Breaking Impregnable Walls

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

By

Ananya S Guha

The report on Britain and the United States’ intervention in Iraq is now an official document. It can now be interpreted and conclusions can be drawn, inferences made. Prior to that things were on the basis of speculation.

It is clear now that the reasons cited by Tony Blair were wrong, on which the US led by George Bush, a professed Born Again Christian, crusaded against- that the Saddam Hussain regime were preparing with arsenals for a war. It was as the report now says, a hype and a pretext for invasion and meddling into the internal affairs of another country, however dictatorial its leader may be. That led to Libya and Syria. That also led to Al Qadea and now ISIS.

Super Powers must know that interventionist policies play with the lives of people, both in their country and the country they have occupied. Iraq’s woes are known, children, women and men died. The UK sent soldiers to die. The pull out of forces was hardly a solution, only a desperate act of redemption. It all started with the pyrrhic victory of US forces in Vietnam. That lesson was not enough. To support rebel causes in another country is poking noses into their business in the garb of a saviour. Russia did another attack in Syria to counter US domination.

The world is a battle ground now for captivity and fanatic domination. One group uses the name of religion and resorts to blind,  mindless killing. Another group led by American European domination is treating the world as it’s own property and backyard. And this is a trend since the 1960s mind you, ever since the Vietnam fiasco. It is in this context that the BREXIT must be seen as well as China’s proxy wars and silent agression. The poorer countries in Africa, South Asia depend heavily on aid and assurance of safety from the Super Powers. The US’s support to India for membership in the NSG is a case in point to force an ally in the face of Pakistani Islamic terrorism and China’s might as a fastly developing nation in areas of arms, education, standards of living and sports.

We have parallel worlds now. A world dominated by muscle power and the other by the power of the cyber which is misused and abused, notwithstanding our exhortation of a borderless, unified world. Once nuclear power fully enters the cyber world, wars may not be fought in real spaces but in virtual ones. Perhaps the process has started. It is sad that in the name of development people are dying like the swatting of flies. Poorer Nations have little choice but to anchor on to the more developed ones in terms of strategy, geo politics and wealth. Communism with all its plea for egalitarianism is almost a myth, a pale imitation of what it thundered to be. The working classes are sufferers. The Berlin Wall was dismanteld but walls of human corrosiveness have not.

It is to be augured what political will both the US and UK will show and how the EU steers between such a crisis in terms of the UK backing out of the EU, a common market and a common Union sans the British of course.

Ananya S Guha

Ananya S Guha was born and brought up in Shillong, North East India. He has seven collections of poetry and his poems have been published worldwide. They have also been featured in several anthologies. He is also a columnist, critic and editor. He now is a Regional Director at the Indira Gandhi National Open University and holds a doctoral degree on the novels of William Golding.