By Mike Tront
This topic has been on my mind for a while, and with the recent New York Times article about Obama being at war longer than any other president in history, it’s time to write this out. First though, from the above article:
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.
Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln.
Slaughtering innocent people is horrible, especially for a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, but why is it inherently racist?
It’s very simple, if you truly believe a war is just, so much so that you think it justifies killing innocent people, I have one question for you: If this justifiable war didn’t kill one innocent person in another country, but somehow ONLY killed innocent Americans, would it still be justifiable?
Let’s get specific. So far in Afghanistan around 26,000 civilian deaths have been recorded as a direct result of the war since 2001. Another 91,000 have been injured. Another 360,000 have been killed as an indirect result of the war. These are innocent civilians. Not terrorists, not soldiers, not militants. Just the civilians.
War apologists usually say something along the lines of “those innocent deaths are not our fault, it’s their government or local terrorist group that’s holding them hostage and using them as human shields who are to blame!”
There may be some truth to the human shields argument, but that doesn’t justify killing the innocent people involved! In America, if the police suspect a fugitive is in a particular apartment building, they are not justified in bombing the entire building in order to kill that dangerous fugitive! We expect the police to apprehend the suspect while preserving the lives and property of the innocent people, even though it would be much easier to just drop a bomb and be done with it. Why? Because our innocent lives have value.
Even in a direct hostage situation in America, negotiating is always the first step. Bombing the building is never considered. In fact, in either situation we’d all much rather let the fugitive escape and save the innocent people, rather than kill the innocent along with the fugitive.
However, the war apologist will still insist the anti-war crowd is simply naive and there’s no way around killing innocent people. In Afghanistan, the Taliban had to be defeated and Bin Laden had to be caught. Well, lets suppose they’re right. Let’s suppose there was no other way to achieve those ends without a war and the number of innocent people dying was and is unavoidable collateral damage.
If you argue that the war is necessary, but the cost of this current war in Afghanistan didn’t cost one innocent Afghan person, but somehow killed 26,000 innocent Americans directly, wounded 91,000 innocent Americans, and indirectly killed another 360,000 innocent American men, women, and children, would you consider that okay?
If you say either way it’s worth it as long as you don’t know any of the people being killed on either side, then you’re not racist, you’re just okay with murdering innocent people if you agree with the ends.
If you say it’s not worth it if the innocent people dying are Americans, then what you’re saying is that an innocent life in another country is simply worth less than the life of an American. Downgrading the value of the life of someone else simply because they are a different race/nationality is what leads an average person to sit idly by while their government slaughters, plunders, enslaves, and destroys the population of another land. I can’t image a worse form of racism on this Earth.
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