
Who cleans up after war? - snake117
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/question/214593-war-cleanup-damage
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guelo
Reminded me of this article about how Gaza is still just rubble after Israel
bombed the crap out of it last year.
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living-
rubbl...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living-rubble-Gaza-
nearly-one-year-Thousands-Palestinians-suffering-international-aid-promised-
six-months-ago-arrive.html)

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Animats
France is still cleaning up explosives from World War I. About 900 tons a year
are collected.

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percept
Another example is Laos. The US dropped a couple million tons worth of bombs
there, leaving a third or more of the country contaminated.

The use of cluster bombs in particular, left unexploded bomblets embedded in
trees or under soft earth, where they're detonated all too frequently.

(The US has slowly begun sending some money over to assist with cleanup.)

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kitwalker12
I recently saw Daniel Craig on the Late Show. He's the "United Nations Global
Advocate for the Elimination of Mines and Explosive Hazards"

UNMAS ([http://www.mineaction.org/unmas](http://www.mineaction.org/unmas))
helps with war clean-up in the few cases where peace eventually breaks out as
apart from the dead-bodies, mines & IEDs are also painful remnants

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samstave
The countries and companies that make mines found in war zones should be
required to clean them up.

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dragontamer
How do you plan to force them to do that clean up work? In particular, Iraqi
Insurgents were planting roadside bombs and land-mines throughout the totality
of the 2000 through 2010 decade.

We can't even get them to surrender properly (they just transformed into
ISIS). How do you expect us to "force" them to stop planting IEDs?

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vacri
Iraqi IEDs are a tiny drop in the bucket that is 'deployed landmines'. Most
landmines are mass-produced by munitions companies. Start there.

~~~
dragontamer
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty)

It has already started. But not everyone is on board with this. So now what?
We go to war about it?

~~~
huragok
"Well everything is fucked so we might as well not bother."

~~~
dragontamer
Oh we do "something" about it. But I just gotta point out that "forcing other
people to do something" is typically a non-scalable solution. As soon as
someone disagrees with you, you become deadlocked.

Its not enough to just say "force those other guys to clean it up". If you
actually want to say that, you need an action plan (ie: how you plan to force
those other guys to do stuff). If you're saying "pass a law", we can pass a
law of course, but its not going to affect other countries.

This is a United Nations issue, and it needs to be solved globally.

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madengr
The cleanup contracts probably go to the same ones who profit from the war to
begin with.

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RooBadley
Haliburton comes to mind, their subsidiary, KBR (Cheney's old haunt) made 39.5
billion USD on Iraq War v2.0. Fluor, a Texas based engineering firm, made 1.5
billion USD on logistics and reconstruction.

Security (Dyncorp 4.1 billion USD), transport (Combat Support Associates 3.8
billion USD), and food services (Agility 7.4 billion USD), were all needed for
the above operations.

138 billion USD went to private contractors during and after the war in Iraq.

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silentplummet
Who cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the
exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is
rarely well understood to begin with, from view.

Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the
old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the
road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning
them up?

Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a
mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is
really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a
neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.

We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And
then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific
ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes,
so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous
inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and
our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of
sight by the glorious global capitalism.

Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.

~~~
mkaziz
What do you propose is the alternative to capitalism? It's the only system
that seems to have reasonably worked.

~~~
paulojreis
Slightly off topic, but I don't think that the argument "capitalism is the
system which worked better) is valid. It's not that it's wrong, per se, but I
think it's an implication of mankind evolution and not the capitalist system
itself.

In more concrete terms: if you pick any given point in time, you'd probably be
able to say the same without being wrong. At date X, the social system in
practice is/was the one which worked better up until that X point; it's
because we've been evolving somewhat continuously, not because the system per
se.

