Denazification?
From the battlegrounds of Europe to the Middle East, the world’s last empires cannot justify their never-ending wars of stupidity
This is not an article about Ukraine.
Over the past three weeks, tens of thousands — hell, maybe even millions — of such pieces have been published, both by the mainstream media and here on Medium. Most of them, written by a variety of authors with disparate backgrounds and diverse opinions, all come to the same conclusion — the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine is a naked power-grab of the highest order, a cheap political gambit by a deranged man who fancies himself the new Tsar.
All of these articles, then, are largely correct. But they resoundingly fail to grasp the bigger picture — what the Western world views with horror in Ukraine is the same tragedy it watches with indifference elsewhere — and this hypocrisy, above all, will come back to haunt us tenfold.
Casus belli is a fancy Latin term which in plain English means “justification for war”. This concept’s been with us since ancient times, when man finally realized that it was perhaps a bit improper to go around bashing in the skulls of his fellow homo sapiens sapiens without even the flimsiest of excuses, and this past February 24th, it was on full display at the Kremlin as Vladimir Putin bungled his way through a prerecorded speech to a (literally) captive Russian audience, proclaiming that he was on a divinely-ordained mission to “denazify” a country run by a Jew whose grandfather spent his youth killing Nazis.
Of course it was a dogshit excuse. When you reach the kind of military might Russia has, you don’t need to offer up real, tangible reasons to satiate your bloodlust and thirst for conquest — you just do it.
America should be eminently familiar with this — for the past twenty-one years we’ve been fighting a “War on Terror” with justifications so flimsy a toddler could pick them apart in seconds. Like Putin, however, the U.S. government didn’t come up with such weak grounds for eternal war out of sheer incompetence — it was a conscious decision birthed from decades upon decades of cynical geopolitics, one made from the realization that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you proclaim battle against some amorphous, ill-defined enemy, you’ll never run out of reasons to keep fighting.
It turns out the best way to create terrorists is to fight a “War on Terror”. As the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in his 2018 book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, the “U.S. military presence in the Middle East is actually the main recruiting tool for ISIS and other terrorist groups”, with young people flooding Iraq and Syria in droves to fight America, the imperial boogeyman. This shouldn’t surprise anyone with even half a functioning mind — when your only interaction with the “land of the free and home of the brave” is via drone strike, assault rifle, or artillery shell, you probably won’t be singing “God Bless the U.S.A” once you get back to the pile of rubble that used to be your house. And have no doubt in your mind — the civilians enduring America’s decades of military adventurism in the Middle East have no faith in the supposed righteousness of our War on/promoting Terror — to once again quote Sachs, “the simple fact is that the United States very often had its own narrow interests at heart: oil wealth in the Middle East (such as Iran, 1953); valuable farmlands and industry in Latin America (such as Guatemala, 1954), and U.S. military bases across the world”.
What reward was there for the civilians whose lands were “deterrorized”, you ask? Here’s a not-so-comprehensive list:
- Over 387,000 helpless civilians killed
- 38 million refugees and displaced persons
- Unexploded ordnance maiming and killing hundreds of children
- A surge in malnutrition, especially among minors
- A decimated healthcare infrastructure
- Disastrous political instability
If that does not move your heart — look at what these wars have done to your country:
- 7,050 U.S. soldiers — your fellow citizens — killed on the battlefield
- Eight TRILLION dollars wasted on wars which yielded few or no geopolitical gains
- 30,177 veterans of the post-9/11 wars dead by suicide
- 1.4–3 million potential jobs lost
- 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted
Can anyone explain to me the strategic goal attained by causing the deaths of over a quarter-million civilians? Or the loss of almost forty-thousand brave Americans both on the front and back home? Was any war, against terror, the dark, or some other phantasmagoric enemy worth the destruction of the U.S. economy? What did democracy gain, for example, when the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition murdered 117 Yemeni civilians and starved 14.4 million more? And when our drone strikes in the same poor country killed 13 children, did America solidify its position as the greatest country of the world?
The grave missteps Russia makes as it stumbles headlong towards its own undoing in the Ukraine should haunt Americans — these are, beat by beat, the same mistakes we’ve been making for twenty-one years — the same mistakes that forced us to withdraw from Afghanistan this summer with our heads held in shame. What we have on our side that the Russians don’t is our particular American resilience — but as history has shown us, the luck of empires is nothing if not fleeting, and the wheel of fortune need not continue to bless us if the hands of fate have their way.
America, like the two other great powers it frequently locks horns with (Russia and China), is an empire. Ignore the internal screeching about us being a goodwilled “republic” — what nation without imperial ambition spends $768 billion on its armed forces? Empire isn’t a pejorative, nor is it even necessarily a bad thing, but despite its outward appearance of strength it is always inherently fragile — as the struggle of our rival Russian imperials to conquer a nation not even half their size has shown us.
The lesson America must learn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is simple — NO MORE FOREVER WARS, and no more bullshit justifications based on ludicrously unsound philosophical arguments which in no due time devolve into nothingness. I am no naïve pacifist. If America and her people wish to maintain the influence which has afforded them so many benefits in the modern world, it is clear that she must be ready and willing to fight for it. Even with that taken into account, nothing can justify the War on Terror’s decades of nihilistic destruction — especially when we have practically nothing to show for it, save for a refugee crisis nobody talks about and thousands of good Americans butchered.
The solution is clear — America must completely revise its current military strategy and yield back to the wisdom of an earlier era (more specifically, the 1990s). The late Gen. Colin Powell, in the doctrine which so aptly bears his name, outlined his conditions for U.S. involvement in any foreign conflict:
When the United States uses military force, it must do so in decisive fashion and only in the service of vital national interests.
What a shame, then, that he so quickly abandoned these principles which granted America such military prowess in the 1990s once he signed onto the Bush administration. If he had pushed for the course of America’s military machine to be diverted back onto the path of limited intervention, perhaps we’d be looking at a much better world today — though this is, of course, mere speculation, the evidence supporting such a conclusion exists. If you don’t take my word for it, take the RAND Corporation’s (they did a whole study on the benefits of limited military intervention):
Not all [military and logistics operations] require large numbers of troops. Consequently, it
should come as no surprise that even small numbers of troops can
make a meaningful difference in conflict outcomes. According to
our models, interventions of 1,000 soldiers improve the probability of a negotiated settlement between the government and rebels
from 23 to approximately 46 percent.
It is high time for the United States to enter a new era of military operations. We have seen, time and time again, how the idea of “bigger is better” has not only destroyed the communities invaded by such forces, but has also inevitably undone the invaders themselves. If we are to minimize civilian casualties, properly secure American interests, and avoid repeating the mistakes of imperial ambition both we and our rivals have made, it is a necessity to start thinking about the benefits of operational downsizing.
