Washington Loses the Wars but the People Suffer

The United States exhibits an ostensible incapacity for occupying, maintaining order and defeating the resistance of the communities it invades. The invasions are unfair, immoral and illegal, and they are always enveloped by lies before and after being carried out. For example, the empire’s cultural industries have done everything in their power so that new generations forget, or learn a false version, of the humiliating defeat in Vietnam.

For those of us who saw it live on television, the images of the last gringo helicopters flying from Saigon to the airplane carriers with groups of soldiers clinging to the landing skids in a panic remain unforgettable. Recently, the media octopi have constructed a smoke screen around the embarrassing retreat from Iraq, where Washington had to revoke its requirement of indefinitely leaving a military contingent in the country because Baghdad’s government — who has a cordial relation with Tehran, by the way — declined to grant the U.S. military immunity in Iraqi courts.

Now the massacre of 16 civilians in the province of Kandahar, Afghanistan, by a supposedly deranged sergeant in the U.S. military reaffirms the moral, political, and consequently, military failure of the superpower. The circumstances of the incident are unclear and the lone-wolf version of the occupiers does not match that of the Afghan authorities and residents’ of the three villages where the victims lived — they insist that more U.S. soldiers were involved. Whatever may have happened, after this event and the continued affronts on the Afghans — the previous one being the burning of Quran at a Yankee base — Washington has no option other than to speed up the process toward their retreat. It can no longer trust its Afghan counterparts; even parliament has said that it is fed up and has agreed to demand that the guilty parties be tried in an Afghan court. A long time ago the U.S. had to renounce the idea of defeating the Taliban and admit that to retreat and save face, they would have to negotiate with them, which is what it has been doing.

Let’s not even discuss the “reconstruction” through which (of course!) various corporations have made millions, even though the Afghans have seen nothing more than an economy supported by soaring drug traffic, a devastated country with ruined cities lacking in even the most basic of public services, an almost absolute absence of infrastructure and tens of thousands of civilian deaths. Let’s not mention the promises of democratization and recognition of women’s rights. Fortunately, every day there are fewer who believe that the United States is a model of democracy and human rights, and even fewer who accept that those values can be enforced through fire power.

Lenin was right when he asserted that imperialism needs to continuously generate wars of plunder. Many things have changed since then, but some essential truths remain. Now they are highlighted by the compulsive eagerness for petroleum, fossil fuels and the greed for water sites, which have lead to a paroxysm of aggressiveness in American imperialism. If this were not the case, it would be inexplicable that after the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. is poised, along with Israel, to attack no one less than Iran. A tough nut to crack and impossible to decimate with conventional weaponry.

If their peaceful nuclear facilities are bombed or if threatened even further, Tehran will surely respond in full force — including closing the Strait of Hormuz, a jugular through which a vital river of petroleum flows to the global market. The big question is what the United States will do with a rival that it can only destroy with nuclear weapons; and if it does decide to use nuclear force, what will neighboring nuclear powers Russia, India, Pakistan and China do. When you look at the situation under this light then one understands perfectly the intense diplomatic negotiations between Moscow and Beijing in favor of a political resolution in Syria, a vital ally to Iran, and their double-veto blocking of foreign intervention where Washington would arm terrorists and implement a “regime change.”

But coming back to Afghanistan: The most Obama can aspire to now is to exit quickly without making it look like a stampede and to hope that the situation does not escalate before the November elections to the point of forcing him to prematurely retreat and hand off power to the Taliban without further negotiations.