Evil Assad, Evil Gaddafi,
Now Evil Putin: How the West Sells War (and
Makes a Killing)
Distraction politics and the economic
variables in Ukraine and the parallels with
Syria, Libya and Iraq
By Ghada Chehade
February 21, 2015 "ICH"
- "RI"
- As the conflict in Ukraine persists
and as peace talks between Putin and western
European leaders (Merkel and Hollande)
continue, it is important to look at the
economic actors/interests that benefit
from conflict and regime change in the
Ukraine and how this compares to situations
like Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are
under-reported angles and interests to these
conflicts that we hear little about in
western mainstream media and that many do
not look for because they are too caught up
in political or human dramas. For instance,
mainstream media spend so much time
demonizing a single enemy, be it Putin in
the Ukraine situation, Assad in Syria,
Gaddafi in Libya or Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
etc., that they do not also critically
explore how external actors may exploit or
bolster such conflicts and situations in
order to secure politic-economic motives
such as access to oil, making way for
destructively conditional IMF loans, or
quashing domestic policies that undermine
foreign imperial and economic interests.
In western media, a
dangerously false binary exists; wherein
opposition to western imperial and corporate
agendas for a particular region equals
support for “evil men” like Putin or
Gaddafi, for instance. This is part of what
I call distraction
politics or conflation politics,
where opposition to neoliberal and imperial
policies—such as IMF loans with austerity
conditions that devastate and impoverish a
nation, its people and its agriculture—is
conflated with support for certain tyrants
(as defined by the west).
In the case of regime
change and concomitant conflict in Ukraine,
western media is so fixated on the
demonization of Russian President Vladimir
Putin over annexation of Crimea that little
attention is being given to what
JP Sottile calls “the corporate
annexation of Ukraine.” Commenting on the
economic plan for the country Sottile notes
that, “for American companies like Monsanto,
Cargill and Chevron, there’s a gold mine of
profits to be made from agri-business and
energy exploitation.”
Some
European lawmakers view the Ukraine
conflict as a smokescreen to allow the
IMF/World Bank/European Bank for
Reconstruction financed agrochemical and
agricultural biotechnology business to steal
Ukraine’s highly valued and coveted
farmland. The distraction politics
around the conflict in Ukraine—e.g., the
west versus the evil Vladimir Putin—hides
the reality of massive farmland seizures
that will greatly enrich western
agribusiness corporations while ushering in
poisonous policies and practices such as GMO
crops. With Yanukovych ousted, the new
government in Ukraine has agreed to
austerity reforms in exchange for IMF and
World Bank “aid.” In addition to the
devastating impact these reforms will
have on poverty levels and Ukrainians’
standard of living, the austerity measures
will also allow western agribusiness
corporations to side-step Europe’s hitherto
tight restrictions on GMO production. As
Lendman explains Ukraine has long been
considered Europe’s “bread basket.” “It’s
rich dark soil is highly valued” and “ideal
for growing grain.” With one third of
Europe’s agricultural farmland, Ukraine’s
agricultural potential is vast, making it an
ideal target for western agribusiness giants
that seek to amass massive economic wealth
through altering and poisoning the food
supply of the region. For many analysts
these economic prospects underlie the
Ukraine conflict.
This is somewhat
reminiscent of the economic motives for the
2003 US invasion of Iraq and the “war on
terror.” It is now widely known that the
Bush administration lied about Saddam
Hussein—the US’s former ally and partner in
(war) crime turned public enemy number
one—having weapons of mass destruction in
order to have a pretext to invade the
country. As I explain in an upcoming book,
the motives for war on Iraq were
overwhelmingly economic, with US
mega-corporations winning massive
contracts—largely paid for by US tax
payers—to “rebuild” a country (i.e.,
infrastructure, privatizations of public
services, etc) the US military had just
destroyed. In addition to development
contracts, massive profits were made by US
oil and oilfield services firms such as
Halliburton and Chevron. Halliburton alone,
which was once CEO-ed by none other than
former vice president Dick Cheney,
reportedly made $39.5 billion on the
Iraq War.
Similarly, NATO’s
involvement in Libya was largely for
economic reasons. Like Saddam, Gaddafi was
an ally—and former foe—of the west that fell
back out of favour before the 2011 rebellion
against him. While the US
hypocritically claimed that NATO’s
involvement in Libya was humanitarian, many
analysts feel it had more to do with oil and
protecting the global monetary system.
Indeed, as
Newman explains, Gaddafi’s regime went
from a “a model” and an “important ally” of
the west to an enemy and target of regime
change in a period of just a few years. This
sudden shift in popularity may have
something to do with Gaddafi’s
plan “to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S.
dollars — a plan that would be “especially
devastating for the U.S. economy and the
American dollar.”
Similarly, is has been
noted that the plan for intervention in
Syria was/is fueled by oil interests, not
humanitarian concerns. In his comprehensive
analysis of the situation,
Nafeez Ahmed explains that violence and
the killing of civilians—by either side of
the conflict—is “being exploited for narrow
geopolitical competition to control Mideast
oil” and gas pipelines. His report draws on
numerous official sources, including leaked
government documents, retired NATO officials
and former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas, to demonstrate how the
situation in Syria is tied to long-standing
western desires to secure control over
Middle East oil and pipelines, with the
US-UK training Syrian opposition forces
since 2011 in order to elicit collapse of
the Syrian regime “from within.”
While a western oil grab
is a major factor in Iraq, Libya and Syria
(in addition to protecting the dollar and
European banks, in the case of Libya), in
Ukraine it is largely about land grabs and
western agribusiness’ GMO plans—ushered in
through a $17 billion conditional IMF
loan—for the rich and fertile soil of the
country. It is interesting to note, as
Joyce Nelson of the Ecologist does, that
in late 2013, then president of Ukraine,
Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a European Union
association agreement tied to a $17 billion
IMF loan, opting instead for a Russian aid
package worth $15 billion plus a discount on
Russian natural gas. As Nelson explains,
“his decision was a major factor in the
ensuing deadly protests that led to his
ouster from office in February 2014 and the
ongoing crisis.” This means that the
present-day IMF loan—and its voracious
economic conditions—was on the table
before the ouster of former president
Yanukovych, and that regime change in the
country conveniently made it possible for
the loan to take hold.
In addition to opening up
Ukraine’s rich farmland to western
agribusiness giants and GMO production, IMF
loans typically come with strict economic
restructuring conditions in the form of
structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These
programs essentially force the borrowing
nation to restructure its economy by cutting
public spending and subsidies in areas such
as employment, income support, health and
education as well as privatizing (previously
accessible) services such as health. If
these IMF conditions are applied in Ukraine,
it will devastate and impoverish the
country.
Such important
politico-economic issues and agendas in
Ukraine are rarely covered at length, if at
all, in western mainstream media. As the
conflict in Ukraine continues and as western
mainstream media focus mainly on the human
and political dramas of the conflict and the
Minsk 2 ceasefire agreement, one can only
hope the people of Ukraine will not suffer
the same long-term political and
economic fate as the people of Iraq,
Syria or Libya.
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