On the need to replace the concept of humanitarian intervention with the idea that there is a worldwide responsibility to protect and a need for global/local action by civil society to make any future intervention be humanitarian.
The people of the twenty-first century will require longer, wider vistas to flourish or even just survive. Each person will need to see and to respect the hopes and fears of all within their communities in villages and cities and in networks across the whole wide earth. They will need to work for each other and for the common norms of world law and human rights. Also, world institutions will need to support the people.
Exerpts from the aboveGlobal Beat interview are below and in the text to the right regarding oil.
The world needs to forge an alternative to war. Peace with gross injustice as in Saddam's Iraq is not acceptable, but any war involves vast injustice and pain and loss. We need to put an end to war. We need to find a way to achieve major change for human rights without war.
Citizens and communities throughout the world need to be engaged in ensuring for themselves the implementation of the norms of international law that could protect them and that offer them richer lives in larger freedom.
war in Iraq was largely intended to secure oil resources?
Lucy Webster: I think the main motive was to reconfigure the political structure in the Middle East for the security of the United Sates and for Israel, but I believe oil was a concern also.
Almost half the known oil reserves in the world are probably in Iraq and Saudi Arabia--although the official figures lead to lower estimates. Out of an estimated one trillion barrels in the known world reserves, almost 500 billlion are probably in Saudi Arabia and Iraq with some 300 billion more elsewhere in the Middle East. Not only are these quantities impressive, but the quality of Middle East oil is orders of magnitude better than any other oil in terms of ease of access and the economy of the refining processes needed.
These facts tend to tell their own story. At the moment that it became totally clear to the United States that Saudi Arabia could not be trusted following 9:11, it was also known that Iraq was weak militarily and under pressure from internal dissention and external criticism. Consequently, if there was a newly perceived risk that Saudi oil might be inaccessible either because its government no longer worked with the United States, or because it did work with the United States and was then overthrown, another source of high-quality sizable reserves was needed.
The world needs to forge an alternative to war. Peace with gross injustice as in Saddam's Iraq is not acceptable, but any war involves vast injustice and pain and loss. We need to put an end to war. We need to find a way to achieve major change for human rights without war.
