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Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia

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Bush's war on Iraq has degenerated into a bloody occupation, signified by war crimes, slaughter of civilians and US soldiers engaged in Sadean rituals with Iraqi prisoners. The justifications for the war have been proven to be bald-faced lies. Thousands have perished and Iraq as a nation is worse off than it was under Saddam. This war was supported by both political parties and the corporate press. But not Cockburn and St. Clair, and the team of writers at CounterPunch, which called it right as the war was being planned, sold and unleashed. A similarly bleak saga has played out in Afghanistan, where a cruise missile war was launched on an impoverished nation under the grip of a regime the CIA had put in power in the first place. Mullah Omar and Osama are still at large, heroin production has soared and the nation is controlled by warlords and misogyinistic religious zealots. Again, the press and the Democrats went along for the ride and haven't looked back at the carnage left in the wake of the war. Cockburn and St. Clair predicted and show why the Afghan war was doomed to backfire on US interests and the civilians of that desperate nation. Imperial Crusades doesn't spare Clinton and his gang, either, which orchestrated an illegal war on Yugoslavia, under the rubric of "humantarian intervention", which ended up killing thousands of civilians, propping up Kosovar terrorists, unleashing religious zealots and looney sectarians. Both Kosovo and Yugoslavia remain in dire straits and the humanitarian bombers have moved on to other causes. This book is written as a journal of the past 12 years of unremitting war by the imperial forces of the US and their allies in the press. It was CounterPunch which first exposed the fabrications of the New York Times's Judith Miller. This book holds no punches and plays no favorites.

This is a fantastic book that exposes the truth behind the last decade's worth of US war. The Counterpunch crew has done it again, in bringing the truth to light regarding the US involvement in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

They debunk the lies the mainstream press has used in justifying and defending the US invasions. They reveal the truth behind the conflict in Iraq, and show that the wheels were set into motion long before Dubya took the oath of office in 2000.

Pick it up for yourself and take a look. It's a must read for those wanting to know the truth behind the current US foreign agenda.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair are journalists yet this book is quite surprising in that it tends to get to the bottom line and get fairly close to the real goal of the rich countries. That is to eliminate any regional alternative economic system to that of sweat shop globalisation. The authors emphasize that Yugoslavia had been targeted for elimination and that Serbia was going to be bombed regardless of the facts. Why they also ask has Turkey, particularly given its diabolical treatment of Kurds in its South East, never been attacked or bombed under the guise of "humanitarian mission?" Why has Spain with its regional conflicts and regional hatreds never been broken up and bombed back to the 14th Century as happened to Serbia? Why was Iraq mercilessly bombed and sanctioned for over a decade? Why are these countries' economic infrastructures always bombed and destroyed in deliberate fashion?
The answer must lay in the economic system. There is to be no alternative economic model to that of sweat shop re-export industrialisation or export-oriented monopoly agribusiness. Yugoslavia led by Serbia had for decades been based on Market Socialism, and the great system of worker self management. Worker Self Management was the highest form of democratic participation known to mankind. Managerial staff in enterprises were frequently rotated and workers could become the main shareholders in the enterprise where they worked. For any major decisons a majority vote of the enterprise's workforce had to be attained. Income diffrentials existed but they were not substantial. The country was technically educated. The country was industrialised, well fed, well looked after and had a number of sporting powers e.g Red Star Belgrade. The sporting system also produced a number of Basketballers good enough to be high level players in the NBA such as Vlaad Divac, a feat not even dreamed about by most small or middle income countries around the world.
Iraq was an experiment in Arab Socialism, a State run economy mixed in with a private sector which nonetheless had to compliment national development goals. Iraq used Soviet Planning methods to industrialise and militarise its economy. It is no coincidence that UNSCOM, that terror body of the United Nations, and the "oil for food" sanctions regime installed by the US deliberately targeted Iraq's industrial base and in fact accelerated its dismantling, in much the same way as did the NATO 78 day bombardment of Serbia. UNSCOM alone destroyed at least 1,000 industtrial factories in Iraq, under the pretext that many of these plants e.g animal vaccine factories could be used to manufacture chemical agents. It is no coincidence that civilian and industrial infrastructure was targeted by US Fascists in both countries. This was a well tried tactic used by The Nazis in every invasion undertaken by Hitler in WWII. It was also used by Britain during its incursions into India and other colonies during creation of the Sterling Zone Era.
Iraq was one of the only oil exporting countries in the world to achieve any degree of industrialisation and military capability, a feat that countries such as Saudi Arabia can only dream of. The Saudis purchase US and British military hardware and cannot even use the weaponry without British or American "trainers."
In sum: Destroying two industrial economies with State run economies was the long standing goal of Capitalist policy toward both Iraq and Yugoslavia. Neither the Market Socialism/Worker Self Management system of Yugoslavia nor the Arab experiment in Socialist Planning to industrialise an oil exporting country in Iraq could be tolerated by the incoming plan of sweat shop re-exports and export orientated monopoly agribusiness Capitalism. That is really the focal point of any Military aggression, particularly when there is no alternative economic model allowed. One wonders what the economic plan is for the protest movement in larger countries such as Egypt, which has very pressing economic problems and as yet no alternative economic model from that under the Mubarak regime.

"If ever a country deserved rape, it's Afghanistan." These words were written by Alex Cockburn, the same person who co-wrote this book. The rest of the article in which this sentence is situated goes on to cheer the invasion of Afghanistan by a foreign power, a non-Muslim country.

What gives, you say? "I thought Cockburn was deploring the 'rape' of Afghanistan!"

Hold your horses, there, Johnson--the article quoted above was written back in January of 1980, when the Soviets were invading Afghanistan. Cockburn being a diehard leftist and apologist for Stalin, the Soviet-engineered war against the "graveyard of empires" was morally justifiable in his eyes, even though it was far more brutal than the current U.S. war there and resulted in far more Afghan civilian casualties/deaths.

Suddenly, when the U.S. invades, as a response to a terrorist attack launched from that country, it's an "imperial crusade."

The intellectual dishonesty of this man makes me want to VOMIT.

I became an apostate of the Left because of people like him.

This is a book based on opinion, fallacy and hyperbole. It deals with three conflicts, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia. The claim with Iraq is that America encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait and then conspired to starve Iraq and assassinate Saddam, in the end America simply took over Iraq. The truth is that Saddam chose to invade his neighboors. First he choose to invade Iran, then he choose to Gas the Kurds and finally because of jealousy he invaded Kuwait. The sanctions were approved by the U.N and they didn't work anyway. Saddam used the Oil for food program to get billions for new weapons.

Yugoslavia may be one of the only conflicts that this book is slightly accurate in portraying. IN Yugoslavia the government reacted against terrorism and in doing so the international community claimed `ethnic cleansing'. In a brutal war America bombarded civilians in Serbia and then invaded Kosovo, helping to finish the cleansing of Serbs from the province and supporting terrorists. Here the book is on the mark.

In the last analysis the Afghanistan conflict this book is so far off the mark as to amaze anyone. The Taliban destroyed thousand year old Buddhist statues, they stoned women to death for daring to leave the house alone, they made music and cinema illegal. IF ever their was a regime that never deserved to exist it was the Taliban. Most of the Taliban were not even indigenous Afghans, but foreigners who invaded Afghanistan in the 80s to fight the `Jihad' against the Soviets. In the end the war against the Taliban was as just as the war against Nazi Germany. This book may well be so extremist as to argue that fighting Nazism was also wrong and therefore it may not even be worth flipping through.

Seth J. Frantzman