Another excerpt from Dallaires book, Shake Hands with the Devil:

Engraved still in my brain is the judgment of a small group of bureaucrats who came to "assess" the situation in the first weeks of the genocide: "We will recommend to our government not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans."

Once again, we're brought back to the same thing: What is a human life worth?

Look around you, look around the world. Assess the actions of your government, assess your own actions and opinions. How many of us would willingly give our lives to save even one Rwandan (for example)? Is it safe to say that very few would? Perhaps some of us are feeling especially heroic right now. How many would be able to send someone else to sacrifice their live on your order?

That, of course, is based on a simple measure of life for life. Reality doesn't tend to set things out so clearly for us.

It's hard to quantify the worth of a life. If such could be even considered a morally acceptable objective. We're talking about people here, not cars, not houses, certainly not oil.

Yet, when faced with the choice, the choice will inevitably be reduced to a matter of cost-benefit ratio. What will this cost, and how will it benefit us? Or, what price are we willing to pay for an expected result? The United States is willing to spend an awful lot on Iraq. The monetary cost of the war and restructuring efforts has been monumental, and will continue to pile higher. The lives? How many soldiers have died? How many Iraqi soldiers and civilians? In relation to the latter, we only have guesses and estimates. I guarantee the Pentagon can give you the exact number of American deaths in Iraq, though.

When assessing what the motives were for the war in Iraq, the contributing factors towards the decision that the cost-benefit ratio was acceptable, we shall consider these:
1. Protecting American Lives.
2. Saving Iraqi Lives.
3. Possible long term economic gain.
4. Revenge, and an unsettled score.

The first and most publicized reason is rather easily refutable. Consider: More American lives have been lost in Iraq since the start of the war than had been in the previous years since the ending of the Gulf War. I'm sorry, didn't anymore realize that it wasn't Iraq that destroyed the World Trade Centre?

The second would have been the best reason. Saddam has ruthlessly murdered his own people by the thousands over the past years quelling rebellions, including the one Bush Sr encouraged when the Gulf War ended. Saddam himself is more a weapon of mass destruction than any of the chemical weapons Iraq has ever possessed. He's embroiled his country in 3 wars, as well as the aforementioned killings of his own people. The sanctions put on Iraq as a result of the Gulf War sure as hell didn't help. We can conclude that Saddam is bad.

By way of refuting this, I now ask this; (Pay attention, because this is the entire point of all of the previous dialogue.) Why would the United States care?

I gave everyone a direct quote at the start of this entry, "all that is here are humans.". Also, remember another quote from one of my previous blogs, "It would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify risking the life of one American soldier." O, how important are we! (Certainly a Canadian soldier is worth just as much!?!?!? But we don't put nearly as much money into our military, so maybe some would disagree).

Why, oh Why, is it that Iraq's people are worth so much more than Rwandas? It must be due to extraneous factors, forgetting for the time being that humans are supposed to be all created equal, and whatnot. So we look at Rwanda as a whole, and Iraq as a whole. Rwanda is a small, overpopulated African nation. Worth little enough to the rest of the world, no major natural resources of interest (Unless you consider 8 or 9 million people a natural resource of interest, again, some would disagree). Iraq has plenty of people, Iraq has a natural resource that everyone wants.

Ah, I understand. A person's worth isn't based upon anything resembling their own humanity. No, I'm afraid the cost-benefit ratio doesn't work that way. A person's worth is only based on what they can produce, or what control of them can produce. Control of Iraq has economic benefits for the United States. (Unfortunately for them, and I'm starting to think that they somehow didn't realize this at the start, getting the control they want isn't turning out to be so easy). Control of Rwanda gains.........A few hundred thousand people thankful that they weren't slaughtered because they're different? (Were the Jewish happy when they were pulled out of the concentration camps?) But that's just more mouths to feed, Rwanda is overpopulated as it is.

Why should anyone here care if 800,000 men, women, children, and babies are ruthlessly hacked apart with machetes. Their mangled remains left to rot in the sun, nothing more than food for maggots and whatever else.

Of course not. It's only humans. It's not as though saving a few lives is worth anything.

I admit, I must sound like a crusader. Like someone becoming obsessed with a cause. But just like everyone else, I change the channel on TV whenever those terribly sad commercials come on asking for just a small donation to save the life of an innocent child. Should I be donating my money to some company on the television that I'm supposed to trust simply because it flashes the same images of poverty we see on Newsworld over and over again? I'm afraid Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker cemented paranoia in the collective consciousness of the consumers in relation to things such as that. I suppose I depend too much on my government to help those helpless children. But I and the rest of us, should remember that a government's first responsibility is (always) it's own people. The government doesn't care, so long as we remain happy. But that's just it, I'm not happy. Not now, not about what was allowed to happen. I think it's disgusting, I think it's terrible, I think it's awful. That's why I'm writing. Maybe I just hope I can evoke some positive change simply by getting the message out there.

This is not acceptable.