Victims Of Tsunami Pay
The Price Of War On Iraq
US & British Aid Dwarfed By Billions Spent On Slaughter
By George
Monbiot
The Guardian - UK
1-5-5
- There has never been a moment like it on British
television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was
bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it
suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African
children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their
mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make
us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the
characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of
the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for
the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from
stone not to cry.
-
- The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last
week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami
fund. A pub on the other side of town raised �1,000 on Saturday night.
In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly
�100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she
had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do
my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry.
-
- Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack
of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and the failure, in the west, to mobilise effective protests
against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether
we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now
stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we
might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for
empathy.
-
- But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief
of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the
whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? 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. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they
have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the
amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which
they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in
Iraq.
-
- The US government has so far pledged $350m to the
victims of the tsunami, and the UK government �50m ($96m). The US has
spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK �6bn ($11.5bn). The war
has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the
tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a
half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five
and a half days of our involvement in the war.
-
- It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the
war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as
much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it
elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less
than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq.
-
- The figures for war and aid are worth comparing
because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were
stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for
the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face
value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had
nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact,
components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless
generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of
this aid programme than lost.
-
- To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe
assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the
money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human
suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in
the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and
as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not
possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling
matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war
categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations
suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a
contradiction in terms.
-
- But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to
distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's
New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking
insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their
own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to
help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the
civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes
and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja.
-
- Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are
confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military
assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief
and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent
trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq
war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised
world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.
-
- While they spend the money we gave them to relieve
suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster
relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as
generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would
ever go hungry.
-
- Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/tsunami/story/0,15671,1382931,00.html
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