Generosity by the Numbers
Weighing in with The Victims of the Tsunami Pay the Price of War on Iraq by George Monbiot (Common Dreams), another staunch camp (2)* resident delivers some personal experiences of the generosity of the people of England when faced with images of destruction from Southeast Asia. “The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy.”
He asks the same questions as Mickey Z:
“Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?”
The obvious answer is that “governments have other priorities”; it’s the conclusion that a truly objective outside observer would reach in seconds. If an entity, time after time, fails to do something, it is because it is not interested in doing it and sees no advantage in doing so. What is a priority issue? Well, quite a bit of money is being spent on “blowing people to bits in Iraq”. Maybe that’s why the U.S. financial contribution to tsunami relief is “equivalent [to] one and a half day’s spending in Iraq”.
In an interesting argument, he (for the sake of argument) grants both that the war in Iraq was waged for “the good of the Iraqis” and, further, that “more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid program than lost” (emphasis added). Even given these two “wildly unsafe assumptions”, it suffices then to show that the $150 Billion that the US has spent so far* was a “cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering”. Since there are only “25 million people in Iraq” and that amount of money could have made a “measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty”, even by the dry evaluation of an accountant who is blind to all political issues and innocent deaths caused by a “humanitarian war”, the war in Iraq is an absolute failure.
I want my money back.
*For comparison, not that the U.S. foreign aid program comprises about “$16 Billion” per year, of which “$8.9 Billion is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust)”
Because of the ever present White Man’s Burden ™, “our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them” and we always end up with our moral backs against the wall, in which we simply end up “bomb[ing people] for their own good”. It doesn’t have to be this way. You only have to look at the numbers to see that there is a ridiculous amount of spare wealth around that could be used to hear most of the world’s hurts. It’s not even the communist kind of spare wealth, the kind that might actually hurt to extract, the kind you might miss. You wouldn’t even notice it’s gone because it’s already gone. Your government just spends it on other stuff, making a few people very rich, the world a very dangerous place for everyone and foregoing yet another chance to do the right thing. Monbiot put it best: “If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.”