US Defence Secretary Ash Carter has criticised Iraqi forces for showing no will to fight against Islamic State (IS) during the fall of Ramadi. Al Jazeera later reported, “Iraqi officials are blaming the US for not delivering crucial weapons well before IS mounted their offensive.” The Pentagon chief’s comments reek of hypocrisy and deceit. After almost yearlong US bombings and ground military operations, IS seems to be far from vanquished. In Iraq and Syria, where IS was born, the devastation of society due to prolonged conflict cannot be underestimated. The western imperialist military invasion and occupation of Iraq, replete with torture and indiscriminate violence, played an undeniable role in paving the way for the emergence of forces of black reaction such as IS. Before western intervention, al Qaeda was nowhere to be seen in the Levant. With Iraq in disintegration, Syria mutilated, Saudi Arabia plunged in a disastrous war in Yemen that has gone horribly wrong and Egypt choking under a fragile despotic rule, the Middle East has been ravaged by imperialist interventions and fundamentalist terror.
Nafeez Ahmed recently wrote in The Guardian, “For nearly the last half-decade at least, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan and Turkey have all provided extensive financial and military support primarily to al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant networks that spawned today’s ‘IS’. This support has been provided in the context of an accelerating anti-Assad strategy led by the US. Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that in 2009, British Foreign Office officials told him ‘the UK forces were already active in Syria attempting to foment rebellion’. The continuing operation has been closely supervised under an on-going covert programme coordinated jointly by American, British, French and Israeli military intelligence. Evidence in the public record confirms that US support alone to anti-Assad fighters totalled about $ 2 billion as of the end of 2014. Classified CIA assessments showed that US intelligence knew how US-led support to anti-Assad rebels through its Middle East allies consistently ended up in the hands of the most virulent extremists. But it continued.”
States like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Pakistan have bitter experiences of US imperialism’s aggression and destruction for control of their resources and strategic locations. This goes back to the overthrow of the radical left, nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the current destruction of the Syrian state. Lebanon was a cultural and commercial centre of the region that has been atomised by US imperialism and its destabilising extension in the region — Israeli Zionism. Iraq, with one of the highest living standards in the region, went through almost genocidal destruction. This ordeal was inflicted due to their ‘strategic asset’, Saddam Hussein, spiralling out of imperialist control. Induced civil strifes are the divide-and-rule policy in the region to control assets. All are orchestrated into sectarian insanity and internecine wars. At the same time, vast new profits, resources, lands, price hikes, market manipulations and plundering of resources by corporations proceeds ever more freely. Historically, US imperialism controlled the Middle East by financing Islamic fundamentalism and providing protection to royal absolutism and military dictators. In the process, it destroyed societies and plundered resources. The latest model being peddled has the hallmark characteristics of runaway cancer capitalism. US geostrategic planners are eroding these societies towards social collapse and barbarism. Even the relative social development of the past has been reversed by corporate vultures in their frenzy of looting the wealth of societies under imperialist economic and military aggression. This is not a conspiracy; it is a boisterous despotism of corporate terror and tyrannical oppression.
The Middle East, with its fertile soil, rivers and climate has historically been the cradle of civilisations. Islamic societies of the past in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba and Granada developed architecture, art, literature, science, philosophy, irrigation and societies to new heights that laid the basis of the European Renaissance. However, with the accumulation of primitive capital, these societies under Islamic caliphates become more absolute, autocratic and profligately enriched themselves. In the process, they decayed, with reaction surging to the helm and, more importantly, became fetters on developing the productive forces in society. Degenerate versions of Islam from absolutist monarchs to jihadist death squads have followed. Whatever their pretences, they serve only the underlying agenda of corporate money sequence globalisation. They keep the petit bourgeoisie and the primitive masses superstitiously suggestible, and force obedience through violence and threats. Islam, confined to ritual repetitions and prohibitions without elevating social life standards, does not confront this corporate money sequence idolatry. Thus, the corporate plunder of the people’s wealth with oil deals, weapons, finance, exorbitantly expensive military services and reconstruction costs multiply to more corrupt oligarchical control. Mass resignation, subjugation, inertia and sectarian hatred led to the condition of a dispossessed mass anomie of the west.
The corporate media, intelligentsia and politicians play a vicious role in maliciously debasing and smearing dissent against these imperialist crusades. The real issue is diverted to a familiar hate object instilled in the general consciousness by media barons. It gets attention and usually sells. It runs deep in the social psychologies of societies trapped in stagnation. Challenge by evidence or reason is derailed onto blaming a known enemy imposed by the elite intelligentsia. This is the underlying method of engineering the thinking upon which all genocidal wars and capitalist coercion depend. It is the cornerstone of imperialist ideology that has no common ground but animosity to the latest designated enemy. The bourgeois experts now rely on this manipulated hate for every attack and proclamation. Truth and knowledge of anything outside the game is not safe in corporate culture. Honest knowledge, which sees, documents, shares, certifies, distributes or organises to prove and act for the oppressed is forbidden in a thousand ways.
From the narrow spectrum of logical thought all seems to be doom and gloom. However, from a dialectical understanding a different scenario emerges. This was not always the case nor will this imperialist aggression and fundamentalist terror eternally keep on pulverising the region’s people. In the post-World War II period there were revolutionary upheavals and the overthrow of capitalism in several countries from Yemen to Syria. The societies that experienced the replacement of market economy with planned economic structures developed much more and achieved relatively egalitarian social welfare states, albeit under totalitarian regimes. The Arab ‘Spring’ of 2011 was another upheaval yearning for socioeconomic change. This was derailed in the name of democracy as a consequence of the absence of a Marxist party and leadership in the movement. More such revolts impend. However, this misery and bloodshed cannot be decisively ended without the overthrow of rotten capitalism, of which imperialist crusaders and religious monsters are two sides of the same coin.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]