The Age of Imperial Wars
By James Petras
August 22, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
2015 has become
a year of living dangerously.
Wars are spreading
across the globe.
Wars are escalating
as new countries are bombed and the old are ravaged with ever
greater intensity.
Countries, where
relatively peaceful changes had taken place through recent
elections, are now on the verge of civil wars.
These are wars without
victors, but plenty of losers; wars that don’t end; wars where
imperial occupations are faced with prolonged resistance.
There are never-ending torrents of war refugees flooding across
borders. Desperate people are detained, degraded and criminalized
for being the survivors and victims of imperial invasions.
Now major nuclear powers face off in Europe and Asia: NATO versus
Russia, US-Japan versus China. Will these streams of blood and wars
converge into one radiated wilderness drained of its precious life
blood?
Living Dangerously: The Rising Tide of Violent Conflicts
There is no question that wars and military threats have replaced
diplomacy, negotiations and democratic elections as the principal
means of resolving political conflicts. Throughout the present year
(2015) wars have spread across
borders and escalated in intensity.
The NATO allies, US, Turkey and the EU have openly attacked Syria
with air strikes and ground troops. There are plans to occupy the
northern sector of that ravaged country, creating what the Erdogan
regime dubs a ‘buffer zone’ cleansed of its people and villages.
Under the pretext of ‘fighting ISIS’,
the Turkish government is bombing Kurds (civilians and resistance
fighters) and their Syrian allies. On Syria’s southern border, US
Special Forces have accelerated and expanded operations from their
bases in Jordan on behalf of the mercenary terrorists – funded by
the monarchist Gulf States.
Over 4 million Syrians have fled their homes as refugees and over
200,000 have been killed since the US-EU-Turkey-Saudi-sponsored war
against the secular Syrian government was launched four years ago.
Dozens of terrorist, mercenary and sectarian groups have carved up
Syria into rival fiefdoms, pillaged its economic and cultural
resources and reduced the economy by over ninety percent.
The US-EU-Turkish military
intervention extends the war into Iraq, Lebanon and…. Turkey –
attacking secular governments, ethnic minority groups and secular
civil society.
The feudal, monarchist
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have invaded Yemen with
tanks, launching air strikes against a country without any air
defenses. Major cities and towns are devastated. Saudi ground
troops and armored carriers are killing and wounding thousands –
mostly civilians. The brutal Saudi air and sea blockade of Yemen’s
ports have led to a humanitarian crisis, as ten million Yemenis face
starvation deliberately imposed by a grotesque and obscenely rich
monarchy.
The Yemeni resistance
fighters, driven out of the major cities, are preparing for
prolonged guerrilla warfare against the Saudi monsters and their
puppets. Their resistance has already spread across the frontiers
of the absolutist Saudi dictatorship.
The brutal Israeli occupation troops, in
collaboration with armed ‘settler’ colonists, have accelerated their
violent seizure of Palestinian lands. They have stepped up the
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Bedouins, Druze and Christian
inhabitants replacing their communities with racist ‘Jews-only’
colonial settlements.
Daily assaults against the huge ‘concentration
camps’ of Gaza accompany an armed blockade of land, air and water,
preventing the reconstruction of the tens of thousands of homes,
schools, hospital, factories and infrastructure, destroyed by last
year’s Israeli blitzkrieg.
Israel’s continued annexation and ethnic cleansing
of Palestinian territory precludes any diplomatic process; colonial
wars have been and continue to be Israel’s policy of choice in
dealing with its Arab neighbors and captive populations.
Africa’s wars, resulting from earlier US-EU
interventions, continue to ravage-the Continent. Somalia, Sudan,
Kenya, Libya are riven by bloody conflicts between US-EU backed
regimes and armed Islamic and nationalist resistance movements.
Throughout North and Sub-Sahara Africa, US-EU
backed regimes have provoked armed upheavals in Libya, Nigeria (Boko
Harem), Egypt (ISIS, Moslem Brotherhood et al), Chad, Niger, South
Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere.
Imperial client Egyptian and Ethiopian dictators
rule with iron fists – financed and armed by their EU and US
sponsors.
Imperial wars rage throughout the Middle East and
South Asia. Hundreds of experienced Baathist Iraqi military
officers, who had been expelled or jailed and tortured by the US
Occupation army, have now made common cause with Islamist fighters
to form ISIS and effectively occupy a third of Iraq and a strategic
swath of Syria.
There are daily bombings in Baghdad undermining
its US client. Strategic advances by ISIS are forcing the US to
resume and escalate its direct combat
role
The US-Baghdad retreat and the defeat of the
US-trained Iraqi military in the face of the Baathist-Islamist
offensive is the opening salvo of a long-term, large-scale war in
Iraq and Syria. The Turkish air-war against the Kurds in Iraq will
escalate the war in Northern Iraq and extend it into southeast
Turkey.
Closer to ‘home’, the EU-US-backed coup (‘regime
change’) in Kiev and the attempt to impose dictatorial-pro-West
oligarchic rule in Ukraine have detonated a prolonged civil-national
war devastating the country and pitting NATO’s proxies against
Russian-backed allies in the Donbas.
US, England, Poland and other NATO powers are
deeply committed to pushing war right up to Russia’s borders.
There is a new Cold War, with the imposition of
wide-ranging US-EU economic sanctions against Russia and the
organizing of major NATO military exercises on Russia’s doorsteps.
It is no surprise that these provocations are met with a major
counter-response – the Russian military build-up. The NATO power
grab in Ukraine, which first led to a local ethnic war, now
escalates to a global confrontation and may move toward a nuclear
confrontation as Russia absorbs hundreds of thousands of refugees
from the slaughter in Ukraine.
The US puppet regime in Afghanistan has faced a
major advance of the Taliban in all regions, including the capital,
Kabul.
The Afghan war is intensifying and the US-backed
Kabul regime is in retreat. US troops can scarcely advance beyond
their bunkers.
As the Taliban military advances, its leaders
demand total surrender of the Kabul puppets and the withdrawal of US
troops. The US response will be a prolonged escalation of war.
Pakistan, bristling with US arms, faces a major
conflict along its borders with India and permanent war in its
semi-autonomous Northwest frontier states with Islamist and ethnic
Pashtu guerrilla movements backed by mass regional political
parties. These parties exercise de facto control over the
Northwest region providing sanctuary and arms for Taliban militants
operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Armed ethno-religious conflicts persist in western
China, Myanmar and northern India. There are large-scale popular
resistance movements in the militant northeast Thailand opposed to
the current military-monarchist dictatorship in Bangkok.
In the 21st century, in South and
Southeast Asia, as in the rest of the world, war and armed conflicts
have become central in resolving ethnic, social, tribal and regional
differences with central states: diplomacy and democratic elections
have been rendered obsolete and inefficient.
Latin America – On the Verge
Burgeoning violent extra-parliamentary right-wing
movements, intent on overthrowing or ‘impeaching’ elected
center-left Latin American governments face major confrontations
with the state and its mass supporters.
In Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil, US-backed
opposition groups are engaged in violent demonstrations, directed
toward ousting the elected regimes. In the case of Ecuador, ‘popular
sectors’, including some indigenous leaders and sectors of the
trade union movement, have called for an ‘uprising’ to oust
President Correa. They seem oblivious of the fact that the hard-right
oligarchs who now control key offices in the three principal
cities (Guayaquil, Quito and Cuenca) will be the real beneficiaries
of their ‘uprisings’.
The resurgent Right envisions violent ‘regime
change’ as the first step toward ‘wiping the slate clean’ of
a decade of social reforms, independent regional organizations and
independent foreign policies.
‘Civil war’ may be too strong a word for
the situation in Latin America at this time – but this is the direction which
the US-backed opposition is heading. Faced with the mess and
difficulty of dislodging incumbent regimes via elections, the US and
its local proxies have opted for the choreography of street
violence, sabotage, martial law and coups – to be followed by sanitized elections
– with US-vetted candidates.
War and violence run rampant through Mexico and
most of Central America. A US-backed military coup ousted the
popularly elected, independent President Zelaya in Honduras. The
ensuing US-proxy regime has murdered and jailed hundreds of
pro-democracy dissidents and driven thousands to flee the violence.
The 1990’s US-brokered ‘Peace Accords’ in
El Salvador and Guatemala effectively blocked any agrarian reform
and income redistribution that might have led to the rebuilding of
their civil societies. This has led to over two decades of mass
disaffection, the rise of armed ‘gangs’ numbering over 100,000
members and an average of six to ten thousand homicides a year with
El Salvador becoming the ‘murder capital of the hemisphere’ on a per
capita basis. The annual murder toll under the US-brokered ‘Peace
Accords’ now exceeds those killed each year during the civil war.
The real ‘carnage capital’ of the
hemisphere is Mexico. Over 100,000 people have been murdered during
the decade-long, US-backed ‘war on drugs’ – a war which has
become a state-sponsored war on the Mexican people.
The internal war has allowed the Mexican
government to privatize and sell the crown jewels of the national
economy – the petroleum industry. While thousands of Mexicans are
terrorized and slaughtered, the US and EU oil companies are
curiously shielded from the drug lords. The same Mexican
government, its police, officials and military, who collaborate with
the drug lords in dividing up the billions of drug dollars, protect
foreign oil companies and their executives. After all, narco-dollars
are laundered by banks in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and London to
help fuel the speculation!
From Regional to Nuclear Wars
Regional and local wars spread under the shadow of
a looming world war. The US moves its arms, planes, bases and
operations to the Russian and Chinese borders.
Never have so many US troops and war planes been
placed in so many strategic locations, often less than an hour drive
from major Russian cities.
Not even during the height of the Cold War, did
the US impose so many economic sanctions against Russian
enterprises.
In Asia, Washington is organizing major trade,
military and diplomatic treaties designed to exclude and undermine
China’s growth as a trade competitor. It is engaged in provocative
activities comparable to the boycott and blockade of Japan which led
to the Second World War in Asia.
Open ‘warfare by proxy’ in Ukraine is
perhaps the first salvo of the Third World War in Europe. The
US-EU-sponsored coup in Kiev has led to the annexation of Western
Ukraine. In response to the threat of violence toward the ethnic
Russian majority in Crimea and the loss of its strategic naval base
on the Black Sea, Russia annexed Crimea.
In the lead-up to the Second World War, Germany
annexed Austria. In a similar manner the US-EU installed a puppet
regime in Kiev by violent putsch as its own initial steps toward
major power grabs in Central Asia. The military build-up includes
the placement of major, forward offensive military bases in Poland.
Warsaw’s newly elected hard-right regime of
President Andrzej Duda has demanded that Poland become NATO’s
central military base of operation and the front line in a war
against Russia.
Wars and More Wars and the Never-ending
Torrents of Refugees
The US and EU imperial wars have devastated the
lives and livelihoods of scores of millions of people in South Asia,
North and Sub-Sahara Africa, Central America, Mexico, the Balkans
and now Ukraine.
Four million Syrian refugees have joined millions
of Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Yemeni, Somali, Libyan, Palestinian and
Sudanese refugees fleeing US-EU bombs, drones and proxy mercenaries
ravaging their countries.
Millions of war refugees escape toward safety in
Western Europe, joining the millions of economic refugees
who have fled free market destitution in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Balkans and other EU satellites.
Panic among the civilian population of Western
Europe sets in as hundreds of thousands cross the Mediterranean, the
Aegean and the Balkans.
Droves of refugees perish each day. Tens of
thousands crowd detention centers. Local labor markets are
saturated. Social services are overwhelmed.
The US builds walls and detention camps for the
millions trying to escape the harsh consequences of
imperial-centered free markets in Mexico, narco-terror and the
fraudulent ‘peace accord’-induced violence in Central America.
As Western wars advance, the desperate refugees
multiply. The poor and destitute clamber at the gates of the
imperial heartland crying: ‘Your bombs and your destruction of
our homelands have driven us here, now you must deal with us in your
homeland’.
Fomenting class war between
the refugees and ‘natives’ of the imperial West – may not be on the
agenda . . . for now, but the future for ‘civil’ society in Europe
and the US is bleak.
Meanwhile, more and even bigger wars are on the
horizon and additional millions of civilians will be uprooted and
face the choice of starving, fleeing with their families or fighting
the empire. The ranks of seasoned and infuriated resistance
fighters are swelling in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine
and elsewhere.
The US and EU are becoming armed fortresses. US
police deal with the marginalized citizenry as an occupying army,
assaulting African-Americans, immigrants and dissidents – while
looting poor communities . . . and protecting the rich…
Conclusion
War is everywhere and expanding: No continent or
region, big or small, is free from the contagion of war.
Imperial wars have spawn local wars . . . igniting
mass flights in a never-ending cycle. There are no real diplomatic
success stories! There are no enduring, viable peace accords!
Some pundits may protest this analysis: They
point to the recent US – Cuba rapprochement as a ‘success’.
They conveniently forget that the US is
still subverting Cuba’s biggest trading partner, Venezuela;
that Washington’s major regional proxies are demanding regime
change among Cuba’s allies in Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia and
that Washington is increasingly threatening Cuba’s alternative
markets in Russia and China. The vision of the US flag
flapping in the breeze outside its embassy in Havana does little to
cover Washington’s iron fist threatening Cuba’s allies.
Others cite the US – Iran peace accord as a major
‘success’. They ignore that the US is backing the bloody
Saudi invasion of neighboring Yemen and the massacre of Shiite
communities; that the US has provided Israel with a road map
detailing Iran’s entire defense system and that the US and EU are
bombing Iran’s Syrian ally without mercy.
As for the US – Cuba and Iranian agreements– are
they enduring and strategic or just tactical imperial moves
preparing for even greater assaults?
The war epidemic is not receding.
War refugees are still fleeing; they have no homes
or communities left.
Disorder and destruction are increasing, not
decreasing; there is no rebuilding the shattered societies, not in
Gaza, not in Fallujah, not in the Donbas, not in Guerrero, not in
Aleppo.
Europe feels the tremors of a major conflagration.
Americans still believe that the two oceans will
protect them. They are told that placing NATO missiles on Russia’s
borders and stationing warships off China’s shores and building
electrified walls and laying barbed wire along the Rio Grande will
protect them. Such is their faith in their political leaders and
propagandists.
What a packet of lies! Inter-continental missiles
can ‘rain down’ on New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
It is time to wake up!
It is time to stop the US – EU headlong race to
World War III!
Where to start? Libya has been irrevocably
destroyed; it is too late there! Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are
aflame. We are being plunged deeper into war while being told we
are withdrawing! Ukraine sucks in more guns and more troops!
Can we really have peace with Iran if we cannot
control our own government as it dances to the Israelis tune? And
Israel insists on war – our waging war for them! As the Israeli war
criminal General and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once told some
worried American Zionists: “Trouble with
the US? We lead them by the nose…!”
Just look at the terrified families fleeing
carnage in the Middle East or Mexico.
What is to be done?
When will we cut our losses and shake off the
bonds of these war makers – foreign and domestic?
James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor of
Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and
adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada