At the heart of it all are the Palestinian territories, occupied by Israel since 1967, and before that back to the founding of Israel with its takeover of Palestinian territory in the nakba of 1947-48. With 3.8 million people living in contanments that are in some cases no more than open-air prisons, the Palestinian people suffer under the Israeli occupation that is fully supported by the U.S. administration. [4]
For the Palestinian people, life is a daily fight for survival against impossible odds as all aspects of their lives are controlled by the Israeli government and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). For westerners, Palestine has been a thorn in the side that festers occasionally, with the IDF applying the necessary treatment to keep it under control if not fully removed. Israelis use the rhetoric of terrorism and fear – very similar to U.S. rhetorical arguments – to rationalize their many incursions, the IDF attacks against a variety of targets, and the building of the wall. Behind the rhetoric is the reality of encroaching Israeli settlement onto Palestinian land to fulfill the dream of Eretz Israel as a contiguous and homogenous Jewish unit from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. U.S. media presents only the Israeli side of the argument as it continues its relationship with Israel within several ideological fronts: religious fundamentalism, militarism, energy and resource control throughout the Middle East.
Israel for all intents and purposes is unbeatable militarily. No nation state around them would survive if they perpetrated any form of attack as Israel could, and would, retaliate with the full force of its estimated 200 nuclear weapons, based on land, sea, and air – very similar to U.S. strategies. While many of the Arab-Muslims states speak against the atrocities within Palestine, their real intentions and purposes from their actions suggest they are much more interested in maintaining their own elitist status quo in their relationships with Israel and with the U.S. But as both Israel and the U.S. have learned, a territory occupied and oppressed by a military power with a different worldview creates nothing but counter-terror towards the invaders.
The only force that could convince the Israelis to pull back to the Green Line (the 1967 borders) is the U.S. and that is not likely to happen with the new Obama administration. Obama gave full verbal support to the Israeli government before and after the election. His choice of Emmanuel Rahm as White House Chief of Staff indicates that Israel's position will not be ceded to anyone else lightly. This was recently demonstrated with the proposed appointment of Charles Freeman for the chair of the National Intelligence Council, which was aborted after a short but vicious slander campaign by Israeli allies in the power corridors of the U.S. capital. It did not seem to be noticed by anyone that the greatest irony was the highlighting of his relationship with Saudi Arabia, while Bush's relationship with the Saudi prince's and their petro-military dollars received much less if any attention in mainstream media. Whether the U.S. needs Israel or whether Israel needs the U.S. seems to be a moot argument as they both tend to encourage the liaison for their own sometimes diverse reasons.
At its heart then, the Palestinian occupation becomes a symbol. It is a symbol of the Arab League's failure to be able to do anything about it; at the same time it symbolizes their somewhat thorny accommodation to regional Israeli politics. Beyond the Arab League, the occupation is symbolic of the west's suppression, hostility, and control of Muslim lands from Western Africa through to South East Asia. With the advent of al-Jazeera television, the Muslim world finally had a view of the world not controlled by their own elitist powers, a view that revealed the atrocities visited upon their religious kin across the region, with the savage Israeli attacks into Palestinian territory, into Palestinian lives, visible for all to see.
As in Palestine, so in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the terror of occupation gives rise to the 'terror' of resistance. The unifying element is the occupation, seen rightly as a combination of resource take-over and religious fundamentalist belief in the superiority of the invaders cause. Across the region, the increase in violence and terrorism can be directly attributed to the global war on terror announced by the Bush administration shortly after 9/11. For Obama the trend continues.
The long war – into Pakistan?
The new Obama administration, again full of wonderful rhetoric of hope and looking forward, has not changed significantly the U.S.' militaristic tendencies in the Middle East. Still describing the mission as one against terror, Obama is making a few tactical shifts while retaining the overall strategy of occupying Muslim states in order to contain and curb Russian and Chinese activities and control access to and transportation of oil and gas resources.
The ruse is not subtle. Some 35-50 thousand troops will remain in Iraq, while the contingents in Afghanistan will be increased. Both areas are suffering immensely from the occupation of the U.S. and its allies. The Obama administration is now turning its sights on Pakistan, a nuclear-armed Muslim country of 170 million people [5]. If the smaller populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are any warning, any military ventures into Pakistan will have disastrous unintended and perhaps unimaginable outcomes. For now, there are no direct land operations, apart from special units operating in certain areas, the use of aerial drones to attack 'terrorist' positions – or weddings or festivals – and the political manipulations between the elites and the U.S. trying to control the various factions of the military, the intelligence services and the various and complicated tribal relationships.
The results of any increased actions within Pakistan are unknowable other than to be certain that it will not be pretty. At the moment, the people in power and the military appear to be following U.S. edicts and performing as the U.S. wishes. It is within itself a diverse area, with some strongly modernized urban areas and other areas still operating as tribal lands as they have for centuries. Tribal lands are divided by the artificial boundary, the Durand Line, created to separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, but breached readily by the native population. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are only somewhat federally administered, with ongoing hostility between federal forces, tribal loyalists, the Taliban, al-Queda and other sundry warriors and drug lords.
Kashmir is quiet for the moment but its largely Muslim population is divided between Pakistani control – with its attraction for Muslim mujahideen – and Indian regular forces. Pakistan also has worries about increased Indian presence in Afghanistan creating a double-sided front against its traditional enemy. China and Russia also have interests that cross into Pakistan. The Pakistani government is shaky, with various parties largely based on tribal affiliations manipulating for power, a power that has to operate with a military that historically has been happy to take over power when convenient or warranted, depending on one's interpretation. There are a variety of Muslim fundamentalist relationships between the army, the intelligence service, the political parties, and the various tribal fiefdoms. It is not a stable area, and it will not be made more stable by increasing U.S. activity in the area. Expect the worst.
The real certainty is that "terrorism" will not be beaten. The U.S. is the occupying force and the natives will remain restless until they are all dead or the occupiers leave. As with Iraq and Afghanistan, any move to increase military activity within Pakistan will only increase the reaction of the people against the U.S. The natives will not be returning home in defeat – they are at home, a home where they have previously witnessed the fall of empires.
Great game - end game – end results.
The ultimate end game of all this military activity has nothing to do with democracy and freedom, or civilization and modernization. It is about dominating the region's resource wealth, using its captive population for cheap labour and open financial markets that allow the massive transfer of wealth to the U.S. and other imperial countries to continue. Whether those markets are democratic or not matters little to the U.S., as they already interact quite well marketwise with such non-democratic countries as Saudi Arabia, Jordan et al. The U.S. – and they are not alone in this, just the prime candidates to date – is quite willing to deal with whatever country has the requisite resources and a further ability to keep the new frontier stable. The Great Game for control of the Middle East, and Central Asia continues, with more than likely similar results of previous rounds of the great game.
The end results could have a heavy influence in many areas. The extended financial requirements of wars projected in time and space are huge, not just the ongoing operating costs, but the costs in the homeland where the social and medical costs of on-going warfare add up quickly and significantly. The military itself consumes huge resources to keep itself operating, not just oil resources to fuel the war machines, but also the material resources to garrison and resupply the hardware and personnel.
Apart from those effects on the U.S. there are obvious long-term effects on the countries that have been invaded, occupied, or simply bombed. Death, disease, industrial and agricultural capacities, essentially the whole of the occupied societies are altered for the worse. Leading into the third component of my overall theme of the negative effects of a corporate inspired debt ridden consumptive life style is the environmental destruction that accompanies it all, a component seemingly neglected in the face of the other two major elements of war and financial ruin.
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