[Bit]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

You're missing my point, Bit. There is how we, as private citizens, who are NOT going to be shot at and who are NOT responsible for making these decisions, can afford to think about these things and then there's how folks in national capitals, military administrations or sitting out standing watch can afford to think about these things. I'm suggesting that it is more useful to look at this with cold-eyed realpolitik based upon how the world works from those latter perspectives.

It doesn't work, Aj.

At what point does one finally say, "whoa... that doesn't work; it never has worked"? We are perpetually in a state of war. It crops up over and over, and looking at it the same old way doesn't solve the problem. Throwing more money and bombs at it doesn't solve the problem. Throwing away more people's lives on both sides doesn't solve the problem.

If the old way doesn't work, we have to seek a different way, a way that actually CAN solve the problem.

I say we have passed the point where we SHOULD HAVE been looking for that way, passed it by thirty years--and now we're reaping the consequences.

"If you keep on doing what you always did, you will keep on getting what you always got."

We, the US, are the most powerful and influential country on the face of this earth; we have unparalleled economic and diplomatic influence over the rest of the world. If the UN Peacekeepers are ineffective, we have the means to mount a political campaign to redraw their regulations and make them effective. We have the means at our disposal to do this in a matter of weeks.

What we have so far lacked is anyone with the vision and commitment to mount the campaign, to follow through and see it to the end. Instead, we prefer to pretend that we are somehow virtuous for being a country of war. We rename war; we say we are "pacifying" countries as if they were babies and we were the parent--but it remains war and it does not solve the problem. We barely get one place "pacified" and another crops up, enraged.

It doesn't work.

At what point will we finally stop in our tracks, look around, and say, "it doesn't work; let's find a better way"?