacerbate the conflicts they aim to solve."

So, in Romanoff and Juliet, the British favor partition of a country and speak to it in the U.N.. The following week they change their mind and oppose it, and give the exact same speech in the U.N..

Wars have terrible consequences for the losers and, particularly in modern times, significant responsibilities for the winners. The winners must create circumstances that allow for the continuation of life without the threat of recurrence of warlike animosity inherited from the previous conflict (e.g. The Treaty of Versailles) or the accidental sowing of seeds that engender new conflicts from the old. Historically winners have solved these problems by simply killing the enemy and sowing their fields with salt. The Romans absorbed their enemies. 

Now, in the current nuclear age, this is even more important. Animosity is becoming increasingly more dangerous with the rise of the power of the individual. With nuclear poisons and bacteriologic weapons, even individuals with limited resources can pose a world threat that seems certainly as disturbing a risk to life as the more theoretical climate change.

But if you have the confidence to volunteer for leadership of a nation and the arrogance to send young men to their deaths, you better step up to manage the wasteland your acts have created. And you should be judged by the failures. Unless, of course, the nations are entirely self absorbed with no sense of human responsibility or have no real ability to exercise their positive vision.

Or both.