I say less about such things in here than I ought to. I don't know why ... as everyone who knows me will tell you, I refuse to shut up about them in person, and am very tedious company as a result.
It's not just in Iraq, or just in war zones, that such imbalances occur. Across Africa, twelve percent of children die before their first birthday and twenty percent before their fifth. Most of those need not die if we spent ridiculously small amounts. Many of them die of diarrheal dehydration, which kills three million children a year globally but can be countered by oral rehydration with solutions of sugar and salt.
Oxfam used to have a poster, in the 1980s, pointing out that all of humanity could have clean water, free health care, and primary education, for an amount of money equivalent to two weeks' global military expenditure. I don't know whether that exact equivalence still holds, but take it as a working approximation to be ashamed of. And remember that "world military expenditure" is not something distant and amorphous: half of all world arms expenditure is US arms expenditure and four percent of it is British. That means that the US could remove poverty on its own in a month out of its defence budget, Britain (or Japan, or China, or Isra'el) in one year.
That's still big money, though. Let's think smaller. Rough calculations show that Dr C's per capita contribution to global military spending is somewhere around US$3000, mine US$2000. Let's be cautious, and say an average of US$2000 per capita across our two countries. How much sugar and salt could be supplied for US$2000? How many rehydrations could be funded if both our countries put just 0.1% of their military expenditure into it?
And for all our talk of information revolutions and information explosions and information superhighways, how many citizens of our vaunted information societies actually receive the information to make such comparisons?
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