The Congo lost about three million people in their recent war. In Rwanda, roughly one million more people were killed in only a few months, and a lot of estimates said that 1000 peacekeepers could have averted the entire thing. And Clinton knew, and refused to send them, according to some reports.
Neither the US, or the UN did anything effective in either case, and that's 4,000,000 dead people. 4 million people. We didn't lift a finger.
Although it would only cost about $40 million to eradicate polio, they're having trouble finding the money, and we just spent about $80 billion dollars plus going to Iraq. Iraq was a secular socialist country - secular, as in non-Islamic - they came down hard on their militants to safeguard the current regime. They had free, if basic health care, and free, and quite good, education. Rather like Tito in Yugoslavia, the dictator, though nasty, held the lid on an incredibly violent and explosive set of ethnic and religious rivalries spanning the centuries.
Now, everybody hated the heck out of Hussein, and if you were a political opponent, he was a monster. But the basic quality of life was pretty middle-class for most people most of the time. It was a dictatorship, but nothing like North Korea where people are literally starving to death by the thousands. Iraq wasn't supporting Al Qaeda - in fact, they'd been on the Islamic Fundamentalist Hit List for a long time because they were resisting the spread of radical islam to protect Hussein's power.
We could, and should, have left well alone if there were no WMD.
Because, when all's said and done, it is going to require a miracle from god to give the average Iraqi more liberty than they had under Hussein. Well over 50% of the population of Iraq wants a fundamentalist muslim theocracy in Iraq - to turn Iraq into a second Iran.
If we give them democracy, they'll vote in a clerical dictator.
Rather than chasing around non-existent weapons, we should have made sure the Saudis were hunting down every last Al Qaeda donor in Saudi Arabia and putting them on trial, restoring rule of law of Afghanistan, rather than invading, turning the place over, and then abandoning it. We should have taken care of our problem with terrorism, rather than fighting strategic wars under the lie of fighting the war on terror.
And make no mistake, Iraq is a strategic war. Getting US troops out of Saudi Arabia has been a key foreign policy goal for years. Moving them into Iraq solves a lot of political problems, and conveniently parks out tanks on something like a third of the world's oil supply. Completely cold-heartedly it makes a lot of sense, and I can imagine that clear eyed people in the Pentagon could see it as a necessary plan.
But not me.
And if we wanted to do some good in the world, eradicating polio would have been a cheep, good start.
In the long run, the invasion of Iraq is almost certainly going to turn out to be a human welfare disaster for the people of Iraq. If we did it to save them from Hussein, we should have given a lot more thought to what was going to happen, and how we were going to save them from themselves and each other.
The Economist on Rwanda:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2536344
Literally the morning after 9/11, according to Richard Clarke, George Bush and **** Cheney started trying to pin the attack on Iraq. Clarke, Tenet and others told them squarely that Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan, and not Iraq, and yet we invaded. There are no weapons, and whatever happens now our nation is responsible for.