https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/who-murdered-international-order?utm_source=twitter&s=w

Who murdered International Order?

Or Mystery of the Missing Body

International Order allegedly died at Bucha. It had been tottering over since the day Putin plunged a knife into Ukraine, but to the cognoscenti that knife was one borrowed from the Americans. The blood from their using the knife in Muslim lands had barely dried, when they lent it to Putin. Even as they were drawing blood with that very same knife in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, they set up an ambush using Ukraine as bait. Enticed, Russia took over the knife from the West and set upon Ukraine. So, for sure, we have two murderers: Russia and America. 

But, as commentators remind, both have supporters with bloody hands. While the Americans cobbled up coalitions made of up the West when they went about visibly digging the grave of International Order, the Russians have China holding their back. To the extent the West participated in twisting the knife, it is party to murder. Rumour has it that Putin got a tacit nod from China for sticking the knife into Ukraine when he went over for the winter Olympics. Though China has spooked its neighbours, it is at best accomplice to the crime, not having physically stuck a knife into International Order. Spectators are aplenty, those who might have played a part in staying the slaying. Instead, they either sat on the fence or swayed to one side. In not collectively stopping the murder, together they prospectively make the fourth murderer. 

International Order was killed since it prevented deeds the murderers wished to go about with, without feeling embarrassed about it. International Order valued sovereignty and non-interference, which the West could not see bandied by the countries of the Middle East. It backed status quo in the region based on pro-American authoritarian regimes for the sake of its local friend, Israel. This put out some locals, who ganged up and flew some planes into American buildings, killing many. 

Claiming this to be the first nail into the coffin of International Order, the Americans took the knife to Afghanistan to take out the Arab group that challenged the chaperon of International Order was hiding out. Tasting blood, they then went about reshaping Middle East in their own image, beginning with taking their feud with Saddam to the logical conclusion. They claimed Saddam first challenged International Order by an armed attack on his neighbour, Kuwait, though his armed attack on another neighbour, Iran, earlier had elicited not such complaint. Removing Gaddafi followed and then they overstretched by going after Bashar. The Iranian bomb-in-the-basement kept their knife at bay both from Bashar and Iran itself. 

The Russians – ruing loss in stature as a global power - saw their opportunity to get back at the Americans not only for Americans ambushing them in Afghanistan, but also for what followed: hara-kiri of the Soviet Union. Espying the Russians seeing an opportunity to do them down, the Americans, on their part, tied Russians down with colour revolutions. The Russians put up a fight in Georgia, pulling a Kosovo on the Americans. 

The Americans hit back, setting up Ukraine for an ambush of the Russians. With their Ukrainian client unsaddled by the Americans at the Maidan, the Russians went into Syria to steady Bashar - who the Americans wanted to unseat. Backed by China – that wanted to join the United States as superpower - the Russians punched above their weight. Putin wanted to replay the Soviet past he was loath to see disappear when as its intelligence official he saw it wither and die. 

The Russians were gratified to see the Americans wanting to leave Afghanistan. Taliban, receiving a lifeline through Pakistan, with Iran, Russia and China in the background, outlasted the Americans. The ignominy required Americans to get back at their antagonists. Against Russia, Ukraine provided an enticing killing ground. 

Having spotted an ambush site there in Russian occupation partially of Donbas and incorporation of Crimea into Russia when Yanukovich was displaced, they set about ensnaring Putin. Keeping up a din that he was about to attack, they handed him the knife they’d been wielding elsewhere. Enticed into using it, he stuck it into Ukraine, nailing instead International Order’s other vestment – preserving political independence and territorial integrity from armed attack.  

Pumping in easy-to-use, hand-held armaments for the Ukrainian army and a host of white-supremacist volunteers, the West stopped Putin from twisting the knife. Though Ukraine twists and turns in agony, it valiantly tries to snatch the knife and turn it on Russia. This keeps the two from talking peace, as each tries to bleed the other. The Americans, keeping the Ukrainians on life support and promising rehab, are waiting for Russia to implode. Unbeknownst is that their main adversary, China, is instead in their sights. A weakened Russia helps isolate China. Two birds with one stone, Ukrainians paying a price. 

And Bucha happened. Genocide made its appearance. It’s a vulture that alights when convenient, like in Darfur, but not in Iraq between the wars when 600000 children died from US sanctions. Knife wounds in Ukraine include humanitarian protection and human rights. Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, West Bank, Syria and Afghanistan did not elicit the expulsion of the perpetrator from the Human Rights Council. Libya was ousted the last time, but not the West for what they proceeded to do in Libya thereafter and for eddies across the Sahel. Neither did wars of aggression trigger off the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court stepped up even as the war started, and has begun investigations – happily breaking the jinx that its domain is only Africa. Certain is its proactivism cannot and will not include Israel and the West, least of all the US. That its domain does not yet include the crime of aggression is so convenient. 

Allegedly, International Order lies dead. There is the United Nations Charter in which is written up International Order. The Charter-era world order was instead first made up by the Cold War. The two sides did pretty much as they pleased, with the areas not part of the two sides serving as vent for to keep their warring cold. Once one of the two sides tired and died, the other touted International Order, even as it set about putting nails into its coffin. Resurrecting, Russia joined in nailing International Order. Rising China used International Order, without putting a check on either the West or Russia. Now it’s seeing Russia put the final nail into International Order, so that it can manufacture an International Order all its own when Russia has taken down America. The UN is missing-in-action, merely another forum in which to beat the other side. International Order turned out merely mistress of balance of power. No body found, there was no murder; only murderers left. 

Book Review

A Bleak Century Ahead?

Ali Ahmed 

GLOBAL JIHAD AND AMERICA: THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR BEYOND IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN 
By Taj Hashmi 
Sage Publications, Delhi, 2014, pp. 322, Rs. 995.00
http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-4380/2015/february/2/a-bleak-century-ahead.html
VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 2 February 2015

Taj Hashmi evidently utilized his four year stint at the US Department of Defence, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, very well. He mentions conversations with student practitioners with service in theatres of the myriad and ongoing American wars. This lends a degree of authenticity to the book; in particular, its vehement critique of the manner the US has conducted its wars. While not being an apologist for the ‘enemy’, the Jihadists of various hues, the author’s thesis is that these wars have fuelled their own counter in the form of Jihad. This explains his pessimistic title about a world already in a hundred-year war.

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Hashmi brings to bear his considerable knowledge of Islam, languages including Arabic, and South Asia to forcefully argue that there are no ‘good guys’ in this war. Just as there is no ‘good Taliban’, there are no ‘good Marines’ either. He does justice to the inspiration of the book, the victims of ‘unjust wars and terrorism’, writing with passion against both: unjust wars waged by the US and its many coalitions of the willing and terrorism perpetrated by Muslim extremists. While he outlines the problem many have suspected all along, he runs out of space to dwell on remedies, preventive measures that could potentially transform the bleak century ahead.
There are two villains in his book: the US and the Jihadists. He presents the US as a political system that feeds on violence. After being born in violence and expanding to its current borders by violence, it set the standards of modern wars with its civil war. Its political economy is one impelled by the military-industrial complex. Its capitalist oil guzzling economy ties it in an imperial embrace to the Middle East. The system of lobbies that runs Capitol Hill, and the salience of the Jewish lobby in American politics, ensures that US actions belie its professions of benign intent. American ‘exceptionalism’, to Hashmi, is a myth amounting to a propaganda tool. Even if Obama seeks to disengage, the ISIS led spike in the conflict in the Levant indicates that the flotsam and jetsam of the Bush years will continue to create geopolitical eddies into the future.
This creates the context that sustains and empowers the Jihadists. Whereas the ideological currents in Islam would have inevitably played out with the onset of modernity in postcolonial Arab and Muslim lands, their violent turn owes largely to geostrategic reasons. This was at two levels: one at the global level in which the Americans laid out the ‘bear trap’ in Afghanistan, and the second is in the Arab-Iranian—in its current avatar, Sunni-Shia—rivalry. The latter too is partially the outcome of US tutelage in that to contain a post-revolution Iran, the Shiekhdoms proved handy. This brings the story, simply told, up until the Iraq Wars. It has since gotten more complex with people power on display in the Arab Spring, that the US has taken care to undercut in Egypt, upturn in Libya and pre-empt in the Gulf. Whereas this is the visible strategic tip, the center of gravity of the iceberg is subsurface where intra-Islamic ideological wars unfold. Here, Hashmi provides some historical background that can help understand, what to him appears as, a date between the US’s Titanic and the Islamist iceberg.
Hashmi discerns two eyes to the unfolding and oncoming storm: one is South Asia and the other in the Middle East and North West Africa. In South Asia the ‘storm’ is possibly about to break with the Peshawar outrage against school children being the forerunner of more to come with the Americans departing the region worse off than the way they found it, even after spending about a trillion dollars. Obama was unable to follow through with the peace prong of his double pincer, the other being the ‘surge’. Though Holbrooke was a known hatchet man from his Balkan’s years, but past his prime, he died on the job. This shows up American appetite for war in contrast to its stamina for peace. Though Hashmi dwells on the rest of South Asia too, the Af-Pak problem is less likely to end up a subcontinent-wide problem than being merged with the widening arc of instability from the other eye of the storm, in the Middle East. The ISIS has emerged, yet again on account of external support including the US and its Arab minders, to be the most potent group. As hitherto, a divide and rule policy is in place to contain it. It is unlikely anything more can be done, since rolling back will require boots on the ground that the US, several times bitten by now, will ensure are not its own but those of its proxies.
This brings out the sense in the author’s contention that the present day threat is not from Islamism and terrorism as the West projects it, but from proxy wars, nurtured by the West. With its periphery in turmoil, and, if Hashmi is to be believed, likely to remain so for a hundred years, the only gainer is easy to spot: Israel. The proxy wars also stem from the incipient second iteration of the Cold War with the West and Russia facing off over Ukraine. The outcome of this is in further entrenching proxy wars such as the one in Syria.
Since the US is part of the problem, it is clearly not the solution. In any case, its solution is only military, one that has failed it and the rest continually. This is best exemplified by an anecdote Hashmi recounts. The military victor in Kosovo, General Wesley Clark, inquiring after US strategy from a uniformed colleague in the operational hiatus post displacement of Taliban from Kabul learnt that since military power was all the US had, to it every problem appeared to be a nail! Clearly, the war machine the US has created will not be cheated out of a war by China allowing itself to be co-opted into the global order. It needs an opponent, and lucky for its self-perpetuation, has created a formidable one in the Jihadists.
If their tryst is to be less bloody than the last hundred years or the previous Hundred Years War, then liberals in both America and in Muslim lands need first to win the intellectual battle within the two sides respectively.