Of course everybody deserves a trail. But sorrily we do not live in a perfect world. But the world is far from perfect and most countries hardly participate in efforts to keep it safe für civilians and trade, leaving the USA with the costes of maintaining safty and with the mess of cleaning up.
Of course everybody deserves a trail. But sadly we do not live in a perfect world. But the world is far from perfect and most countries hardly participate in efforts to keep it safe für civilians and trade, leaving the USA with the costs of maintaining safety and with the mess of cleaning up.
Take Germany. Among the countries of the world it profits most from open trade routs and dictators who abide by a minimum of restraint in robbing foreigners, it ist ahead of the pack with practically no resources and a huge trade surplus. It lives off of the safety of trade. It sends only few and ineffective forces, spends a trivial amount on military so that with a population of 80.000.000 it can put less than 9.000 Troups in the field. Like many countries around the world there is no help from that quarter. In the run up to the Iraq war Germany even made things worse by standing behind Saddam with Chirac and Putin thereby giving the dictator the feeling he could hold out against die UN inspection, which was a recipe for war. In Afghanistan they promised to educate Afghanis as police. They could not find German police for the job and for two years did nothing on the matter. The US took the job eventually pushing the Germans to help. A German born man of turkish decent was captured and put in Gitmo. Although the German government continuously lambasted the US on Gitmo the German government refused over a number of years to allow the man to come back to his family in Hamburg. etc.
This is not just Germany and I use this example only because I live here and follow politics here very closely. But when all is said and done it has been the US with a very few close allies, that have been saddled with producing, what is economically a Public Good. Given the nature of Public Goods everybody can use them, once somebody produces them. This has been what many around the world have done.
In this situation the costs are high for the US. There are the military costs for equipment and battle. But there are other costs that are often higher. When you take a couple of Thousands of prisoners, like sometimes happens, in a world without robust general safety, you have all sorts of problems. Your own courts demand high levels of proof, which cannot be attained in battle or from countries that made the arrest. Countries do not want their nationals back or the persons face brutality at home, that we just can't push them into. We can't bring them to the US, because the population would go ballistic. I mean the Saudis put a largish number of Gitmo people into rehab and found that most of them reverted to active terrorism.
So here we are. Take no prisoners? That is presently the German stance after trying trails, which was a fiasco with the pirates claiming asylum in Hamburg and turning prisoners over to third world country prisons, where they found the prisoners average time till contracting HIV and tuberculosis war 6 weeks. Their ship off the horn of Africa no longer seems to be allowed to capture pirates.