Why should they buy it when we don”t?
Not long ago we invaded two countries for reasons now long since forgotten, even though we are still there losing lives and spending money we never had to spend.
One country was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction, but when none were found the new reason for us to be there was to rid them of a dictator and to bring them democracy. The other country harbored the criminals who were actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks and our mission was to get them “dead or alive!” After we allowed them to escape from Tora Bora, the new mission was to rid the country of the Taliban and to bring them democracy.
One of the basic rules of war is to “know your enemy” so that you can predict their moves and perfect your own. In neither case did we bother to gain the tiniest inkling of the people whose countries we now find ourselves mired in eight years later. We”ve now lost over 5,000 lives, 40,000 wounded and spent over $1 trillion of borrowed money with little or nothing to show for it. One of the other basics of warfare is to seize and keep the initiative, which we gave up long ago.
While the terrain and people of Afghanistan are more primitive than the Iraqis, both countries are dominated by Islam. Our leaders were perhaps the only ones who had no idea that Sunnis and Shia are mortal enemies, despite being bound by Islam. The only thing they hate worse than each other are infidels, like us. In Afghanistan we find a country that is really little more than isolated villages connected by the roughest off-road trails imaginable or even mere foot paths through the mountain passages. Most homes have only one book, the Koran, and in many homes they can”t read it, the prayers are memorized and chanted.
Imagine how hard it is to sell something you don”t even believe in yourself! We like to call ourselves a democracy, but we don”t have majority rule on many levels. In 2000 Al Gore won the election by 500,000 votes but lost the election. The Senate is perhaps our most un-democratic institution. All states, regardless of population, get the same two senators. This means a tiny state like North Dakota, with 600,000 people, gets the exact same representation as California with 38 million people, giving the voters of North Dakota roughly 70 times more representation than us! To make things even worse, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires it, but for some arcane reason, we have imposed the nonsense that instead of 51 votes, we now need 60 votes to pass a bill through the Senate. Incredible. Right here in California, we have, courtesy of Prop. 13, the rule that to pass any new tax laws, we need not 50.1 percent of the vote in the legislature, but 66.7 percent, meaning one no vote beats two yes votes! No wonder this state is now deemed to be “ungovernable!”
How can we expect to sell our concept of democracy to these countries, whose people have no want or need of it, when we don”t really believe in democracy ourselves? What do we tell them, “We”re in favor of minority rule?” Would they understand it better if we told them “We allow corporations to buy our legislators with campaign contributions?” They think we”re crazy and they have good reason. It might be better to clean up our own mess before going half way around the world to clean messes we don”t understand. Maybe it”s time we got back to the reason we went to Afghanistan, to track down, kill or capture bin Laden and his gang of criminals. We should stop building military bases and outfitting their army, which will soon enough be in Taliban hands, as their own government is a sham, and instead build only schools or hospitals. And I wish someone could explain why we are still in Iraq!
Lowell Grant is a local real estate broker.
