US economy will suffer due to its meddling in the middle-east

Monaem Sarker

As the violence in Syria worsens, Washington has been ramping up threats to intervene without UN approval in the absence of international consensus. As reports of a new massacre emerge from Syria, State Secretary Hillary Clinton has announced a new transition plan that would remove Assad from power completely, possibly signaling the US is ready to make good on its threats to go it alone.

Washington has made its desire for larger intervention in Syria clear, with Senator John McCain publicly calling to arm the rebels last week. The US has a history of ignoring the UN Security Council if international consensus does not coincide with American interests.

The real question about Syria is: Why is the United States involved at all? Before we discuss that, we need to know the goals of American foreign policy in the region.

In fact, Syria poses no direct threat to the United States. The U.S. will gain no direct benefit in assisting the Syrian rebels or in overthrowing Assad. On the other hand, U.S.  “allies” in Saudi Arabia and Israel clearly want Assad gone. Both of those countries have the ability to get rid of Assad on their own. They should feel free to do so, but without the assistance or complicity of the United States. Each time the U.S. intervenes needlessly in the internal affairs of another country, it only prolongs the conflict.

Furthermore, it is disturbing that the United States and other nations are using the United Nations to further their foreign policy agenda. The United Nations was set up to moderate peaceful resolution of issues between nations and it should not be involved in internal affairs of sovereign states. For the U.S. and others to use the U.N. as a tool to get rid of Assad delegitimizes the U.N. and puts its overall mission at risk.

Certainly democracy and human rights should be promoted through diplomatic means whenever possible. But the process should not be manipulated to benefit U.S. and their  allies. U.S. policy towards Syria needs to be reconsidered.

There is no doubt that Assad is a ruthless despot. However, Syria’s president is one of the last secular Arab leaders in the most ethnically diverse nation in the Middle East. At the moment, he enjoys popular support because many Syrians view him as the last bastion between them and a fundamentalist Islamic government, like the one just installed in Libya.

The U.S. has targeted Syria, both because of its strategic alliance with Iran and because of Pentagon’s underlying strategy of isolating and encircling Iran as a prelude to toppling its current government. The US has systematically occupied and/or militarised nearly all the countries that border Iran. First you have US-occupied Afghanistan and Pakistan (the target of a second undeclared US war) on Iran’s eastern border. Then you have Iraq, which is still partially occupied, Kuwait (where the US deployed 15,000 troops in December), and Turkey, with its US airbases, on Iran’s western border. Finally you have Saudi Arabia (also host to major US military bases) and Qatar to the south. US military intervention in Syria will spill over and involve the Hezbollah in Lebanon, effectively neutralizing Iran’s last remaining allies.

The U.S. persists in its occupation of Iraq, in addition to major military engagements in Somalia and Sudan. Presumably the military intervention in Libya is complete, now that the new US-friendly regime has agreed to privatise Libyan oil for the benefit of US oil companies.

Countries such as Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Iran and Sudan became US military targets because they refused to play ball by allowing Anglo-American oil company unlimited access to their oil resources. In contrast, oil-poor countries like Syria and Lebanon are current targets because of strategic alliances with oil-rich Iran.

US involvement in armed conflict is nothing new. US was involved in the Vietnam War and spend billions of dollars funding that war over two decades. Their aim was to control communism. On the other hand, the former Soviet Union was also spending billions of rubles trying to spread communism in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Both the US and the Soviet Union were interested in spreading their own agenda while disregarding the condition of the people in the countries that they were invading.

We see the same situation today. The US is involved in Iraq. Now they are trying to bring down the Assad regime in Syria. Toppling the government in Iran is also in their cards. This US involvement in the region is not in the interest of the people in the region. The US wants to use the people as pawn in their motive to dominate the region.

But the US should learn from the Vietnam war and Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Involvement in Afghanistan ultimately contributed to the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Soviet mothers could no longer take the return of their sons  in body bags from Afghanistan. The domestic resentment that the Afghanistan war created in the Soviet Union has been well documented in the literature. The Soviet Union never recovered from the collateral political damage that the Afghan war created.

We see the US economy suffering from the wars.  Growth is low and unemployment is high. The debt crisis in Europe is also connected to what is happening in middle east and the resulting uncertainty in the oil market. If the US continues with this wrong-headed policy of extending the  war to Iran and/or Syria, then this will affect the economic condition in the US.

As US spreads out its armed forces around the world, it will also impose economic burden on the US economy. We have seen how the US economy is suffering from huge budget deficits. US is forced to borrow from other countries including China. So continued US armed forces presence around the world will deepen US budget crisis and prolong the economic hardship of the people in the US.

The CIA and the Pentagon has led the US to war footing at different parts of the world. The political leadership in the US has been misled by the armed forces leaders over the years. That trend has continued. If the US doesn’t change its course, its economic and political condition will remain in a precarious condition.

When Obama was elected President in 2008, the entire world anticipated a fundamental change in the political philosophy of the US government. We thought that he will be able to free the US government from the clutches of the Pentagon and CIA. However, that has not happened. Obama himself has become a tool in the hands of the Pentagon. Not only that, he has tagged along the NATO with him. A number of other NATO countries, especially the United Kingdom, has followed the US lead in extending their military presence around the world.

Tony Blair had to leave office in a humiliating fashion due to the popular uproar created by British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Obama doesn’t change course now, he will face the same fate as Blair.

25 July 2012