Thursday 25 September 2014

The West's permanent war

In what the media are beginning to call Gulf War 3, the US are leading yet another wave of western destruction in the Middle East. The one time that Labour Party leader Miliband could actually do something significant to effect peoples' lives he bottles it, and the Labour opposition will back Cameron's desire to jump on the US bandwagon, and Britain (of course) will tag along. 

The most recent of the West's wars in the Middle East has lasted on and off, in different phases, for twenty four years. The 8 year war to overthrow the earlier western puppet Saddam Hussain (2003 - 11), itself a maelstrom of death and destruction, has directly created the conditions for the most recent eruptions. And the West's permanent war in the Middle East is now to be upped yet again as another rain of missiles, rockets and bombs stamp their deadly authority on foreign soil. 

The Middle East is a permanent target for the west because of oil (of course), because of 9/11, because the West needs to 'encourager les autres' and because the Middle East is virtually owned by Western Imperialism. The Brits, the French and the US have between them set up virtually all of the countries in the region and, over the last century, populated their ruling houses. The west needs to keep 'tinkering.' The set up they created keeps fraying, first at the edges and then falling apart. 

But the mechanism is bust. As all the western war mongering has already revealed you cannot burn, bomb and torture the missshapen Frankenstine that you have created (and continue to create) into life. Instead your interventions, piling mistake onto mistake, just create new versions of hell. 

Surely the first humanitarian 'task' for the world to achieve is to get the west out of the Middle East. The local tumult, even civil wars will continue and may even spread on such an exit.  Genuine humanitarian aid - as in the Syrian case today - will be essential. But without the direct, constant and deadly pressure of the western imperialist war machine there is at least a chance that the nations and peoples' of the Middle East will find their way to a transregional and muti-ethnic and multi-faith solution. The faint echoes of the historical goal of the first revolutionary nationalists that fought imperialism in the 19th and early 20th century for a united Arab nation in the Middle East, can stiil be heard even now. For example while the sectarian warlords of IS face the west's technological terror with their own medieval brutality even in that repository of reaction the urge for a new Caliphate, a new, wide, Arabic centred civilisation surfaces, albeit in a distorted form. Even in the dust of destruction there can be building blocks for the future, if we can stop the west's latest bout of military madness.

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