Hawk, an ethical approach to Saddam would have been to refuse to buy oil sourced from his control. Iraqis could rightly say that those lending Saddam money [or arms or whatever it was that creditors supplied] and buying his oil were the foundation of their oppression.
Dealing with disreputable people who are selling stolen or otherwise unethically produced goods makes one little better than buying stolen electronic gadgets from a man in a pub carpark. It's called receiving stolen goods.
Just as individuals should operate in an ethical way, so should governments, who are just individuals who are not restricted from applying the ten or twenty commandments just because they win an election or are appointed to some government job.
Other countries would buy Saddam's oil. They could be told that any country buying oil from Saddam would not be welcome to buy or sell goods from the USA.
Even little guys can be ethical. Great big monsters can easily be ethical and others tend to comply with the big dude's standards.
If the big guy sides with Saddam for a decade or two and becomes dependent, like a tobacco addict, on his products, it then becomes difficult to suddenly become ethical.
I wonder if the USA runs all proposed actions through an ethics-checking process before they decide what to do. Maybe the not-disbanded Office of Disinformation handles ethics issues.
I always only read of "interests", "strategic importance" and other ethics-free language. There isn't much of "virtue", "ethical" and the like.
Saddam has been as he is for 50 years. So it's not him who changed.
Since oil is fungible, we are all complicit in any unethical sources and have funded Saddam's repressions and cruelties. It's been fungible to now. Nobody puts identifying markers in their oil, though sources could be identified in final products with some fancy footwork with a spectrum analyzer. So petrol at the petrol station is a blend of various unidentifiable sources.
So by buying petrol, one is financing Saddam. Not to mention Osama.
That brings the ethical issues up close and personal. People who don't like funding Saddam and Osama should adjust their lives so they don't support them. Which is more or less impossible because a supermarket gets food delivered by truck, which burns Saddam's oil and the tractor which ploughs the fields does too. But they could dramatically reduce their consumption.
Unless one is prepared to do that, one is joining in with the unethical realm of life; mere nature, red in tooth and claw, where the top dog gets first feed and it's a life of cannibalistic ethics-free confiscatory strategic interests and simple power.
Decisions decisions.
Well, which are we? Human or beast?
If ethics value was reported on goods and services as keenly as the $ sign is and people shopped around, we might see some interesting geopolitical results. As a lonely ethical voice, one would necessarily become a subsistence hermit, akin to Ted Kaczynski, rejecting the modern world; though without the bombing, which put Ted directly into the Saddam camp.
If a lot of people checked the "Ethics Level" of a product as closely as they checked the price, there would be a response from suppliers. A company's purchases would include an ethics content, so when one bought a Made in USA product, it would have a Level A, B, C, D, E, or F grade in ethics.
There would soon be ethics auditing accounting firms, an Ethics Federal Reserve to maintain the ethics standards and decide on what constitutes Level A, B, C etc. A value would need to be defined for ethical content.
A very large industry would evolve to measure, control and report on virtue and ethics. We the Sheeple have the power right there in our wallets, or, more commonly these days, our cyberphone Q currency purchasing power [well, nobody is yet using the Q currency, but PayPal is up and running]. When we dictate, the market follows.
We have nobody to blame but ourselves really.
Greed is the root of all evil. Not money.
We should examine ourselves for evidence of greed and virtue. Check our balance sheets, and then do something about it. One raindrop will fall without comment. Billions coming down for forty days and forty nights cause floods, cleanse the landscape for a fresh start.
The line between good and evil runs right through the middle of each person's brain*. Whether they toe the line or not is a matter for their own free will, or conscience, or social pressure, or guilt trip.
Well, that's my Sunday sermon. Now, it's a beautiful sunny warm early spring day, so goodbye.
Mqurice
* I think that's Mahatma Ghandi's line, or something like it. Hmmm, Google says it was some guy called St Augustine. nd.edu No, hang on, it was Solzhenitsyn breakpoint.org
But wait, there's more it was both... < While we strive for justice, we are not to strive to judge one another. We ourselves are too tangled up with the things we would judge. St. Augustine once wrote that one should “never fight evil as though it were something that arose totally outside of [one’s self].” He was reflecting on Paul’s insight in the Letter to the Romans (3:23) that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We are one in our sinfulness. When we separate ourselves from others, we run the risk of seeing ourselves as sinless and others as damned. But the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. In his monumental Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once observed, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” > That from a Sunday Sermon no less. chslf.org So I must be on the right track. Though I have no idea what a Pentacost is. I suppose it's a Pentagon Cost budget or something in the Pentagon's Ethics Measurement Department of the Office of Disinformation. Oops, it's Pentecost, not Pentacost. dictionary.reference.com Also called Witsunday, which must mean let's crack a few jokes. Something to do with the disciples getting some holy spirit. Whisky? Gin? |
