• Alexactus T KaurePalestinians fighting the Israeli army know that they are also (indirectly) fighting America. Likewise, the Ukrainians fighting the rebels know they are also fighting Russia. It is a dangerous game that the superpowers are now playing with such ferocity.
These, for a lack of better categorisation, I would call ‘proxy wars’. The term has been used in different contexts and it has both positive and negative meanings. I use it here negatively to mean someone doing something while the beneficiary is waiting in the wings to reap the benefits.
The reasons behind the two military superpowers’ proxy wars might differ slightly. In the case of Russia, two immediate reasons come to mind. The first, Russia and more specifically, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative, is on an expansionist move to rebuild the Russian empire that came tumbling down in 1989 after the fall of the USSR, which in turn led to the mushrooming of independent states in Eastern Europe. Thus the geopolitical map of the region was changing much faster than what many expected.
Putin has described the Soviet disintegration as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. The former GDR, for example, which was part of the Soviet sphere of influence, was re-united with the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany.
In fact, many of the former Soviet republics turned capitalist – including Russia itself where some of its elite became overnight billionaires tapping into the oil resources.
The second reason that invited the wrath of Putin, which doesn’t bode well with his dream of an empire, was Ukraine’s wish to join the European Union. Thus, Russia’s fear was if that happens, then it would be eventually encircled by not-so friendly Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) member states. Thus, the fear was more political than economic.
The American’s reasons for their proxy war are slightly different. Unlike Russia, America is driven by two inter-related concerns. The first reason is that America wants to maintain the status of policeman of the world. Its mission is to make the world safe for capitalism. The wars waged by its proxies, or by itself, are big business for the country’s military industrial complex. It is, for example, estimated that since 1948 the Israeli state has received a whopping US$234 billion in financial aid from the USA alone – in addition to military equipment and hardware.
Thus the cry, outcry and outrage from Palestinians and others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, are that countries should stop selling/supplying all these weapons of mass destruction to Israel – because we all know that they are going to be used against the very people Israel had colonised.
Unlike Russia, America’s failure to rein in Israel’s daily shelling and bombardments of Gaza are twofold. The first one has already been alluded to – war as business for the American military industry. The second reason is that we should not forget that America classifies Hamas as a terrorist organisation and as such a target in America’s so-called global ‘war on terror’. So, indirectly, America is using Israel to fight Hamas.
But this is a blinkered US policy of deciding who is a terrorist and who is not, especially in view of what is going on in Gaza specifically, and Palestine broadly, where nothing has been spared by the region’s bombardments which destroyed schools, hospitals, mosques and recently, two universities and, above all, human lives. What’s the difference between this and the Holocaust?
Israel is not just an occupational force or an apartheid state but a terrorist state. It is the leading terrorist state in the world although the West is trying to divert our attention away from this by constantly talking about Iran’s nuclear weapons. I hear people talking about Israel being a democratic state. What a lie! Democratic states are supposed to respect the democratic rights of others which Israel is not doing in the case of Palestinians.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a European problem playing itself out in the Middle East and that’s why many European governments and the US don’t go beyond the occasional condemnation of Israel which in turn explains the UN non-action. In Ukraine, Putin is playing a dirty game. Russia has sponsored a referendum in Crimea which they knew the Russian-speaking majority was going to win through the age-old and tested Russification policy which led to the annexation of the enclave by Russia.
As if Crimea was not enough, Putin is now eying eastern Ukraine where he is heavily arming the pro-Russian rebels in order to force secession of that region which would then be absorbed into the mighty Russia. Putin has alternatively mooted a federal state in Ukraine which is total interference in another country’s sovereignty.
Putin has now put the lives of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine in the firing line forcing many to become overnight refugees heading to Russia, of course. This is yet another humanitarian crisis created by war-mongering politicians using others.
