Help is helpful only if it helps.

Yesterday, on Facebook, my brother Joe posted an interesting comment:

I was watching a fascinating documentary last night. It explored a complicated political situation in a developing country engaged in a horrific civil war that dragged on over a couple of years. As the war escalated the 'rebels' were attacked by the most technologically advanced military weapons, with unimaginable and ever-increasing death tolls in the thousands and tens of thousands....  While superpowers tried to sort out how or if they should get involved, and if their involvement might plunge the world into a much more serious and broader war. Of course the superpowers had their own self-interest behind there support of the "rebel" faction.

The documentary was Ken Burns study of the American Civil War. The superpowers were Britain and France and the rebels held cotton the British needed to keep their economy 'well oiled'. And by and large the folks who were dying in droves were the poor.

Of course, the more things change the more they stay the same.

History is a great teacher. The world has been at war since Cain killed Abel as each individual and group tries to ensure it’s own interests. We try to protect the interests of others when it’s consistent with our own interests. We seek to spare innocent bystanders if it can be done without hurting our own interests. We appeal to universal standards of justice and morality inasmuch as these standards coincide with our own interests. I think you get the picture.

Though individuals, groups and nations love to talk of the interests of the poor and vulnerable, the bottom line is almost always some version of own interests. So, perhaps we may as well concede this and talk about America's interests.

1.    It’s in America’s interest to deal with it’s Lone Ranger complex. America is not responsible for every injustice just because it imagines it’s the only nation that can do anything about it.

2.    It’s in America’s interest to submit to international law if it wants to be able to appeal to that law when it’s in its interest to do so.

3.    And, in this particular case, it’s in America’s interest to recognize that these are Muslim nations with their own particular problems and their own particular interests.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the US, instead of threatening and intimidating the nations of this region of the world, were to humbly invite them to sit down with a “coalition of the willing” and help us all find a way to be helpful. Right now these nations are preoccupied with the threat of military intervention in the region. But what if we acknowledged that this is essentially their problem, expressed our willingness to help them deal with it, and backed it all up with a credible threat of non-intervention?

In the end the Americans, in spite of hundreds of thousands of casualties, worked out their terrible civil war without any great “help” from the British, French or world. And, as the 50^th anniversary of the march on Washington reminds us, they’re still working it out. Race harmony in America is an American problem that few outside America really understand. Help from their traditional allies and friends, if offered humbly, just might help. The threat of military intervention from Russia and China probably wouldn’t.