So many phrases have become synonymous with war including the three mentioned in the title. What I am struggling to understand is how they all fit together to form some kind of coherent moral stance. Often the same person will say war is wrong, we're fighting for peace, we need to show strength or risk defeat or similar loaded rhetoric. Almost ten years on isn't it time to review the situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The image I have published above was selected to make a particular point. Is revenge a good enough motivation for putting a small child through the horror of war. It should be included that my google image search of "injured civilians Iraq" resulted in images of a far more graphic nature. So again, is revenge enough justification for countless civilian casualties and more to the point, what is justification for such large civilian casualties. The first argument that normally gets thrown up by the advocates of Middle East intervention is that the despotic leader Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. Justification for this generally rests on either his supposed stockpile of WMD's or the fact that he carried out systematic genocide of Kurds in the North of Iraq. We know only too well that the decision was made to enter Afghanistan to kill one man representative of a much larger anti-American sentiment within the fundamentalist Muslim community. I believe it is important almost ten years later to review this justification as it seems to be a fairly groundless justification for the murder of civilians and children on an almost daily basis. People need to get involved to send a clear message to our leaders that hypocritical justification for war crimes is no justification. If removing a tyrant was the agenda then why was Mugabe allowed to continue the murder of innocent people and the oppression of an entire population. For that matter why did the west not intervene in countless African nations when there was clear evidence of genocide and violations of human rights. I make this plea because currently there is a need to keep our leaders accountable for their actions for if we do not, we risk one day becoming the group that is persecuted against and we risk that our voice too may one day be the one silenced as we try to scream out to the world for help. The only way to stop this from happening in the future is to get involved, join campaigns, start and sign petitions, donate small amounts of money to organisations that can have a larger voice than just one person. Organisations that apply political and social pressure on governments as they continue their agenda of revenge and military aggression for national gain. Below is a selection of some organisations that are helping keep our leaders accountable for large scale human rights abuses and while we are pointing the finger at developing nations collectively for human rights abuses, sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that our leaders are not infallible either.
These organisations are some that hold all leaders accountable for their actions and try to hold war criminals accountable for their actions from all countries, not just the ones from the global south.
http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.asf.be/index.php?module=home&lang=en
http://www.hrw.org/
http://iwpr.net/
http://www.iidh.org/index2.php?language=en
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