Tim Conibear: New world imperialism
A scathing look at the war against "terror" over the past eight years.
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So Barack Obama will sit with his cabinet and redress and refocus his nation's role in Afghanistan. In so doing he will hope to bring renewed purpose to the protracted and tangled "war on terror" started by his predecessor, aided and abetted to no small extent by our own Tony Blair.
Sitting and watching the news reels and archive footage of the bombs falling on Kabul back in 2001, I realised just how much those events have inflicted on our lives and the lives of others over the past eight years, to what extent they have been manipulated and moulded to support the various whims and desires of those in charge, and how they have tarnished the image of entire nations and their people. We're no longer popular in the west. Bush and Blair, now gone from the spotlight, have left quite a legacy.
We've had almost a decade of tabloid induced "terror" and "fear", dressed up and sexed up so as to cover for the new world imperialism of Bush and Blair. We were told our freedom was at stake, that our system of government was at stake, and that the system of values previous generations had fought to uphold was under threat by an axis of evil hell bent on destroying us and all we stood for. Terror was their weapon and if you believed what you read, terror was at your doorstep.
"Terror" essentially gave Bush and Blair carte blanche to peddle their version of Western Democracy to those living under repressive and authoritative regimes. To the public it was sold as a relief effort, dressed up as a humanitarian mission to save those living under repression and to strike at those who sought to hurt the West. But in practice, it seems, it was more an opportunity to get their hands on vital oil and mineral resources and to extend their political sphere of influence deep into the heart of the Middle East. The man on the street was lost amidst the political manoeuvring and deal brokering, and soon the complications of war exacerbated the cracks in the original brief and focus was soon lost. It was pretty obvious this was not a simple humanitarian effort and that behind the scenes there was a lot more going on.
Since then we've chased fictional weapons of mass destruction, fought and executed dictators, toppled repressive regimes, and, in theory, bought freedom to the innocent civilian. We were the liberators. We exported Western Democracy to the East, in so doing bringing freedom to millions. I wonder if the man on the street feels free today? In Afghanistan we hear reports of vote rigging and corruption in the free elections we proffered. Opium production is healthier than in 2001 and the Taliban still hold a strong presence as they live off the opium windfall. Iraq is in the grip of an insurgency and on the cusp of civil war, many insurgents are disaffected civilians recruited by fundamentalist groups preying on the climate of anger. So what went wrong, where did we loose focus?
Maybe it's these Western Ideals that we so readily and heartily exported as the solution. Or maybe it's the fevered egos of the men that shaped and moulded these ideals to their own personal goals as they acted in spite of the international community and, ironically, their own public, and marched to an unpopular war.
Western style democracy has little place in Middle Eastern society. Freedom of speech and freedom of press, these are healthy and positive aspects of our system of government that we can be proud of, that should fit into all societies as they form part of our basic right as free human beings to do and say what we please without fear of persecution. But in our secular Western society we have long since renounced the principles that certain nations still hold as pillars, and are happy to place materialism and economic advancement at the fore to the detriment of our spiritual well being. Those that took us headlong into this eight year crisis did so with, seemingly, little forethought or respect for the hugely sensitive cultural differences that exist between our nations. They went in with their wallets and egos, dressing their cause in humanitarian and philanthropic linen but with their thoughts focused firmly towards the economic and political
rewards at the end: An act of blind and bloody-minded political evangelism.
These were big men manoeuvring in the face of the International community, flexing their muscles with thoughts focused only on their legacies. They were warned of the complications of war in these far and remote places. They underestimated the tenacity of those they were fighting and soon lost their way as things went awry, and through these errors it took little time to see just how shallow and insincere their motives really were. And those that bore the cost were the innocent civilians, both at home and away.
It will be interesting to see what comes next. Obama has promised to re-focus the campaign on fighting those that perpetrated the horrific events at the World Trade Centre that predicated this war. But he's been left with quite a mess. With his Nobel Peace Prize in tow, it'll be interesting to see what comes next.
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New world imperialism (text) by Tim Conibear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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