by Ian Black Trippen

Created on: July 23, 2007

Of course not, as these reparations would not go to the people harmed, but rather to whichever junta ended up controlling the country after the war. (If you think that it's possible to give money, food, medicine, and other resources to unarmed civilians and to avoid having the evil people with guns take it somewhere along the line, I'd like to ask, "How is the weather in your own little world?")

We should pay reparations, under that or some other name, to countries when it is prudent to do so. Take for instance the Marshal Plan after WWII: we took responsibility after the Second World War for rebuilding our defeated enemies and most of our allies in order to ensure that the USSR wouldn't be in a position to control an even larger segment of the world than he already did. In that case, when there is a madman who wants to rule the world and we must rebuild our defeated enemies in order to stop it from happening, then we have a good reason to pay such reparations.

Let's take another example: Iraq. When we do finally pull out, whether it's in two years or in twenty, paying war reparations wouldn't go toward rebuilding the country any more than did the money we gave Halliburton, or the money that we took out of the Iraqi treasury (for more information see "Iraq's Missing Billions" on the BBC's "Dispatches"). Whoever gets the money is either going to be in the middle of a bloody civil war, if we pull out today without first securing the country or rebuilding it, or is going to be the winner of the bloods civil war if we actually do pass a draft law, secure Iraq, and start doing the reconstruction right. In the latter case, we would have already paid for the damaged buildings and infrastructure and so forth, and there is really no way we could pay money for the loss of human life in the country. If, however, we leave now without securing or rebuilding the country, then war reparations would simply amount to payments to one of the warring factions within Iraqmoney that would be used to buy weapons and ammunition to kill the members of the other factions.

Let's take another example: Vietnam. (I can almost feel an explosion as I type that name.) Vietnam was an instance where we didn't so much find ourselves in the middle of a civil war as we found our puppet government was widely unpopular and tried to prop it up with military force. We had no reasonable provocation to do so; indeed the only reason we did was that no politician wanted to have it on their reputation that they "lost" Vietnam to communism. Our war in Vietnam is a blot on our national character, and therefore in that instance I believe it would do us a great deal of good internationally to actually apologize and pay some war reparations. (On a side note, no American President has ever apologized for the misunderstanding that led to that war.) Humility would serve us well here because no one likes a foreign power who takes a hard-line stance on almost every issue and never admits to being wrong, and right now we could use a little more international support for our war in Iraq even if we decide to pull out soon.

As already stated, we should only give money in the form of reparations when it is prudent to do so. War reparations paid right now to Vietnam would most likely go towards building the country's economy and infrastructure because the existing government isn't in imminent danger, so it would be money well spent and would improve our image in other countries. Reparations paid to places like Iraq, however, or to North Korea, would only be gobbled up by the tyrants or warring factions of those countries to maintain their own power or their level of luxury.

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