Policeman of the World Looking for Help

When I was a little kid of four or five, my family lived in Hingham, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. We lived in a small neighborhood filled with kids about my age.

Next to this neighborhood was a very large cemetery filled with the graves of deceased New Englanders going back more than a century. For us kids, the beautifully manicured lawns and giant old headstones of this cemetery made it the perfect place for games of hide-and-seek and freeze tag.

Being sensible kids, we played in the cemetery during the day but left it to its own devices during the darker hours. We knew that the meaner ghosts of the cemetery would never dare attack us in broad daylight but that they had the upper hand after sunset. That was just basic common sense.

One weekend, many of the gravestones were festooned with kid-sized American flags. I gathered as many as my friends as I could find and told them to take the flags off of the headstones. We were going to have a parade!

And a parade is exactly what we had. A bunch of us kids marched down Hersey Street waving our little American flags, singing, and trying to get our parents out of the house to watch us, which they eventually did.

No parade is complete without some local police cars flashing their blue lights. And our parade had one. The Hingham Police Department had been tipped off to our flag-stealing ways and took up a position in the rear of the parade to see where the crime spree was heading.

What happened next was that the police had a chat with our parents who in turn had a chat with us kids. When it was all over, the flags were returned to their rightful owners and we got off with some serious scolding and perhaps an open-handed slap or two across the buttocks area. I forget exactly what punishments were handed down. I do remember that nobody went to jail that day and no parents or children were given tickets by the police.

That was my first brush with the law. It was not the last…but that’s another story.

The police in that first encounter showed that they could enforce the laws of the land and do so in a wise and fair manner. I think that’s all any of us wants from our law enforcement personnel—that they treat everyone they encounter fairly. We want to know that if a rich influential person is caught shoplifting, they will be treated in the same manner as a poor person (even though we all know that rich people who steal things they can already afford are worse people).

I am reminded this week of the fairness that we demand from our law enforcement officials as once again our country’s military forces appear to be at the ready to respond to another hotspot in the Mid-East. Like it or not, American military forces have served as the world’s police force since we entered the fray in World War II. It is time for some serious soul-searching about the fairness of that role in respect to our military men and women as well as what that role costs the average American taxpayer.

Less than a week ago forces in Lebanon and Israel began bombing each other over their shared border on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The war started when Hezbollah forces from Lebanon took two Israeli soldiers hostage. By Monday evening, the resulting death toll in Lebanon had reached 210, mostly civilians, including eight vacationing Canadians killed in a civil defense building in the port city of Tyre.

This current wave of discord between Israel and its neighbor to the north is the direct consequence of bringing democracy to the Mid-East, something our president has claimed as one of his goals on numerous occasions. The most recent election in Lebanon resulted in the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shiite Islamic party coming into power. A similar situation occurred in the Palestinian territories when voters backed Hamas, a political party whose more militant factions are set on destroying Israel.

Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “The roots of democracy are so shallow in these places and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds. We are getting Islamist parties that are elected to power, but that insist on maintaining their own private militias and refuse to assume the responsibilities of a sovereign government.”

It is a situation that makes one wonder if you can rightfully force democracy on a population if 51% or more of the people don’t want it.

It also makes one wonder what kind of situation will be left in Iraq when our military forces eventually leave. Will its democracy be lasting or merely a prelude to civil war?

As of the current situation between Lebanon and Israel, one gets the feeling that strings are being pulled by nations such as Syria and Iran to worsen the situation as much as possible. Israel has been a staunch ally to the United States but also a bit of a rogue elephant when it comes to dealing with its neighbors in the Mid-East. President Bush and his advisors have urged Israel to show restraint in the dispute (short of calling for a much needed ceasefire), while reassuring the country that it has our full support.

When outside forces are called in to mediate this situation, the United States should politely bow out and let U.N. peacekeeping forces handle it. Our military is stretched too thin with its extended presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and our government has not shown itself to be capable of “fair and balanced” police work when it comes to disputes between Israel and its neighbors.