NATO's crisis

As NATO met recently by a Welsh golf course this once mighty engine room of the cold war looked like it would fail its MOT. NATO remains the armed wing of US led imperialism and its current fragile state reflects the tentative reach of US power following the bloody shambles it has bequeathed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is western power in every sphere is on the wain. Which is not the same as saying that its current opponents are dedicated to serving the interests of humanity. It would be more accurate to say that they are part of the toxic residue deposited in the wasteland that imperialist madness has created in parts of Asia and the Middle East. The Taliban and now Islamic State put a minus wherever their previous oppressors put a plus. The result is that their creations of hybrid states appear as grotesque inversions, captured by a distorting mirror, of the societies they claim to abhor. Their factional lines simply reverse those that applied in the previous puppet regimes. Their murders are personal rather than engineered by remote control. Technology is used to defend modern caricatures of medieval social and political structures. 

Of course I.S. is also a desperate response by a section of the oppressed to fight hell-fire with hell-fire. The mass destruction of the drones and the jets, the annihilation of any sense of self-determination, the blood sucking international corporations are all still at large in Iraq, (with the hard won exception of the Kurdish enclave) and in Afghanistan, still representing the overarching presence of the most powerful forces on the planet. But fire is rarely overcome by fire. And recently, near Cardiff, the US leadership of NATO was edging towards a new regional alliance in the Middle East, making military training deals with Jordan, financing a 'non-sectarian' government in Iraq that can 'credibly' call in NATO to 'defend' the country, preparing a noose around the neck of I.S. pour encourager les autres. The US has already bought and paid for the State of Israel, the Egyptian army the Afghan government and its army and countless bases in the region. It now wants Jordan's army (a problem for the Brits), a new dictator in Syria and a (very expensive) deal with Iran. 

At the centre of all this is the complete disaster that western imperialism has meant for the peoples of the Middle East and now Afghanistan. Chopped up land spaces turned into countries based on western oil 'concessions'; deliberate fomenting of religious differences among Arab peoples to ensure western control; 'solving' the Jewish question at the expence of the Arabs following Europe's ethnic cleansing; it is difficult to see a whole people (the Africans?; Latin Americans?) who have suffered more at the hands of the great western powers. 

From an immediate and humanitarian point of view NATO and its friends in the oil business and the security business and the rest, need to be thrown out and then kept out of the area. Yet  I.S.'s provocative beheadings are precisely designed to draw in the West, to force a change in local allegiances in the region, courtesy of another western invasion. An invitation that should be firmly rejected in any form.  (It is ghoulish to note that the famous western bastion, Saudi Arabia, supports I.S. informally and itself beheaded 113 people in the last 20 months without the slightest murmur from the west.) On the other hand it is surely right that the Kurds should be able to defend themselves against factional religious armies, a struggle which could help to create nations defined by all those people who wish to be part of that nation rather than by ethnicity, or by imperialist map makers.

We should be aware that as the world and the struggle for its resources becomes a more and more acute, and the great policemen of the twentieth century world shrink in their power and pomp, so the struggle for fairer divisions will erupt more often, but mixed together in more and more wild and extreme forms. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the debasement of the world's first coherent and analytic ideas of human liberation have rendered the battle for justice all the more chaotic for now. But that stage is not eternal. Humanity only poses questions when the conditions for their solutions exist. And without the battle, without the struggle to be managers of our own fate, as a species we are finished.