The Hidden Costs of War
As Mathey Yglesias points out in TAPPED, one of the hidden and unforseen costs of our war in Iraq is our nation's, and the world's, severly diminished capability to respond to legitimate unfolding humanitarian crises around the world. This was illustrated by the Bush Administation's belated and half-hearted efforts at intervention in Liberia last year. It is less publicly being illustrated by our continuing failure to intervene in the Congo, where estimates of loss of civilian life in a genocidal civil war that has gone on several years now runs to the millions. In western Sudan a similar scenario is unfolding, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and at least tens of thousands already killed by a lethal combination of drought and government supported militias.
Our State Department it seems would sincerely like to do something to intervene to stop the bloodshed in both countries, but has little at its disposal outside of appeals to the UN and other nations to bring their resources to bear. Our military is overextended in Iraq; we have no option of dropping a significant military force in either of these other countries, not even as part of a multi-national effort. Sadly, due largely to our leaders' arrogance in the run-up to the Iraq war, we have spent whatever moral capital we had built up over the last century, so even our appeals to do what is morally correct are now too easily disregarded by a world that finds it too inconvenient and expensive to try to stave off another Rwanda. Ironically, the significant exception is France, which has expended capital and troops in an effort to bring peace, or at least stanch the bloodshed in Africa.
At the end of the second world war the world said never again when faced with the horrors of the nazis previously inconceivable murder of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. The world was reminded just ten years ago how easy it is to let it happen again, and the world, in words, renewed that pledge; never again. It's happening again now. And once again, when faced with a chance to do the right thing, to redeem humanity, the world is failing. And tragically, though I believe the American people would really like to not have this happen again, to stand up and stop the murder, we once again find ourselves on the sideline, doing nothing. This may someday be seen as the greatest and most tragic cost of the war in Iraq.
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