Putin offers the emperor fig leaf to cover nakedness Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin

Joram Nyathi Spectrum
DO you realise now what you have done? It was a gut hollowing question thrown in the face of imperialism’s chief musketeer and his gang at this week’s United Nations General Assembly meeting by Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

It was a brutal question enough, but directed at a supercilious world power too blinded by conceit to admit “we were wrong on Afghanistan, on Iraq and on Libya. We are wrong on Syria now. Thank you for coming by.”

It is a world power armed with weapons more lethal than muskets and lacking the humility and nous to appreciate that the bitterest hostilities between nations are eventually resolved by the tongue rather than the hammer.

Chinese president Xi Jinping warned of those who lift a “rock only to drop it on their feet”.

President Putin’s dagger-like question was in reference to what impetuous intervention in the internal affairs of independent states in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya in the name of democracy and human rights had done to those nations — the untold human catastrophe now fetching up on the shores of Europe like a tribe of colonial invaders.

He was challenging the flawed wisdom on trying to impose alien concepts of governance as if their efficacy were the product of hard scientific studies.

He was challenging the imposition of an imperialist ethos on nations which have their own organicistic norms, traditions; cultural and religious mechanisms for preserving law and order among their diverse ethnic groups.

President Putin was exposing the failure of America’s claims to a superior, universal moral order which could be imposed and adopted as a standard guide on how all nations should mind their affairs and relate to each other. Not only were such impositions contrary to the notion of democracy but that they had yielded the disaster the world was witnessing in the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan, a disaster to which the world didn’t seem to have an immediate solution, a conflagration to which America and Britain seemed to want to add fuel to by removing yet another sitting president in Syria.

US president Barak Obama conceded in his address to the UNGA that despite the death of thousands of young Americans and spending trillions of dollars in Iraq, they had failed to bring peace and democracy to the land of Saddam Hussein.

Reports indicate that most of the fighters trained and armed by the US to enforce its democracy and human rights now constitute the backbone of ISIS.

They have joined forces with Saddam Hussein’s former soldiers decommissioned after the first rape of that country in 2003.

Without seeming to learn anything from these disastrous adventures in Iraq, America led another military crusade against Libya, abusing an ill-conceived UN Resolution 1973 authorising a no-fly zone.

They trained and armed rebels and thugs to kill Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Since then that nation has not known peace.

It has become a charnel house with warring armed militias administering jungle justice.

The authors of the horrors in post-Gaddafi Libya now describe it as a “failed state”, a gross and crude misnomer as this exposes the cost of American ventures abroad, and a rejection of its worldview as the correct one for everybody.

One would have thought they learnt something from their unwinnable disaster against the Taliban in Afghanistan — that you cannot always create a political power vacuum in the hope of imposing an alien culture and ethos later to restore order.

The resurgence of the Taliban after years of bombing only highlights the scale of American foreign policy failure.

But America and its allies are too arrogant to learn going by their machinations against Al-Assad in Syria.

We are told ISIS now has 30 000 fighters.

This is double the number of fighters on the ground last year.

ISIS has been adept at using the social media — yes, the same tool imperialism thought it had the sole capacity to deploy in the service of regime change — to recruit new and eager fighters not only among Muslims but from across Europe.

And America and its allies clearly have no clue how to stop the savagery going on beside a desire to drop more bombs on Assad, creating another power vacuum in the hope of filling it with “moderates”.

It took President Putin to offer a cure for this terminal stupidity, to give Obama and his allies a fig leaf to cover their shameful, naked failure, by deploying his military and setting up bases in Syria.

It indeed took the Russian president to ask what should have been a rhetorical question; “Do you realise now what you have done?”

And you still want to pursue the same modus operandi?

You are impervious to the lessons from your immediate past disasters!

These “self-anointed prefects of our time”, as President Mugabe described these incorrigible global foulers.

They can’t identify the enemy to be fought between ISIS and Assad!

How do you save the Syrian people from the heinous savagery of ISIS by fighting their government which is fighting their scourge?

Whose is the US’ friend or foe in this genocidal feud? Is the US affirming obliquely that its interests in the Middle East and Africa are inherently inimical to order?

Partly yes, because the US is in bed with Saudi Arabia, the main funder of ISIS.

That is why America and her allies find themselves in a fat dilemma fighting on the side of a terrorist organisation against a sitting government.

After Putin came to the rescue in dramatic airstrikes against terrorist positions on Wednesday, showing direction in the “war on terror” and providing much needed global leadership, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond admitted that Russia’s military build-up in support of Al-Assad had brought up “a new dynamic”, a more “pragmatic” approach to a dark conundrum, a more than binal dilemma for Obama and his dragooned allies. Now they have to make a painful choice: to stand by ISIS against the Syrian people or to join Russia on the side of Assad and the Syria people.

If they had a sense of right and wrong the choice couldn’t be more stark. But that is to assume their motives are any less dark than those of ISIS itself. We could just be headed for something apocalyptic.

Hammond couldn’t climb down without a fight, quibbling about the immorality of Russia supporting Syria’s “odious regime”.

Britain insisted, like the US all along, that Assad could not be part of the future of Syria. Call it a face-saving posture, but it is something worse.

John Kerry was on Wednesday forced to stretch credibility to breaking point when he told CNN that the US had always supported a “transition” involving Assad to avoid “creating a vacuum”.

Yet the US had insisted a new Syrian leader was needed to defeat ISIL, until Russian planes struck. It was a lighting coup by Putin, a brave decision and a direct challenge to American foreign policy.

America was caught flat-footed.

In one fell swoop it was stripped of pretensions to global leadership despite Obama’s theatrics at the UN.

But at the core of global political disasters is this: there are nations which have arrogated unto themselves the “exceptional” right, the moral authority even, to determine for everyone else who qualifies, by dint of their ideological or religious leanings, to rule in particular countries.

They are more than “self-anointed prefects”, they go on to anoint subalterns, monitors on their behalf, including threatening Kenyans with dark warnings against electing Uhuru Kenyatta as president because “choices have consequences”.

These democrats!

Those who resist this prescribed subordinate status are demonised as dictators.

NGOs and proxy insurgencies are instigated, trained, armed and funded to foment disorder.

When the unwanted government exercises its police power to secure peace, the leader is accused of “killing his own people”, a new nomenclature for a marked man.

That way, an alibi is manufactured to justify a military invasion under selective application of the “responsibility to protect”.

This we learn from the lives of Bob Marley’s prophets: Nkrumah, Lumumba, Sankara, Gaddafi, Machel and many others who paid the supreme price in defence of their national territories, their traditions, their beliefs, their ethical sensibilities and their desire to be free.

But for now, Putin has told America, you can’t repeat the same method and expect different results. You have to decide whether to fight terror or to foment it.

Assad has to be part of the solution to the US-engineered Syrian crisis.

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