Gandhi in the Hood

As grown-ups, when we see two kids on the playground fighting, do we first decide which kid deserves our support and then jump in and start punching and kicking the other kid?

No, of course not.  Our job is to step in, bring an end to the conflict, help restore good will, peace. That’s what adults do.

Alas, the recent decision by the Biden administration to bomb and kill numerous Syrian fighters in that country’s civil war—the Pentagon says two were killed, the local Syrian hospital reported seventeen were killed—shows there were no true “grown-ups” in the room when the president authorized such unconstitutional and internationally illegal barbarity.

As with Iraq, there is simply no military solution to the Syrian civil war. Both sides are committing atrocities. Military solutions are no solutions.

And in another recent sad decision by the Biden administration, when a grown-up witnesses one kid push another off the platform to be dismembered by an oncoming train, that grown-up does not just shake his head and turn his back, just because the pusher kid comes from a very wealthy family. He doesn’t let the pusher kid simply continue playing with his mates.

No, the grown-up, steps in, separates the rich-kid killer from his mates, and isolates him such that he does not have the opportunity to continue such inhumane actions.

So once again it seems there were no true grown-ups in the room when the Biden administration recently decided to not impose sanctions and diplomatic restrictions on Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, colloquially known as MBS, for his ordering the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post reporter critical of the Prince’s dictatorship.

According to a CNN report, “Sanctioning the crown prince . . . would have been ‘too complicated,’ according to two administration officials, and could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom. As a result, the administration did not even request the State Department to work up options for how to target MBS, one State Department official said. Another current administration official said sanctioning the crown prince was never a ‘viable option’ given that it could upend important initiatives in the region.”

Too complicated? Jeopardize U.S. military interests?

These are childish, short-sighted reasons for not sanctioning a brutal murderer.

The United States desperately needs a return to—or perhaps make a beginning toward – truly “adult” foreign policies based on a mature understanding and expression of universal human values, beginning with the most fundamental value of all, “thou shalt not kill.”  Any foreign policy, by any nation,  that uses killing, or condones killing of human beings, or threatens such killing,  is a faulty, dangerous, unsustainable foreign policy. Such a policy contains the seeds of that nation’s own demise.

Perhaps we, the U.S. —and much of the rest of the world—never have been brave enough to remove murder,  and the condoning of murder and the threat of murder,  from our foreign policy tool kit. But it’s time we did so.

When with this new administration we all had such high hopes for a “return to normal,” we neglected to remember that in our foreign policy “normal” has been, way too often, so often, a militaristic swagger that relies on individual and group killing. (Quick examples: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major general. And, alas, how much of our “foreign aid” is given to help countries purchase our military equipment?)

We adult Americans don’t want a return to “normal” in our foreign policy. We want a truly healthy, humane and supportive foreign policy that reflects  the values of the majority of American people. Thou shalt not kill.

We ordinary citizens won’t remain silent when these values are completely reversed.  We expect grown-ups, and mature human values in our governors.

It’s a long road ahead. Speaking out against “official murder” is one small, yet so obvious a step.