049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page Three: Why This War?

049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page Three:  Why This War?

One last related thing on this.

There has been a great deal of both sympathy for Ukraine for what they are going through and admiration for the courage and resourcefulness they have shown and they are well-deserved. And yes, we should offer what help we can.

I have to acknowledge - I know this will not popular be popular but I will say it anyway - that I am a pacifist and as a matter of conscience I can't approve sending military aid and weapons, but I say yes to human relief, to acceptance of refugees, and I note that there are materials that can be used in raising all sorts of non-lethal means of resistance that could be gotten in. And I do approve of and support the social and economic sanctions that have been put on Russia, even as I am aware that these can result in hardship for innocent Russian civilians who are not part of and indeed have shown their own considerable courage in openly protesting Putin's war, with something approaching 8000 having been arrested so far.

And I also want to give a shout-out to the Amazing Mr. O, aka Barack Obama, who in his statement on the invasion said what most have avoided: Those economic sanctions could impact us here but as he said, that is a price we should be willing to pay if we believe our own words, even as - he didn't say this part, I did - President Blahden suggests his red line on sanctions is hurting Americans or, more likely, his political standing.

So sympathy and admiration are both deserved and assistance is the right thing to do.

But that still leaves one final question: Why? Why this war? Why did this war get the press, the attention, the coverage, the sympathy, the coordinated efforts of great nations?

There are at least four other wars going on in the world right now that saw from nearly 10,000 to over 40,000 deaths in 2021 with hundreds to thousands deaths more already in 2022. There are 18 more with 2021 death counts ranging from 1500 to 8000. I doubt you could recall more than a couple of those 22 wars if you tried and most of them you never even heard of.

So why Ukraine? One reason, of course, is the push by the major nations of the West to make it that big an issue because it impacted their interests. But even as that influences, why does it seem to control?

So the real question is not why Ukraine, but why not Myanmar?

Why not Yemen, where the US has been involved and continues to be through approving of arms sales of hundreds of millions of dollars to Saudi Arabia?

Why not Afghanistan, a country of which we have washed our hands so thoroughly that despite a 20-year history most of us have no idea what's going on there now?

It takes nothing away from the people of Ukraine to say that our concern seems rather selective, and it behooves us - if I can use such an old-fashioned term - to consider how much of that is because, as David Hannan of the UK Paper "The Telegraph" wrote, "what makes it so shocking" is that "they seem so like us" or as Charlie D’Agata of CBS News put it, Kyiv is a "relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect that."

We need to consider, that is, how much of that difference is because they are white.

It's true, its true, judgments always have to be made that even as rich and as powerful as we are, the US can't do everything, we can't cure every economic ill, can't relieve every need. But we could do so much more.

In fiscal 2020 - the most recent data I cold find - the US provided something over $39 billion in foreign economic - not military, just economic - aid and an additional $13 billion in humanitarian aid, a total of $56 billion. That is an amount equal to less than 1% of the federal budget and 0.2% of our GDP.

It takes nothing away from our desire to assist the innocent in Ukraine to say that we have as a nation been lacking in our willingness to assist the innocent in places less “like us.”