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War & Peace
Dr. Khalid
Sohail and Peter Joyce
are exchanging arguments on an age-old question: why do we fight? The world
has been spending almost one trillion dollars per year (half of that by USA) on
defense. But, defense from whom? Why nations and man are fearful
of each other?
Aa’dmi
se durte ho?
aa’dmi
to tu tum bhi ho, aa’dmi tu meiN bhi
hooN
(Are you scared of
man? but you are also a man, I am also a man)
Why do we have to
waste our resources to defend ourselves from each other? The answer is
simple as well as complex.
Unfortunately, war is
a “human condition” whereas peace is just a noble desire and that is why
history is replete with conflicts and wars. We claim to be more civilized
then our ancestors but the human trait that bears the seed of aggression
has not changed. There is no difference between the Macedonian King
Alexander of the fourth century BC who conquered the famous Khyber Pass
(the same area in Pakistan that is being bombed by the Americans today),
Mahmud Ghaznavi who at the turn first millennium
repeatedly invaded India, Halaku of the
thirteenth century who pillaged Baghdad and George Bush, the invader of
Iraq in the beginning of the third millennium.
Regardless of the
reasons, the root cause of all conflicts is the desire to control land,
resources that come out of that land and human beings who live on it. Jews
would not occupy Palestine if they did not
need land and Palestinians would be living peacefully in Israel in their “reserves”, like native
Indians in Canada,
if they would let the Jews dominate their destiny. There would have been no
invasion on Iraq
had there been no oil.
By spending 450
billion a year and constantly invading one country after another, the US has
achieved an absolute global hegemony. No “patriotic” American would agree
to surrender that unique position in exchange of such “un-sexy” social
benefits like health insurance for 40 million uninsured, as Dr. Sohail
suggested.
The same logic is at
work all over the world. Canada
has wasted billions of dollars in Afghanistan to buy the goodwill
of its largest trading partner while The United Way is cutting back due to
a shortfall of $2.5 million (Toronto Star 22.01.09). Pakistan government is bombing its own
citizens to please America.
The resources are
finite; the majority of the people in this world will have to consume less
to support the over-consumption of the developed world. Twenty-five percent
of the world oil production is consumed by America that has five percent
of the global population. America
needs an expensive war machine to seize more than its fair share of the
global resources. That is what American leaders mean when they say, “we
have to defend our way of life”. Such defense needs strong military and
sometime invasions of other countries, regardless of cost.
However, there is an
urgent need to check this aggressive behavior of man. Gone are the days
when the war and its effects were local and not global. In less then a
century man has invented such lethal killing machines that he can erase his
own existence from the face of this earth (we are too smart for our own
good). Therefore, peace is not a matter of choice but a question of
survival.
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