Jo Swift blogs:
If you look more closely at what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan and plans to do in the future, it’s clear that the rhetoric about upholding democracy and making the world safer is – as in Iraq – a smokescreen to justify pursuing imperial ambitions.
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This is silly. Didn’t the Taliban offer a sanctuary to the people that blew up the WTC? It thought *that* was the justification for going to war.
While I normally avoid saying “shoot the bastards” I think Joe does make a good point. I mean, the Taliban effectively made a violent attack against the USA by proxy. That is reason enough to invade, isn’t it?
And after investing the massive amount of manpower and resources to eliminate the Taliban government and support the new one, positioning long-term resources in this new foothold only makes sense – it’s not like the USA isn’t going to be spending a lot of time in the middle east. Even discounting imperial ambitions, the American military finds itself there very often.
Not that I disagree with the thesis – but even without imperialism, wouldn’t the same thing be done either way?
Then imperialistic motive is overall pacification of the region. Oil is the issue, in a general sense, and if you look at our stationing arrangements, it is hard to get around that.
Look at the map from Iran’s perspective – we have troops on two sides of them. And they have a bunch of Wahhabis who loathe them to thank for that!
But the people with the biggest imperial ambitions in the area are the Russians, and always have been.
I don’t blame Iran for being paranoid about the various Sunni nations around them. Many Westerners are condemned for thinking that all Moslems are bad and that Islam itself is a threat that needs to be dealt with. But many Sunnis and Shias have similar attitudes about each other if what I read is true. Sunnis have oppressed Shias for over a thousand years.
And if you want to talk about imperial motives, I’m guessing that you don’t have to leave the borders of Iran to find them. I believe that Persia had an empire before the word existed (at least in English). Think they’d like to re-establish it, starting with the Shia-majority portion of Iraq? Sure, they talk about the threat from the West and Israel. But they’d have to go over or through Iraq and Jordan to get there. Gearing up to meet an imagined threat from the West makes a great smokescreen for gearing up to recreate an empire.