Phendrana Drifts

The first four years of my undergraduate degree were spent studying the Second World War - almost exclusively how it started and how it ended. This is important (well, at least to me) because it seems many of the same questions about the current crisis in Iraq are similar to the questions that was posed back then. People are using similar, if not the same language that was used back then, words like appeasement, aggression and the values of the international community. George W. Bush (not that I would ordinarily use his opinion as justification of my own) would say that this is a test of the United Nations, the sucessor to the League of Nations who died on the eve of the Second World War. It failed to protect its members (time and time again) and it failed to protect the world as a whole from war.

So, here we are again. The world is on the brink of war. I'll certainly grant you that the war in 1939 grew up to be a much larger war than the one brewing in Iraq. But in the end the issues are the same: is the "developed world" willing to go to war to end tyranny in a country? And if so, as my prime minister so eloquently put it, "If you start changing regimes, where do you stop, this is the problem. Who is next? Give me the list, the priorities." I'm sure most people would say it was just to go to war against the evil tyrant Adolf Hitler, but why not Joseph Stalin? The names may have been replaced with Saddam Hussein and Jiang Zemin, but the issue is the same. There are so many other sticky issues, like their were in 1937, but in the end I still feel something is different - I don't know why we are going to war. I mean really. I know the issues as they are usually defined, but there is no Poland (or Finland, as the case could have been made against the Soviets).

Twitter Updates

0 Comments: