Washington’s humanitarian debt President Trump
President Trump

President Trump

Stanely Mushava Correspondent
The sustained eruption of humanitarian sores in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia continues to log newcomers into the index of failed States.

A pantheon of trouble spots riven by endless — in Syria’s case, concurrent wars prefigures the slow and painful death of global security and human rights.

The world looks headed full steam into nuclear war and is already at home with modern-day slavery, refugee crises of record proportions and a rash of apocalyptic scenarios.

Superpower interventions continue to manipulate regions tangled in humanitarian blackouts into diplomatic chips, operation theatres for military showdowns, looting grounds and markets for war merchants.

The “forever wars” are easily traceable to geopolitical hegemons shoring up profit and power at the expense of weaker nations.

Citizens of Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and collateral battle spaces pay the bills that sustain the U.S.A’s military-industrial complex, steel on their necks, fire on their roofs.

The UN, slanted towards richer members and open to unilateral actors, routinely issues lame-duck resolutions and addresses humanitarian calamities downstream without plugging them at the head. The failure or complicity of world governments has stoked the chaos and occasioned the need to course a democratic scalpel through its facilities, redirecting them to the service of humanity.

One downside to living under the weight of an information overload is that basic political realities sail beneath the radar while we burn our bundles on distractions.

This is true with respect to the global cost of Washington’s conflict entrepreneurship, the empire’s selective commitment to security, human rights and democracy based on how each plays into its geopolitical chamber play.

The US sermonises about defusing terrorism, but it has maintained a back channel to terror factions and rogue leaders as long as they are trained on the same bull’s eye.

Washington’s geopolitical one-night stands infamously include al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein and the Islamic State, in each case using the sour morning after as a moral pretext to set entire countries on fire.

Despite bombing Syria and Afghanistan with top-of-the-range explosives recently, Trump does not seem to have a coherent plan for ending the wars he inherited from Barack Obama and George Bush.

Geopolitical Futures editor George Friedman explains the cold calculus behind Washington’s invention of and intervention in war situations, not to solve, but to sustain them for its own interests.

“Trump genuinely wanted something different, as did Obama. But neither achieved it. The only change from Bush is that Trump and Obama used far fewer troops in failing to construct a coherent strategy,” writes Friedman.

For example, the US knows that it has no capacity to impose its will on Iraq, but cannot withdraw for fear that the establishment of a Shiite or Sunni principality will ultimately threaten its interests.

“Therefore, tactical moves designed to undermine on a local level is the best the United States can do,” Friedman writes, implying that the US is wilfully prolonging the crisis to play the factions against each other and keep the country in a weakened state.

This might tally in geopolitical calculus, but the humanitarian costs of prioritising strategy over humanity are revolting.

Millions are currently displaced, starved and constantly stalked by death, while the US, which either authored or amplified the tragedies, is sealing its borders to refugees. In January, Trump issued an executive order to suspend the processing of Syrian refugees and halt travel from six other Muslim-majority countries — Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.

The ban not only undermines the US’ obligation to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds as a signatory of the refugee convention, but deliberately ignores Washington’s title role in the crises.

In 2011, the US arm-twisted the UN Security Council to rubber-stamp Nato’s installation of a no-fly zone over Libya, only to orchestrate regime change and downgrade a powerful African country into a failed State, opening it up for militias, slave traders and terrorists.

This month, the Islamic State took control of Sirte, the deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s home town.

Not that the North Africans did not have enough headaches before the coming in of ISIS, itself an indirect creation of the US.

MSF reports that 5 000 people lost their lives while trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy in unsafe boats last year. Hundreds arrive in Europe daily fleeing a country where people, especially blacks, are now being abducted from the streets, sold into slavery, held for ransom and condemned to malnutrition without recourse to justice.

The oil-rich country that scored high on social services has become ISIS’ latest acquisition in the aftermath of Western interference, a familiar story following the destruction of another resource-rich African country, DRC, with the complicity of the UN. Aside the US’ moral posturing, looting cannot be lightly dismissed as the motive for some of its engagements. Before he took office, Trump repeatedly lamented previous administrations’ failure to maximise spoils of the Iraqi war: “I have always said take the oil! In the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war, and you take it.”

Given his record of living up to campaign rhetoric, it will not be surprising if the empire stretches its tentacles under Trump’s command.

The Guardian’s Seumas Milne writes in a 2015 feature that the US’ consort with terrorist groups goes back to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which gave rise to al-Qaida under CIA tutelage and recalibrated in Iraq and Libya.

“In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule.

“American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq, while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen.

“However, confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly. What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease — not those who incubated the virus,” writes Milne.

The US recently bombed Syria in retaliation to Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

However, according to a 2013 Foreign Policy article, the US’ was complicit in Saddam Hussein’s series of far more devastating nerve gas attacks against Iran.

“In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defences. US intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent,” writes Shane Harris and Matthew M.Aid.

Hussein’s chemical arsenal caused severe blistering of the skin and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the risk of cancer, but the CIA provided him with intelligence to shell the Iranians.

The US has appointed itself the global policeman, but it is constantly rewriting the rule book to suit its interests, a duplicity that is only tearing more Third World countries away from the habitable sphere.

Peace and security cannot be achieved by the fluctuating whims of a power that incubates terrorists and embraces rogue leaders today, only to disown and fight them tomorrow with regionally felt collateral damage.

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, whom the US Justice Department is preparing charges against, recently invoked Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech in an op-ed for Washington Post, warning that the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

The present danger must be subjected to public scrutiny and the UN must be democratically reconstituted to allow the community of nations to curtail predatory hegemons causing global instability.

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