I’m writing today to explain why diplomacy and war are doomed to fail everywhere around the world. I mean every conflict from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror to the Arab/Israeli conflict. In short, human nature.
Consider the Turks and Armenians. Technically this dispute ended nearly a century ago when nearly 1.5 million Armenians as well as a large number of Turks were killed; in fact it’s still going on as evidenced by the effort of the Armenian diaspora to have various national legislatures declare that the Turks committed genocide on their forebears (the Turkish position is that “large numbers of Turks and Armenians were killed in the chaos surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when Armenians rose up.”
France has already done so and a resolution is making headway in the US House of Representative, though President Bush and Secretary of State have publicly lobbied for its defeat. Why should Bush care? His Administration claims passage would disrupt crucial Turkish support for the Iraqi Misadventure.
ETA freedom fighters and the Spanish government seemed to be close to a breakthrough until the recent arrest of more than 20 Basque political leaders, which was quickly followed by a bomb in Bilbao that wounded the off-duty bodyguard of a Cabinet member. There are plenty of other countries where insurgencies rage as well including Kashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Peru, Colombia and Nepal, where the Communists recently captured control and overthrew the monarchy.
Negotiations are taking place as I write over a comprehensive plan to end the Arab/Israeli conflict. My opinions on this topic are controlled by my feelings as a Jew so I’ll leave them out of this essay. However, the idea that any negotiated solution arrived at in 2007 or 2008 has a chance of getting wide enough acceptance to be meaningful is so farfetched that Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul have a better chance of winning the presidential election next November.
Too many people are too heavily invested in the conflict to accept the comprises required to get the major players to sign off on a settlement. Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by the Iranians, and Al Qaeda and its various affiliates will doom the peace even if the governments of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabi, Turkey, Iraq and America all agree.
Underlying and perpetuating nearly all these conflicts is a rarely-mentioned yet vital layer of interested parties, the companies who manufacture and sell the arms and munitions used by the combatants. During the Cold War a good deal of this trade was reasonably visible because it was arranged by the American, Russian and Chinese governments but now the traffic has largely disappeared from the public eye, movies like Lord of War, Casino Royale (the 2006 version) and Blood Diamond aside. Proof is of course impossible to come by but I expect quite a few of these companies engage in spy novel-esque operations disguised to appear as caused by one belligerent or another any time the quarterly results need a helping hand.
What about the War on Drugs? We’ve been fighting officially since the early ’70s when Tricky Dick Nixon made his declaration and various Drug Czars down the years have pushed many programs including massive Public Service Announcement campaigns, financial support for crop eradication programs anywhere substantial farming takes place and, of course, ever harsher sentences that have exploded the US prison population.
35 years, then, and the country is demonstrably no better off despite spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. According to a 2001 report from
the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us), “defenders of strong prohibitions and severe penalties argue that these laws are needed to express, symbolize, and undergird social norms against drug use.” Well not really our norms, at least they aren’t mine; you want to take a toke or shoot up, no skin off my back, or at least no more so than cigarettes ad booze.
Excuse me, “express, symbolize, and undergird social norms against drug use?” Look at the huge expense we incur to support these social norms. If drugs were legal but regulated in the way tobacco and alcohol are, at least 95% of the users jailed would not be in prison but rather a smaller percentage similar to what we see with DUI and vehicular manslaughter punishments. The huge number of violent crimes committed to support an illegal habit as well as murders and assaults committed among rival drug suppliers and suppliers and customers as well as innocent bystanders would mostly evaporate, or at least transform into the sort of white collar crime committed by corporate executives.
The years of the War on Drugs have also seen the rise of huge international gangs to capture the huge profits of the drug trade. 70 years ago America mainly had to deal with the Mafia and Irish mobs and assorted smaller local criminal groups but today there’s hardly a nationality without a mob: Jamaican, Russian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Columbian, Chinese (the Triads), Japanese (the Yakuza), MS-13, to list a few. Makes me wonder about the way the results of these particular social norms fit with others we Americans allegedly hold, such as family, safety and compassion–and fiscal conservatism.
How many prison cells would be emptied by changing the legal status, at a minimum of $40,000 per inmate? How many fewer police officers would we need, at a minimum average cost (salary, benefits and other overhead) of $100,000, and prison guards at perhaps a slightly lower amount? Plus billions spent on eradication and interdiction efforts outside our borders.
Legal products, of course, would produce significant new tax revenue both on corporate profits and income not currently reported. Dedicating even half the new revenue to treatment and education programs would still produce a large net gain for Federal and State treasuries aside from the humongous cost reductions mentioned.
Finally, in the last decade the narcotics trade and terrorist outfits around the globe have found it mutually beneficial to work together despite the distaste each has for the other. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which for all the bad they did otherwise, had nearly eradicated poppy cultivation during the time they controlled Afghanistan but now provide protection and transportation for the resurgent crop; FARC, Shining Path and the rightwing militias which fight them have all made similar arrangements with South American drug cartels.
Everything is connected, eh?
BillSaysThis 