Is the world a better place 18 years later?

Sep 13, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

September 11 marked 18 years since the attack on the World Trade Center, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people including a few Guyanese.
I have some vivid recollections of that incident. I had visited that imposing edifice a few months earlier accompanied by a close relative who was working on one of the upper flats of that building. As I watched that deadly inferno on television, my thoughts immediately flashed on her. In a matter of minutes, I received the dreaded news. She perished along with hundreds of others in the flames.
One immediate consequence of the attack was the declaration by the then Bush administration of the ‘war on terrorism’ which saw in its aftermath the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, regime changes in several other Islamic states including Libya and Tunisia. The alleged mastermind behind the attacks, Osama bin Laden was eventually killed by US military under the Obama administration.
The relevant question is whether or not the world today is a safer place eighteen years later. Opinions are divided on this question but there is broad consensus on one issue, namely, that an architecture of peace is much more preferable than that of war. There is only one winner in an environment of war and that is the military-industrial complex, which rakes in billions at the expense of human deaths and suffering.
The true cost of war is measured not necessarily in the actual money spent on weapons of mass destruction but on the number of people who could have received a better education, health, housing and water were it not for the billions spent annually on the military.

Hydar Ally