This week in Wandering Truth, like many other writers, I’ll speak on ISIS, the latest threat from the Middle East. ISIS, ISIL, IS, whatever they’re called, they’re brutal thugs. No one with any sense can murder by beheading and then expect the rest of the world to take him seriously. My opinion on the truth of this group may not seem to wander much. However, my opinion on our response may. I have a perhaps over developed sense of justice. Where most people are looking to see what the rest of the world is doing and opening dialogue with Syria and other neighboring countries, I’m looking at radar imagery and developing targets. This attitude may earn the “cowboy” epithet President Bush received in his time in office, but there are worse things to be called. Still, the question I ponder is how involved in the world should the US be militarily?
At times I felt we didn’t go far enough after bringing down Saddam Hussein. I can’t stomach people committing “fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning,” as John F. Burns put it in his ’03 NY Times article “The World; How Many People Has Hussein Killed?” regarding victims of Hussein’s regime. Less so can I stomach them holding power. Hussein wasn’t the only monster in the world. Many of them are hiding in African countries, but they only torture their own people. No videos come out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo showing American or European journalists dying so they’re on the back burner. Meanwhile, India has a booming human trafficking industry and Mexico’s drug cartels have a thriving business.
But should we be the world’s police? That’s the standard response. We’re not responsible for the rest of the world’s problems. We get involved and then these countries we try to help hate us. We should just be Switzerland and stay out of everyone’s business. In some cases, I can hear this same sentiment coming from an abusive husband. “What are you looking at? This isn’t your concern.” The mothers and children of Thailand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Nigeria, just fell down some stairs is all.
Extracting the cartel cancer from Mexico would solve some problems, but should we even consider such a monumental task? How do you fight such a massive evil so intermingled with innocents? What about larger countries with questionable ethics like China and Russia? As much as I’d like to help, I have to realize we can’t fix everything by beating up the bad guys. In some cases, the victim needs to stand up, break free, and fight back. I would add “with American moral support,” but we have a terrible history of picking winners and seeing them turn back on us. Sadly, I feel I can only end by saying evil grows stronger as good people argue on how to fight it.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Beating up the bad guy