War is fought for money, not liberty

Sometimes liberty comes from war. There are people who live
richer, more beautiful lives thanks to war. War can bring out
unbelievable altruism and fantastic bravery in human beings. It can
end unthinkable injustices. These are all wonderful side effects.
But we must be careful to make the distinctions between side
effects and motivating factors.

Unfortunately, these side effects are never the reasons a nation
goes to war. No nation of respectable size has ever gone to war for
beautiful, human-centered goals. Not now. Not ever. Nations will
only fight wars for power, money and politics. There has never been
a war that wasn’t about attaining those ends. What’s
more, there’s never been a war not sold to the people (on
both sides) as a war for freedom and security. The current war is
no different.

Decent people (like Americans and Iraqis) will only fight wars
for things like freedom, security, liberty and democracy. As a
result, decent people must be convinced that this is why a war is
being fought.

Countries are not interested in these things unless they are
useful in attaining one of its real goals. Sometimes, in order to
make itself more money, more powerful or simply to make the pretext
for war believable, a country will increase the freedom and liberty
of the people it conquers.

This is not altruism; this is a useful tactic. Countries are
never altruistic. Fans of Machiavellian models take note: this
means our country, too. This doesn’t mean countries
don’t ever do good things. They quite obviously do. But the
action has to have some tangible benefit to the acting country, or
it just won’t happen.

Countries just don’t go around spending billions of
dollars to free people because they feel bad for them. That
doesn’t make sense, and you shouldn’t swallow that
excuse because it doesn’t happen. It isn’t happening
now.

Although things sometimes become better after we intervene, most
of the time freedom and democracy aren’t the abundant
aftereffects of war. If you take a look at a few of the countries
we have “liberated” with our weaponry in this past
half-century, it is mostly a very ugly and shameful list ““
including places like Haiti, Guatemala, Cambodia, Panama,
Nicaragua, Laos and Vietnam.

The clearest example of this “liberation” trend is
Vietnam. Our leaders decided that stopping international communism
(whatever that means) was far more important than any rights,
freedoms or liberties of the 2 million or so Vietnamese we killed.
This is not because our country is evil or immoral. This is how
countries behave all the time ““ other countries and ours.
There is no good versus evil here.

Another example is East Timor. If creating freedom or democracy
in East Timor had been of even marginal use (or profit) to our
country, we would have gone in and protected East Timor from its
own government of Indonesia.

We easily could have, but we didn’t. We didn’t even
hear about it. In fact, Indonesia was so economically dependent on
us at the time, we could have simply asked them to stop attacking
East Timor, and they probably would have stopped immediately.

Instead, our leaders did nothing while the paramilitary in
Indonesia (a brutal dictatorship with no elections) wiped out
something like 250,000 East Timorese who were fighting desperately
to be free. At the time, these people were begging us for help
because they foolishly believed that our leaders would fight for
freedom, even when it wasn’t going to increase their
pocketbooks or political power.

Let me clarify my point ““ our people will fight for
freedom and liberty (and I’m very proud of this), but our
nation will not.

The leaders of any nation will do what is best for the country,
not what is decent or right. Countries fight for power, money and
politics.

If reaching their goals in Iraq means making it a little freer
to gain your unconditional support, then that’s what
they’ll do. But you’re a real sucker if you think Iraqi
freedom has anything to do with why this war was started. And if
you are a sucker, you’re not alone. You’ll be kept good
company by the 40 to 50 percent of uneducated pro-war Americans who
actually believe Saddam Hussein was directly behind Sept. 11,
2001.

Andalibian is a fourth-year psychology student.