Djelloul Marbrook

Columnists are like binoculars. They help you see something
differently. You may not like what you see, you may prefer your
old assumptions, but at least you’ve had a chance to see something from a different angle.

News is a heap of pieces until somebody puts the pieces together. But where a puzzle consists of a finite number of pieces cut from a predetermined picture, there are an undetermined number of pieces that comprise news, and they are often jammed together ham-handedly.

Politicians like to pretend there is only one picture and one way to
see it. When they change their minds, their opponents call them flip-floppers. But pieces of news are like statistics, you can make them say what you want them to say.

Let’s experiment with that notion.

The United States says it invaded Iraq to give the Middle East a model
democracy and a reliable ally in the Arab world. Without getting into what we actually gave the Middle East, let’s look at our assumption that we know what we’re doing and other nations should believe us.

Instead of arguing the merits of this assumption, let’s take some seemingly
irrelevant facts and fashion for ourselves a pair of binoculars:

—The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, but we have almost a quarter of all the prisoners in the world. We lead the world in producing prisoners. Prisons, unlike our manufacturing sector, are a growth industry. We also keep our prisoners in prison longer than other nations.

—The World Health Organization ranks the American health care system thirty-seventh in the world in terms of quality and reach. Not only that, it also happens to be the most expensive health care system. The Number One health care system in the world belongs to a country we are inclined to disparage, France.

Now, given these two disquieting sets of information, how might our assumption that we know what is best for other nations be viewed by these nations? Do we look as if we know what we’re doing? Well, yes, if you concede that our policy is to provide maximum care for the prison and
insurance industries. But if we’re supposed to be rehabilitating prisoners and keeping our people healthy, we’re failing miserably.

Why would any other nation have confidence in our ability to know what is good for them? Unless of course they too are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of their prison and insurance industries.—DM