The end of impunity
On Dec. 17, 1998, Americans woke up to the New York Times headline “Impeachment vote in House delayed as Clinton launches Iraq airstrike.” Fast forward to Jan. 4, 2020 and CNN quoted a Washington Post report that “Some Democrats were privately worried about sending impeachment articles to senate amid Iran tensions.”
Deja vu with a very bitter taste. Regional lives are again sacrificed at the altar of American domestic politics.
For more than 200 years our region has been the victimized arena where Western domestic political fights and imperialistic misadventures play out. They invented the tools of destruction and torture to advance their agendas as well as names for those standing up to these agendas. Fundamentalists, extremists, terrorists, insurgents – the list of adjectives grows.
This imperialist adventurism is supported by an army of lobbyists and think-tanks armed with studies and data intended to prove that drone strikes, arms sales, and extrajudicial killings will bring peace to our region. Of course, peace is conditional to our total subjugation. In their view, the people who belong in this region do not have the right to govern our region. Only those coming from thousands of miles away onboard warships and other killing machines are entitled to govern us.
The security of our region is not the affair of those indigenous to our region but those who are foreign and distant from it. Regional countries and leaders demonstrating the military and technological capability and desire to take control of regional security are portrayed as threats to the very security they are trying to protect! Country after country is being attacked if they do not accept colonial subjugation. Iran is the current target. Count the number of military bases surrounding Iran. Iran is not the first. It certainly will not be the last.
There is Turkey, another regional superpower unwilling to surrender to colonial subjugation. Turkey is still the continuous target of political and economic attempts of blackmail. Others, especially in the oil-producing dictatorships, have succumbed to the belief that they will be protected. In reality, the protection is the surety that having subjugated themselves, they will not be attacked by the very colonial forces protecting them. And therein lies the paradox. Almost Al Caponic, but on a global scale. After all, it was Al Capone who said, “My rackets run on strictly American lines.” Indeed.
The playbook does not change. First, come accusations of terrorism and listing the country in the famous list of terrorist supporting “regimes.” This is usually followed by an economic blockade that aims to strangulate and weaken the “target” country ultimately followed with a military attack.
While we are consumed by sectarian and religious divisions that turn populations against one another, geopolitical control of our region is allowed to be taken over by forces thousands of miles away. Those who seek to dominate our region couldn’t care less about your religious faith. It is not the direction you face in prayer but the resources your feet stand on that is their target. Their weapons of war do not discriminate by religion, sect or nationality – they are equal opportunity killers.
The invading missiles that fell on Iraq did not target a religious or sectarian community but all Iraqis. Afghanistan is a Sunni majority nation, Iran is a Shia majority nation. One has been destroyed and the other is now being targeted for destruction. You have a political religion. They don’t. And as long as you refuse to see these realities and deal with them, you are contributing to the destruction and continued occupation of your region and the subjugation of your children’s future.
This is why it is important for us in the region to look at Iran’s retaliatory strikes, in June against a spying drone and recent missiles upon U.S. bases on Iraq as a major development that has sent an important message. This is not just important for us in the region but the American public as well who’s youngsters are being sacrificed in distant wars they don’t understand and don’t have to fight and die in. These are youngsters who should be building their lives back home with their families and not being killed in an Arabian desert protecting ruthless dictators, some of whom have attacked the U.S. mainland itself.
Tragically, the American public has been a victim of America’s Military Establishment, War Industry and Zionist Controlled Media, an Axis of Evil that dominates and directs American foreign military adventures, sacrificing American blood and treasure. This retaliatory strike should send two strong messages to the American public: 1There is a retaliatory capability and resolve to use it. 2. The fact that American youngsters in the bases have been excluded is a show of technological precision capability and also goodwill that should be built upon toward peaceful resolution and not lost to further adventurism.
It is time the American public rein in, on a very short leash, the American Axis of Evil that is destroying America’s relations with this region. 2020 can be the year to start that process.
Whatever is read from the events of the past few days, there is one very critical message that we cannot afford to miss in as far as colonial military adventurism is concerned: The end of impunity.
* Yemeni political activist, former president of TAWQ, a nonpartisan democratic movement that includes members of various Yemeni political groups