Why Africa Is More Important Than the Middle East

Whether you believe we’re in the Middle East for oil, religion, or terrorism, let’s set that aside for a moment. Instead, let’s think about the consequences of not getting involved there.

And I’m talking global consequences, not just America.

For the most part, we’d just have a political problem. The ethnic and religious groups would continue fighting amongst themselves, and we’d get occasional wars such as the one between Iraq and Iran in the 80’s and Israel and Lebanon last year.

Now let’s look at Africa. We have a lot of the same religious and ethnic conflicts, and a lot of murder, famine, and general death. They also have despotic rulers and, in some cases, the people are beggin for foreign intervention. Things are worse in parts of Africa than any given Middle Eastern country.

But for whatever reason, we don’t care. Maybe it’s their skin color, maybe it’s they have no oil, maybe we look at it as a money pit. (And this isn’t exclusive to the US; you don’t see Britain or even France or Russia in there toppling despots.) We get pissed off that the Taliban won’t let women attend universities, but it’s somehow okay for a warlord and his men to steal food from children and rape women in the streets.

The bigger problem is if things aren’t stabilized there soon, there will be severe global consequences in the form of a great plague. The endless warfare has sent huge segments of an already poverty-stricken population back to the stone age, and it’s become a hotbed of disease. AIDS is rampant, and now tuberculosis is back with a vengeance. My novella “Poisoning the Wound” was inspired by a Chicago Tribune article about the return of sleeping sickness, which had effectively been wiped out by the 1960’s.

What do you think is going to happen if Bird Flu takes hold in Africa? It’ll spread unchecked because they just don’t have the resources to do anything about it. Seems like a great way for it to spread and mutate to the human-transmissible form we’ve been fearing since H5N1 claimed its first human victim.

I’m not an activist. I feel bad for the kids and the people dying over there, but I’m not going to pretend to understand the conflicts and I feel sending medicine and supplies is a waste of time because the warlords will just claim it as their own. But there comes a time when the prosperous nations — again, not just the United States — need to get in there and just put an end to it.

Worried that the next elected guy will turn into another evil despot? Fine. Then we do it again. And again. Until someone can get a foothold and start building an infrastructure and set these countries on a pace to support themselves.

If I remember Beyond Good and Evil correctly, Nietzsche says we should not feel obligated to help those in need. However, those with the power to do so should help out simply because they can.

That’s the position most of the world is in now. We have the ability to take these warlords down. We have the power.

The question becomes do we have the stomach for it.