The above quote is from the iconic movie, "The Princess Bride" which came out in 1987. It's a fabulous movie and if you haven't seen it (I'm not sure how you avoided it up to now, but just in case) you really should. It's a classic. The reason I am quoting this here is that it is a surprisingly penetrating insight into the human condition for a movie that is otherwise a fairly lighthearted comedy. In one pithy statement the hero Wesley shows how hollow the movie's main message about true love conquering all and the hero getting the girl truly is. The implication here is that, even after Wesley has achieved his goals, gotten Buttercup and retired from being the Dread Pirate Roberts, life will not be lived happily ever after. And because it is Wesley saying it early in the movie, it shows he knows this from the very beginning.
As anyone alive knows, life is not easy. You spend the first 5 years of your life desperately trying to learn how to be a big boy or girl, to make your parents proud, only to then be shipped off to school for the next twelve years of your life, whether you want to be there or not. Those twelve years, or more, are often fraught with misery as bullies, school work and the dramas of everyday life weigh you down and crush your spirit. Then, when you graduate, it is either off to work in the real world, or to get even more schooling. All of this effort is merely to prepare you for your next big adventure, which is life in the working world. Life there is no picnic either as more work, the pressures of adult life and family obligations make finding time to do the things that you enjoy a rarity. The reality of life is that you will toil away, day in and day out on things you will likely not enjoy. Then what? Old age and physical decrepitude force you to retire, live off what little you have put away and whatever government handouts are available to you until you die. So when you are young enough to do the things you enjoy, you will instead spend your life laboring on things you don't; and when you are finally old enough to stop, you are likely no longer physically capable of doing those things anyway. Life is pain, Highness.
So, knowing this, it always comes a surprise to me that otherwise rational, moral, law abiding people I know choose to reproduce. Not only does having children add to the burdens of your life, but it also creates a new life upon which the burdens of life can now be placed. Having a child is giving a new life the gift of 65 or more years of hard labor. It appears facially immoral, cruel and heartless. Worse, unlike other human interactions and moral actions, it is not a deal that you make with society or even with another rational, intelligent adult. The child literally has no choice in the matter. It doesn't exist when the decision to create it occurs. It has no say in whether it wants to exist or not (as far as we know. Depending on your religious beliefs, your views on this could differ). The only times we, as a society, view the imposition of hard labor as morally justified is as a punishment for immoral deeds. Here however, there is no immoral deed (again, assuming you don't believe in Karma or some other theory of rebirth based on the quality of your actions in a previous life). It is merely the seemingly arbitrary choice of the parents to have unprotected sex which results in a baby. A baby who gets to learn, over the course of its life, the truth of Wesley's words: "Life is pain".
Thus, it surprises me not at all that, as the world industrializes and men and women are given access to prophylactics and abortion, that the total fertility rate drops, often below the replacement rate. As much as parents tout the gift of life, when given the option, fewer and fewer people choose to give that gift. The reason for this? "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Thursday, September 5, 2013
The Problem With Syrian Intervention
The hot issue du jour in international politics is Syrian intervention. If you haven't been paying attention to international politics for the past few years, there is a civil war going on in Syria. This civil war is an off shoot of the Arab Spring movement in the middle east. In countries like Syria and Egypt the populations have been rising up in protest of the ruling hegemony and trying to bring about political change. In countries like Egypt this has been successful, at least as far as regime change is concerned. In Syria, the movement has so far failed to bring about a change in power. Instead the protests have given way to an armed insurgency fighting running battles with government forces. This brings us to this week's G20 meeting and the debate raging about whether the international community should intervene in Syria.
The debate over Syrian intervention came to a head in the G20 due to evidence that chemical weapons were used on the rebel forces and civilians. A few years ago, when the Syrian situation first became a civil war, President Obama made a series of speeches in which he referred to the use of chemical weapons as a "Red Line". What he meant was that the use of these weapons to quell the insurgency would mean dire consequences for the Syrian government. Now that they have been used the President's hand has been forced and he must make good his threat or appear weak internationally. Unfortunately, there is no international consensus over who actually used the weapons. It is known that the Syrian government posses these weapons and has stock piles around the country, but it is also known that the rebels control a large section of the country and may well have secured these weapons for their own uses. It does not take much imagination to see how the rebel cause would be aided by international intervention and the Syrian government's would not be, so there is some debate over who actually released the Sarin gas.
Further complicating the debate is Syrian ties with Russia, a UN Security Council member and Veto holder, and Iran. Russia has long had military and economic ties with Syria and Russia has long had a military base on Syrian soil. Iran and Syria also have military and economic ties. Iran is also currently building up a supply of fissile material that the West thinks is for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, which is a problem because the Iranian government is hostile to Israel, a strong US ally. The end result of this is that Russia and many others are arguing against intervention, while the US and its allies are arguing for intervention.
So, with that scene set, I think it is important for us to discuss why it is the West feels it needs to intervene at all. For starters, the Syrian insurgency has been going on for years and has been largely ignored by the international community. Sure there has been some hand wringing about war crimes and civilian death tolls, but no one has cared enough to actually do anything about it until now. It seems mighty hypocritical to start caring now after 100,000 people or so have died and the country has fallen into ruin. The time for intervention was when the protests first turned violent and civilian lives were first put in danger. The reality here is that, if there were no broader concerns with Iranian nuclear weapons and Obama drawing lines in the sand, we would still be ignoring the situation.
Second, the world has a pretty miserable track record on intervening in foreign conflicts trying to keep peace and solving situations diplomatically. Even military intervention has a high rate of failure over the long run. We have good examples in both Iraq and Afghanistan of how a successful military campaign turns into a quagmire when it comes to nation building (i.e. we were very good at blowing up and conquering these countries, but not very good at building stable democracies afterwards). But the track record goes back further than that. Korea, Vietnam, South America... Even World War One can be argued as an example of how international intervention can lead to some pretty dire consequences (in this case World War Two). So why is it that this time we think Syria will be any different?
Third, we are all just starting to emerge from a global banking and real estate meltdown and most governments are running pretty untenable deficits as a result. These deficits and persistent unemployment mean that the world can little afford to spend billions dropping bombs on a foreign country that has little to no strategic or economic impact on the international community. A much better use of our money would be in providing refugees safe havens with humanitarian aide in neighboring countries. Essentially, cordoning off Syria and letting the government and the insurgency fight it out while allowing civilians to immigrate to other countries to live their lies in relative safety.
Lastly, even if we do bomb Syrian government targets and destroy its chemical weapons stock piles, it's not like that is going to end the fighting. The insurgency and the Syrian government will continue to fight it out until one or the other has been vanquished. Without the threat of putting boots on the ground as peace keepers, the fighting will just continue. And, as we have seen in previous interventions, putting boots on the ground just means we are putting our own people in harms way in a country we don't really care about. Intervention is pretty much a no win situation.
I think, in the end, that we would be a lot better off if we focused more on helping the refugees than bombing the Syrian government. In the long run, I think we would all be better off if we spent less money on foreign conflicts and more money on the home front. We have plenty of problems at home that could use billions of dollars that doesn't involve dropping bombs on people. But Obama was stupid, drew a line in the sand on both Syria and Iran, and now we are forced into yet another foreign conflict because we can't afford to look weak internationally.
The debate over Syrian intervention came to a head in the G20 due to evidence that chemical weapons were used on the rebel forces and civilians. A few years ago, when the Syrian situation first became a civil war, President Obama made a series of speeches in which he referred to the use of chemical weapons as a "Red Line". What he meant was that the use of these weapons to quell the insurgency would mean dire consequences for the Syrian government. Now that they have been used the President's hand has been forced and he must make good his threat or appear weak internationally. Unfortunately, there is no international consensus over who actually used the weapons. It is known that the Syrian government posses these weapons and has stock piles around the country, but it is also known that the rebels control a large section of the country and may well have secured these weapons for their own uses. It does not take much imagination to see how the rebel cause would be aided by international intervention and the Syrian government's would not be, so there is some debate over who actually released the Sarin gas.
Further complicating the debate is Syrian ties with Russia, a UN Security Council member and Veto holder, and Iran. Russia has long had military and economic ties with Syria and Russia has long had a military base on Syrian soil. Iran and Syria also have military and economic ties. Iran is also currently building up a supply of fissile material that the West thinks is for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, which is a problem because the Iranian government is hostile to Israel, a strong US ally. The end result of this is that Russia and many others are arguing against intervention, while the US and its allies are arguing for intervention.
So, with that scene set, I think it is important for us to discuss why it is the West feels it needs to intervene at all. For starters, the Syrian insurgency has been going on for years and has been largely ignored by the international community. Sure there has been some hand wringing about war crimes and civilian death tolls, but no one has cared enough to actually do anything about it until now. It seems mighty hypocritical to start caring now after 100,000 people or so have died and the country has fallen into ruin. The time for intervention was when the protests first turned violent and civilian lives were first put in danger. The reality here is that, if there were no broader concerns with Iranian nuclear weapons and Obama drawing lines in the sand, we would still be ignoring the situation.
Second, the world has a pretty miserable track record on intervening in foreign conflicts trying to keep peace and solving situations diplomatically. Even military intervention has a high rate of failure over the long run. We have good examples in both Iraq and Afghanistan of how a successful military campaign turns into a quagmire when it comes to nation building (i.e. we were very good at blowing up and conquering these countries, but not very good at building stable democracies afterwards). But the track record goes back further than that. Korea, Vietnam, South America... Even World War One can be argued as an example of how international intervention can lead to some pretty dire consequences (in this case World War Two). So why is it that this time we think Syria will be any different?
Third, we are all just starting to emerge from a global banking and real estate meltdown and most governments are running pretty untenable deficits as a result. These deficits and persistent unemployment mean that the world can little afford to spend billions dropping bombs on a foreign country that has little to no strategic or economic impact on the international community. A much better use of our money would be in providing refugees safe havens with humanitarian aide in neighboring countries. Essentially, cordoning off Syria and letting the government and the insurgency fight it out while allowing civilians to immigrate to other countries to live their lies in relative safety.
Lastly, even if we do bomb Syrian government targets and destroy its chemical weapons stock piles, it's not like that is going to end the fighting. The insurgency and the Syrian government will continue to fight it out until one or the other has been vanquished. Without the threat of putting boots on the ground as peace keepers, the fighting will just continue. And, as we have seen in previous interventions, putting boots on the ground just means we are putting our own people in harms way in a country we don't really care about. Intervention is pretty much a no win situation.
I think, in the end, that we would be a lot better off if we focused more on helping the refugees than bombing the Syrian government. In the long run, I think we would all be better off if we spent less money on foreign conflicts and more money on the home front. We have plenty of problems at home that could use billions of dollars that doesn't involve dropping bombs on people. But Obama was stupid, drew a line in the sand on both Syria and Iran, and now we are forced into yet another foreign conflict because we can't afford to look weak internationally.
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