Saturday, March 10, 2007

Brooklyn Peace Protest

More is not more

At the four year anniversary of Bush II's invasion of Iraq, the Brooklyn Parents for Peace are co-hosting a series of marches against the war. This is good, war sucks, it kills the poor and unpowerful to the benefit of the rich and powerful and sucks the world's resources. And in Iraq it just inflames domestic issues which are beyond any other nation's, let along any other nation's troops, ability to solve.

The issue though is then a lot of times people with a good cause then try to push for more. In this case (and it happens all the time, like especially people against the IMF and World Bank and other neo-imperalism, then they cross the line and combine it with anti-free trade), what starts-out as "bring our troops home NOW", then becomes "fund human needs - jobs, health care, education and housing, not warfare !"

People that can believe in a non-interventionalist foreign policy don't automatically cross the divide into saying then that the government resources should then be used to fund government programs elsewhere. The war should stop, period. This same thing too happened with people who protested the Katrina relief eg, the state and feds prevented private organizations from coming in to New Orleans immediately with private help. The protest organizers then said the government should fund this and that instead of just asking the government to get out of the way so people can help people.

The redeployment of resources rally-cry shows of course an ignorance of, 1) the government is in debt so there are no extra resources to deploy elsewhere, and 2) irrationalilty in devining cause-and-effect. Good intentions do not solutions bring, but, it is better than blind obediance.