The indifference of nations

Reuters

Whenever entities outside of people are bestowed with priviliges normally not given to people, bad things happen. I am talking about nation states and corporations. With corporations, enough has been written about the evil done by this faceless entity.

With nation states like the US and Israel, civilian lives (if it is Palestinian or Iraqi) are treated with scant respect. Even when their citizens would react with horror at discovering the kinds of things done in their names.

After a bout of Israeli attacks on Gaza, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologized for the untargeted assassinations, which claimed the lives of about 14 innocent Palestinians in recent days, including five children. But aren't these actions tantamount to terrorism?

HENRY SIEGMAN, a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London made a very compelling argument in the Los Angeles Times of such an equivalence:

The vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli 'mistakes' and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults also brings into question the distinction between the two. It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake. Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel's disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis. (According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis).

The bottom line is that nation states just cannot be entrusted with the unmonitored use of military power. When the military is to be used, the circumstances must be clearly delineated by the people, the consequence of such military exercise must be measured and the people informed.

The prosecution of the Iraq war was a far cry from such a prescription. With Congress abdicating its responsibilities, with the military subjecting its own citizens to "Psy-Ops", the president having the authority to declare anyone an "enemy combatant" subject to secret imprisonment, and torture, with no quantification of civilian casualties and military coffins arriving in the stealth of night, the people are woefully uninformed. We believe we're trusting George W. Bush to do the right thing, but it is really the unaccountable entity of the U.S. nation state we're trusting. Fools, us!