Lafayette Crosses, Biology, and Foreign Policy

I visited the Lafayette Crosses, a memorial to U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, a few days ago and took some pictures. You have to get pretty far away to include most of the crosses in the picture

As you get closer you can read the sign.

Get really close and you can see the individual crosses clearly.

Imagine how far away you would have to get to see all the crosses representing the Iraqi dead if they were placed on this hill in Lafayette. How small would the crosses look when you had to fit 62,000 of them into the picture instead of the 3,188 that were on the hill when I took these pictures?

For the 65,188 untimely deaths caused by this war, the individual attention of loved ones hold each cross close up and in focus. It is the close up that should count, far more than the view from a distance. Whether the distance is created by the idea of an enemy, national “interests”, theories of international power, numbers too large to comfortably hold close, thousands of miles, or lack of intimate relationship with a person who lost their life to the war, the distance distorts the truth. Each individual, now dead, was a person just like you and me.

This war will end at some point in the future, hopefully soon, but that will not be the end of the issue. The real question I think we need to grappel with is, what would a military and a foreign policy that respected the life of the individual look like?

I think of international relations and the military in the context of a biological model, the immune system. You need a healthy immune system that keeps the body well when a foreign life form tries to invade and harm it. If the immune system ramps up its activity at the wrong time, doesn’t ramp down when not defending against attack, or misidentifies threats, the body is not going to remain healthy for long. If the immune system were used for offense and acquisition of cellular power and prestige for groups of cells within the body, as is the case with our current foreign policy, the health of the body overall would become a mess because the immune system would have been diverted from its appropriate natural role.

Please share your ideas about what an appropriate military and foreign policy would look like if we had to respect the sanctity of the life of the individual from a close up point of view?