By Ofwono Opondo
KAMPALA – Since Donald J Trump’s exit as US president – the Western World is tilting back to cold war alliances, though not quite as a square peg in a round hole because after more than a century – the rogues’ gallery of imperialism is steadily declining partly due to the spread of enlightenment and rise of other countries.
Imperialism can no longer loot resources from other nations and subjugate peoples as it did in the last century. But as the saying goes, even a horse in its dying hours could still strike a devastating kick, and so we have to keep our collective guard on the ready.
Today, the United States and its allies mostly – Western European former colonialists exploiting towers of lies like WMD, terrorism and human rights continue to pour arms, war planes, missiles, military and ideological trainings, finances, economic, diplomatic, and global media propaganda using multiple channels around the world portraying themselves as the benign bearers of perfect goodness.
Considering the Covid-19 backdrop and the fact that war and military is a huge commercial complex, the funnelling of expansive arms caches is certainly lucrative.
France and Australia that fell out of favour with each other in 2021 when Australian dumped a $90b submarines purchase in favour of buying from US and UK under Aukus, this week met for the first time to fine tune another mega deal to supply Ukraine in the on-going western proxy war with Russia.
The Russia-Ukrainian war now making one year is a perfect example as they seek to expand hegemony through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – NATO to Russia’s borderline.
As a reminder, it was NATO that bombed Yugoslavia out of existence in 1995 during Bill Clinton’s era, and Libya in 2011 under Operation Unified Protector air with space and coastal blockade, air and ground attacks toppling Muammar Gaddafi.
And if Gaddafi was indeed as horrible as the west portrayed him, it took five geniuses with evil intent-Barak Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Stephen Harper, and Silvio Berlusconi to turn the once rich, prosperous and stable Libya into a slave market divided among at least seven militant jihadist groups.
Western policy and systematic destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and hubris against Iran is responsible for triggering al-Qaida and Islamic State terror groups that have today cascaded throughout the world. Having instigated, and waged twenty years of wars in the Arab world starting with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria whose outcomes have been a stalemate and defeat forcing the rogues’ gallery to beat hasty, humiliating retreats, and abandoning their arms behind, US and allies now believe it’s time to regain the world. Russia is their starting point with eyes probably on China in Taiwan.
These wars of attrition using stooges were quickly followed by the CIA instigated ‘Arab Spring’ in Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan where imperialism can’t today show any improvement in democracy while its best allies in the Arab world remain the most draconian that don’t even permit women to drive cars or walk the public streets unaccompanied by close male relatives. Such is the hypocrisy, and not democracy the western world proclaims.
In the Russia-Ukraine melee, the western world have now perfectly escaped blame without any sense of shame, responsibility or obligation for the multiple tragedies they caused in those countries especially Afghanistan where children and women die needlessly from would be preventable hunger and diseases because the US has imposed sanctions on funding, trade and diplomatic relations.
Today, no one even bothers to talk in detail about the unfair, aggressive and choking 64 year embargo against the small and peaceful island of Cuban where Commandante Fidel Castro’s Marxist revolution overthrew US sponsored military dictator Fulgencio Batista. Among other things Batista had surrendered the then lucrative Cuban sugarcane and sugar industry to Americans, the reason he was supported.
In Iraq, over one million people most of them civilians killed by western allied troops have gone unnoticed, uninvestigated, no one punished, and now forgotten. Hundreds of billions of barrels of Iraq’s oil worth billions of US dollars that was siphoned and exported for sell unmetered during twenty years of allied military occupation also forgotten. This loot was again repeated in Libya.
It’s much the same way US and allies escaped responsibilities for pouring oceans of chemical weapons that drowned millions in North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos 1953-1974. And because the rogues’ gallery created Israel and runs the world, the tragedies that Palestine and Palestinians have suffered including the current unrestrained killings in besieged Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem no longer invoke global conscience. Today, there’re close to six million Palestinian refugees scattered across the world, majority in squalid UN run camps in Jordan, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. The United Nations and its Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez are no more than lapdogs, and not genuine and effective brokers of equality to the most down trodden. We must continue to expose the rogues’ gallery, and build alternative and effective centres of gravity.
The writer is the Director –Uganda Media Centre
