The following article is me in a sense simplifying very complex political, religious, economic
and military situations in various countries. There are any number of other
reasons and causes for the situations I describe. But what is history and the
lessons we learn from it but that very thing: simplifying complex problems and
examining them so that, one hopes, we avoid the same circumstances in future?
That has been the hope of historians since the learning of history passed from
oral to written.
I had been asked to share my thoughts on the most recent
events in Syria. I refer of course to the chemical weapons attacks that
‘prompted’ the US airstrikes on a Syrian airbase controlled by President Assad.
I put the word prompted in inverted
commas for a reason: I don’t believe that is what prompted it at all. That is
to say, the US waited for something they could label as a ‘cause’ of their aggression,
but that aggression had been planned for a while.
To explain this, bear with me as we travel back in time a
little.
One of the most terrifying weapons invented in the twentieth
century, besides chemical warfare and nuclear weapons, was a singular and
utterly appalling notion: War by Proxy. Proxy war is the idea that larger, more
powerful nations can engage in warfare without actually firing those nukes at each other.
Like bullies in a schoolyard, using War by Proxy the big
Western powers can pit smaller nations against each other, engaging in war
without actually having to declare it. And so those other nations suffer the
consequences.
Modern proxy war began in the ashes of Berlin in 1945. The
guise of US and Russian soldiers united in a brave march on the Reichstag to
finally free the German people from a dictator was a front for the real intent.
Basically, German scientists were a smart bunch of guys who had perfected one
technology and were well on their way to figuring out another one. The first:
rocket propulsion. The second: nuclear energy harnessed and used as a weapon. The
US and Russia knew this because they had been listening in on German radio
transmissions for years. And boy did they want to get their hands on all of it.
Sorry folks, much as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks would
have you believe the Band of Brothers invaded Western Europe out of some
altruistic notion of freeing Europe from the oppressive clutches of a murderous
Nationalistic regime (and to be fair, that’s what the troops believed they were
there to do, and in many ways, did)
the reason the Normandy invasion was planned and executed was not to crush
Germany, the Russians had already well and truly done that on the Eastern Front,
but it was to ‘free’ Western Europe and to gain a foothold there, because if
they didn’t, the Soviets sure as hell would have. And the whole European
peninsula would have become a Red Iron stronghold with its guns firmly aimed at
the United States. If you were running things, if that was the lay of the board
on some massive game of Risk, would you let that happen? Of course not.
Now, disturbingly, ask yourself this: if dropping a nuclear
weapon on Japan was about ending the war, as the United States insisted (and
still insists) it was, why drop two? Why obliterate Nagasaki as well as
Hiroshima? Did they actually think Japan would watch Hiroshima go up in smoke
and then sit back and cross their arms and say, ‘well, let’s not surrender just
yet, let’s see what else they have in store for us!’
No. It was a test of two different types of nuclear bombs.
And, perhaps more importantly for the US government, it was a statement, to the
Soviet Union and everyone else, of what they were prepared to do. It was the US
government’s way of telling any potential enemies: We Won, So Don’t Fuck With
Us.
And no further proof is needed than simply looking at what
came after the fall of Berlin –
decades of hostility and barely-contained nuclear warfare between the US and
the Soviet Union.
And the first of all the proxy wars to come: Korea.
The Korean War was a war between Communism and the West; it
was the sabre-rattling of two world powers testing the waters, ie, what would a
conflict look like between us? Well, it looked pretty devastating, but not as
devastating as it might have been. It was a war by proxy, a test-conflict. It
ended in a stalemate that the Korean people have been paying the price for ever
since.
Proxy war was brought to its most brutal incarnation in the
war that came next: Vietnam. This was again a war between the Communist (and
Russian-financed and equipped) North Vietnam and the pro-American South
Vietnam. Again, two massive powers duking it out in a tiny scrap of land in
South East Asia rather than firing nuclear weapons at each other.
But there was a spanner in the works in Vietnam that no one
saw coming (well, the Vietnamese did, but very few history books acknowledge
it): first and foremost, the Vietnamese people themselves, who were far more
resilient than anyone predicted or could have possibly even understood, and a little-known
revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh and a fanatical and brave group of people who
called themselves the Viet Cong.
The US fucked up in Vietnam. That’s now freely acknowledged,
even by them. But they learned from it, and proxy warfare took a turn from
ideology to oil.
Let’s jump ahead in time and to another continent entirely:
South America. Let’s wonder for a moment why there are more than seventy US military bases of various
sizes in South America. Let’s wonder with even wider gaping mouths why Venezuela
is the only country in South America that is both a) a democracy, and b) been
declared a threat to US national security.
Why Venezuela? Why not any of the numerous dictators in other nations on that
continent? It’s because Venezuela has the largest oil reserves, by far, of any
nation on that continent. And why did the US government help to depose a democracy in Venezuela and a leader who
was, according to many people there, the best thing that ever happened to that
country, economically, politically, and socially? Hugo Chavez had the temerity
to put his people’s and his country’s wealth first. Yes, the companies there
sold the vast majority of it to the United States. But the US would rather not
pay for oil from oil-rich nations. It works out far better for them if they can
work to overthrow whatever despot is in charge and then just sweep in and take it. War, paradoxically, is far
cheaper than peace in the long run.
We must understand US oil interests are best served by
having unstable political situations in the nations where they exist. It’s that
damn frustratingly simple. They could not give a flying fuck about the people
in those nations. The people come and go, and die. The oil is forever. Unstable
political climates and ongoing warfare justify their reasons for going into
certain countries, and staying there.
Think of conflicts anywhere else in the world, and
specifically in countries that have little or no oil reserves. Where is the US
while innocent people in these nations are being butchered by violent
dictatorships and their private armies? Answer: as far away as humanly
possible. They stay away because far from what they would love people to
believe, they really do not care about innocent people being slaughtered by
anyone or in any numbers, as long as it’s not American people or American
soldiers doing the dying.
And that is, of course, how we get to the Middle East.
Let’s start with the Russians, because we’ll certainly
return to them. The Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. This was, ground down
into simple terms, to gain a foothold in a region they knew the US was
salivating over.
The most absurd of all the wars the US has now waged in the
Middle East is undoubtedly Iraq. There was literally no military or political
reason to do it. But there was the fact that Iraq sits atop some of the richest
oil reserves anywhere in the world.
The US administration under George W Bush created a plan, called various things under Bush's administration and the subsequent Obama one, things as vague as 'The New Middle East', or as sledgehammer-subtle as the 'Five Point Plan for American Political and Economic
Control of the Middle Eastern Oilfields'. It was the brainchild of a lunatic running the
Pentagon back then, Donald Rumsfeld. Basically, it involved invading and
conquering (or otherwise gaining control over) five countries: Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Rumsfeld and the rest of those crazies
really were deluded enough about American military might to think that the
first two of these countries would collapse and be able to be placed under
US-installed dictators quickly and easily.
If Afghanistan failed to wake them up to the notion that
taking over the Middle East would not be easy, or quick, Iraq sure as hell did.
And as the American flag-draped coffins started rolling home into airfields on
US soil, they quickly woke up to the fact that American people were still as
decidedly against US military intervention in foreign conflicts as they were
back in 1972, even conflicts ‘caused’ by suicidal religious fanatics slamming
passenger jets into skyscrapers in Manhattan. (As an aside, those said fanatics
had nothing to do with the Taliban in Afghanistan and even less to do with
Saddam Hussein, but that’s another story)
If it’s not already clear by what I’ve been saying, the US needs conflict in the Middle East. The
worst thing that could happen (for them) is for everyone there to shake hands
and sit down to afternoon tea and forgive all the evil and set about to get
along famously. If there is no conflict there, then they cannot continue to
justify their presence there, to their own people and to the rest of the world.
They continue to push this idiotic notion that the place is better off now that
they have intervened and ousted monsters like Saddam Hussein and whoever the
hell else they peg as a bad guy. Iraq was far from a perfect place under
Hussein, but more people have died there since the US invasion in 2003 than ever before
in that country’s modern history (ie since it stopped being part of Persia and
became Iraq). The US took away the one guy who had enough sway in that country
to keep true monsters like ISIS from
stepping in and shooting up the place. I know which of the two evils I would
prefer if I was living there.
So, let’s turn now to Syria. The US administration does not
give a shit about innocent Syrians dying, at Assad’s hand or anyone else’s.
They needed an excuse to begin the military intervention there, and they got
it. And predictably as a sunset, Russia has stepped in to oppose it. Syria is
another proxy war; it’s just one that has been adapted to the technological
age. Russia needs Assad there, the US need him gone. He may or may not have
used chemical warfare; the US would have found a reason to start to blow his
forces away one way or another.
The conflict in the Middle East is now about what it has
always been about: oil. If the US manages to truly gain control over Middle
Eastern oil they will be in a better position to fight the actual war that the
world seems destined to march blindly towards. The real war. No more of this
proxy shit. The actual conflict
between Russia and China, and the United States and the rest of the West. China
cementing a military stronghold in the South China Sea is not something they
are doing for fun. The US (more and more actively) opposing it is proof it’s
something we in this region should be far more worried about than we currently
are. And the fact there are now more NATO and Russian forces amassed along the
Russian/Eastern European border than at any other time in history (it makes
World War II look small) should be cause for a long pause as well.
The previous two instances where the world has been plunged
into global conflict have begun in similar ways – a whole lot of posturing
before a flashpoint ignites the whole damn thing. I look around the world today
and I see the tinderbox filled to overflow. The spark will come in the Middle
East.
Source: the picture I have used above was originally published on the blog (which is a good read, please check it out): https://scrutinisedminds.com/2017/01/03/the-proxy-war-on-syria-afterword-the-roadmap-to-peace/
