Phil Mirzoev's blog

Friday, December 17, 2010

How to avoid ridiculously 'freak' wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan in future?!

Now a majority of TV and radio programs dedicated to the topic of Afghan war are trying to discuss whether or not it makes sense to increase the number of troops there, whether or not it's worth to leave that country and what would be the best strategy to train Afghan army. Unfortunately the media is markedly falling behind the reality: the Afghan war has already been lost, and the exit in a 'cut-and-run' mode is inevitable. To transform Afghanistan into a country (which it is not), especially a stable one the world should have pumped into it not billions, not even trillions, but TENS of trillions of dollars, and now the humankind is still just not enough developed technologically and financially to create new countries from scratch. From the very first it was a game at the expense of taxpayers in monetary terms and at the expense of lives of the young boys in uniform who decide to join the army not based on rational knowledge and analysis but based on their blind trust and believe in the demagogy of politicians whom they mistakenly identify with their country.
The only practical question is how to minimize financial and human losses and - for politicians - how to leave in the most 'face-saving' way possible. How sharply to cut and how fast to run - that's the only headache of those who make decisions. That's all. Game over. Shedding tears about the actions of the US and its NATO allies is long irrelevant - it would have made sense not even yesterday, but the day before yesterday. But what really may be of some concern is rather ineffective tackling of this problem by the media, which continues to discuss the problems which must be left to historians to deal with.
What one would really like journalists, publicists and politics pundits to knock around in panel discussions is HOW to prevent the repetitions of the similar wars (including Iraqi one). How come that a whole bunch of so called developed democracies so easily and rashly involved themselves in such a preposterously catastrophic device? How could it be, that "mother of democracy" Britain just rushed headlong to wage a war against... Taliban after US declared its aim to catch... Osama?! For that matter, UK - parliamentarian democracy - plunged into Iraq war a couple of years latter only because it's PM for some absolutely unknown reasons individually decided to do so - how come?! With more than 80% British population against the war too! Is there really not a single tool or mechanism left even in the most advanced democracies to prevent them from the wildest most obvious and most dangerous war sprees?! Even when the most of the population of those democracies openly express their discontent and disagreement with the 'decision'? HOW COME - that's the first question. And what needs to be done to avoid throwing similar tantrums in the future is the second question. What Afghan and Iraqi campaigns brought to light is not the question of how we should transform those countries but the question of how we must transform our countries and political controls to avoid suchlike follies in future. Many publicists notice, and rightfully so, that the actions of the US and their many western allies were catastrophic for the countries invaded, but even more catastrophic they were for the those 'liberators'. Things that must not be possible in the 21th century for the western democratic world have happened to be quite possible, and that must sound the real alarm of the western media. That's where the main focus of the intellectual elites must be on, because if such absurdly uncontrollable and stupid things are possible we can only guess what comes next. It's a very big disappointment.
Emanuel Kant expected that democratic countries based on the concept of civil society are less inclined to wage wars, but, unfortunately his thesis so far has not been clearly and definitively proved in practice. Quite likely not because this German visionary was mistaken in his assumptions but because the real democracies are still very much underdeveloped. If the key decisions of war and piece beyond the country borders were taken only after a plebiscite British troops might have not ended up in Afghanistan or Iraq. All this dramatic happenings would have been even more unlikely if before such a plebiscite the people had been entitled to the full detailed information based on which such decisions were recommended, or, at the very least, parliamentarians had been given the pass to "the vaults of state secrecy".

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