Think Locally - Act Globally

Imagine the following scenario:

You awaken one day and discover that your next door neighbor has fenced in half your yard. His pitbulls now dig in your wife's herb garden and defecate on the newly planted lawn. You go over to your neighbor to complain, and he tells you through the door that if he sees you on his property again he will shoot you.

What's worse is that you hear the screams of his beating his kids and wife late into the night. Your children confirm that they regularly see them at school, bloody and bruised. You've also noticed assorted cars pulling into his driveway at all hours of the night, and you begin to suspect that he's dealing drugs.

Now what do you do? As an American, you are faced with a dilemma since you are fed the importance of property rights in American life almost from day one - that a man's home is his castle. It's one of the lasting vestiges of the American West, and so ingrained that most Americans are stunned to find that people in other nations do not share this value. Only the Australians come close, and they have yet to completely shake their socialist beginnings.

Morally you must intervene somehow. While there is no legal requirement for someone to intervene when a crime is being committed, you know from your Judeo-Christian upbringing that ignoring a sin is itself a sin. It does not matter that you did the sin yourself, or that you did not know about the sin in the past. As soon as you become consciously aware that a sin is in fact occurring, you become morally obligated to intervene or face a guilty conscience and God's judgement.

In contemporary American society, what do you do? Most likely you would call the police and let the state handle your neighbor's apparent drug dealing. A call to Social Services would notify them about the child abuse, and letters from an attorney demanding the removal of the fence and compensation for the damage to your yard would solve the fence issue.

In parts of the country such a reliance upon state organizations and institutions would not be available. You and your friends would come over some weekend afternoon, rest their shotguns against the swingset, uproot the fence and throw it onto your neighbors yard. They would shoot the dogs as soon as they stepped onto your property, then beat the holy hell out of your neighbor as soon as he came out to investigate the ruckus - warning him that if their kids ever saw so much as an unhappy face on his kids, they would kill him.

Now try to imagine a peaceful resolution to the above. Would you send him angry letters making threats? But what could you threaten if state help was not available? Would you offer to attend anger management sessions with him? What would you do to silence the screams of his children as you awaited his answer?

The sick thing is that the above story is not entirely fiction. The neighbor did end up in jail, his children taken away to foster care, and the house sold by his mortgage company after it foreclosed. What the incident taught the neighborhood was that our apparent independence was a sham. We relied heavily upon state institutions to survive in peace, and without them we would have to swallow our liberal tendencies and either learn to live with a guilty conscience or learn how to fight.

How Saddam sees these women:

Shouting "No War!" makes about as much sense as someone shouting "No Crime!" The slogan is effective if criminals - or dictatorships - heed it. When they don't violence is called for - either by the police are the judicious use of the military.This is the situation we face as a nation in the world where there are no institutions that have the clout to act as the police and judiciary. Many consider the United Nations to be such an institution, but it is not. The UN has no "institutionalized threat of force" to make a nation state do anything it does not want to do. Instead, the UN must rely upon resolutions - agreements made unanimously by the Security Council and by a majority vote of the General Assembly. In our example, it would be as if the police department did not exist, and the neighborhood had to form a posse to force my neighbor to stop dealing drugs and beating his kids. Such an impromptu group would be subject to the wims of each member. It is easy to imagine where some neighbors who lived close to my neighbor might hesitate to act against him, fearing retribution should our little
"impromptu coaltion" fail. Others might be opposed to any action because they simply do not want to get involved. Still others might be prefer to take an even more aggressive stance, believing that my neighbor poses a long-term threat to his wife and children and should be dealt with permanently. In such circumstances, it would be nearly impossible to act in a manner which would meet everyone's demands - and so inaction is the most likely result. My neighbor would keep dealing drugs and beating his children, and I would be forced to act unilaterally or with a like-minded few. Even then, some neighbors could sympathize with my neighbor as they see me deal with him in a way that they think is overly harsh.

The question then becomes, how big does America's neighborhood become? It is interesting to note that many who argue against military action today supported it on behalf of the Bosnians in 1996 and the Kosovars in 1999. America may also be guilty of a sin of inaction for our failure to actively interevene to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994, a sin that arose after America's own bad experience attempting to intervene in Somalia in 1993 - as argued elsewhere in this journal.

America's neigborhood is the world - and has been since the 1930s. Since that decade, events in far-off lands have affected America in various ways - economically (as in the rampant protectionism during the Depression), militarily, and even morally (as in America's hesitance to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration during the same era). Whether it wants to be or not, it has a role to play in the Middle East and in the affairs of Iraq.

I hated every moment of the time I spent dealing with my troublesome neighbor, but I had no choice. I could not afford to move, nor could I appease my neighbor without acting against my own conscience. So for three months I slogged through the American legal system as I withstood threats and taunts from my neighbor. But in the end, the problem was resolved, and the neighborhood is now a better place to live for everyone.

The world will be a better place without an Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein. It is now up to us and our steadfast friends the British to make it so.