A world worth joining

Over at Alternet Barbara Ehrenreich's piece What Abu Ghraib Taught Me discusses the impact of pictures of women involved in the Abu Ghraib war-crimes^*. Although I'm obviously not qualified to comment on her perspective as a woman, she closes with:

To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

I find that to be about the summing up how I feel about Bush's invasion of Iraq. Bush and his clowns unleashed the dogs of war with such sanctimonious hubris it was wretched and vile to me. As Barbara puts it, they are behaving like beasts. When you march virtually alone^** into a country on the pretense that your particular way of running things (which I wont even label "democracy") is better than everyone else's then you'd better darn well demonstrate it.

My feeling is that in this "military action" the USA has failed and failed and failed again to do what it said or even should have done. This is hardly surprising to anyone who has examined the US history of military interventions and installation of governments at gunpoint. Its and almost flawless record of failure and "blowback" as the CIA calls it. More worrying is that inspite of their known ability to fail they never had an "exit strategy" to deal with failure (what, America, fail?) and have put the country and people of Iraq and world into an incredibly destabilizing an dangerous position. The UN should in fact be formulating resolutions to admonish and punish the USA, UK and Spain for their vigilante based interpretation of "United". Maybe they should even boot out the USA and UK from the UN and find someone else to fill their security council seats (or better still abolish it and make security everyones problem). And if the UN can't do it then I'm afraid perhaps there really is no "world worth assimilating into" yet.

A thought that I've dwelled on several times in the last couple of years is why is it that nations have to have geographical boundaries? Is it not possible for the people of this planet to form their own nation independently of geographical boundaries? Form your own perfect constitution, or nearest facismile of, pledge allegiance, get a passport and go about the world... After all, what is a nation these days? Its an organization that makes you uphold their laws, taxes you and gives you money and protection. There appears to me no reason why such a landless "peoples nation" could not come into existence. Some super-evolution of one of these policy based groups like moveon.org etc. I wonder if ultimately such a geographically unbounded peoples nation could find itself with a seat in the UN?

I can imagine that the biggest problem would be that a country like the USA would probably consider membership of such a peoples nation to void your US citizenship, if not tantamount to declaration that you are a "terrorist" against the state.

^* As of yesterday the Bush administration is still adamant that these are neither war crimes or breaches of the Geneva convention on the basis that these are unlawful combatants.

^** Yes I know the UK and Spain and a few others had supporting roles (against the majority wishes of their own people), but of over 500 nations, that's a pretty pathetic showing of blood thirsty sycophants. Hardly a global mandate is it?