We’re in the thick of it, there’s nothing else to say. All the international credibility gained out of Canada’s decision not to intervene in the Second Gulf War under Jean Chrétien’s leadership was lost in the blink of an eye, when Harper announced Friday that Canada would be sending its troops into combat (airstrikes specifically, no ground troops at this time). The thing is, Canada’s “official” intervention is only two days old, but it is already gearing up to be a disaster of gigantic proportions, and ultimately an utter failure that will only delay, but not prevent, the coming of another ISIS.

Canada might have given its green light for a full scale intervention only two days ago, but the coalition of the willing — which ironically includes Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the patrons of the radical interpretation of Islam promoted by ISIS — has been on the ground for around a month now. What are the conclusions that can be drawn? After one month, what is the future for this war? What new day is dawning on the horizon?

Well, to say the least, it’s a very dark one. The black clouds that arose from the ruins of the Kurdish bastion of resilience, Kobane, gave us, spectators, a little glimpse into the future of this mission.

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The women of Kobane have armed themselves to fight against ISIS.

As thousands of Kurdish fighters held back the reoccurring, never-ending assaults of ISIS against the town, Turkish tanks stood still — not much of a surprise —and Western jets flew on by. The battle of Kobane is a central one for the survival of the Kurdish struggle within northern Syria. Unfortunately the lightly armed Kurds are fighting against the much stronger ISIS forces, ironically, using American artillery and weapons to besiege the town.

The hypocrisy of the Western forces and of their Turkish allies is obvious. They most certainly see this so-called humanitarian intervention, first and foremost, as a means towards an end: the eradication of the PKK and any viable Kurdish autonomous authority in the region.

In one of my articles concerning the conflict I wrote extensively about the “revival” of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination and their project of asymmetric federalism. There, I referred to their struggle and to this project as an alternative form of governance for the peoples of the region and a strong vaccination against the rise of organizations such as ISIS. Three weeks down the path of war, and it seems like Kobane will fall within a matter of days, or even hours, even though this humanitarian intervention was supposed to prevent such a tragedy from happening.

One month into this humanitarian intervention, and the American State Department has already announced that it was anything but humanitarian anymore. The White House announced today that civilian protection policy does not apply to the airstrikes in Syria. Apparently, protecting civilians in areas under rebel control from the wrath and vengeance of Syrian government forces is not part of the plan either. Within the past month much of the ground that was lost during the past three years by Assad has been regained. The bloodthirsty and mad dictator, whom the interventional community vigorously condemned for the usage of chemical weapons against his own people, is on cloud nine.

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Can you believe it? The Americans are actually winning Assad’s war for him. Instead of mobilizing and building strong alliances with the secular and progressive sections of the Free Syrian Army, we actually bombed them last week. So much for wining “hearts and minds!” We’re actually losing them, as the ISIS ranks are filled with thousands, if not tens of thousands of young disenchanted Westerners, who turned to radicalism after years of discrimination and racism, and after years of seeing on the TV their Muslim sisters and brothers suffer excruciating pain in Iraq, Palestine or at the hands of any other Western backed dictatorial regimes.

Radicalism’s fuel is war, and unfortunately, through this war, we have swelled the reserves of hatred, of anger, of despair and of pain, everything ISIS was born out of, to last for a generation or two. If you believed the magical fairytale that whatever is happening was a humanitarian intervention, that we, the West, the ardent defenders of human rights, were on a courageous crusade against evil, that just like communism and fascism, this totalitarian evil of radical Islamism had to be quelled, you were wrong. Don’t be fooled. We are reviving ISIS. We created the conditions for it. We are reenacting them as we speak and what will come out of this third intervention in the Middle East might be more horrendous than anything our imaginations can grasp.

In my latest article about Stephen Harper’s grand folly of wanting another military intervention in Iraq, I painted a very bleak picture, criticizing the third Western intervention in Iraq from a purely Canadian perspective.

In this article I would like take another approach, through the Orientalist lenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military and political elite.

One of the biggest fallacies of this whole affair, the need for Western intervention, walks hand in hand with a relatively unnoticed undertone: the concept of Western domination. It appears to be, that, in this day and age, the word “Western” is the exclusive adjective for interventions, which suggests that the notion of a non-Western intervention is just a ludicrous idea. Obviously, international interventions can only be Western.

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Thus, because the West is only part of the world that apparently has the right to intervene, it considers itself as the center of world, and the rightful guardians of world peace. This is a fundamental factor of the humanitarian arguments calling for intervention, but these humanitarian arguments are merely made up to dissimulate the underlying neo-imperialist ideology. Intervention is not only possible if done by the West, but it is only acceptable if done by the West — the events in Ukraine are a good illustration of this.

The current wave of Western interventionism we have been seeing in Iraq and Syria is rooted in Orientalism. Orientalism is the product of a Eurocentric vision of the world, which dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The notion of Orientalism, developed notably in Edward Said’s work by the same name, is that the “West knows best.” All Middle Eastern societies — and all non-Western societies in general for that matter — are undeveloped, static and archaic, and this is why they produce radical groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and terrorists. These societies have to be brought into the light of modernity and globalized capitalism through Western intervention — directly, or indirectly, and whether they like it or not.

As I explained in my previous article, the third “coalition of the willing is unprepared and offers only short-term superficial solutions; oxymoronic solutions, such as: dropping bombs to rebuild a strong Iraq. A perpetual déjà vu!

Is it that the veil of Orientalism has blinded the Western elites to such an extent that they’re now incapable of taking any other approach?

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No! To see Orientalism as some sort of a naive, archaic ideology is wrong. It is an idea that has evolved and has been adapted to modern times. It is omnipresent in our language. The “international community,” NATO, and “humanitarian intervention” are just a few examples of its manifestations. Orientalism, which now fuels this third “humanitarian intervention” in Iraq, is an ideology of domination, which is used to justify neo-imperialist attitudes.

Unfortunately this Orientalist approach completely omits the only viable solution, which is self-determination and autonomy for the diverse array of communities that inhabit the region. The Kurds in an initiative spearheaded by the the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) have proven through their military victories against ISIS that self-determination is the best firewall against radicalism.

For instance, ISIS is the direct consequence of Western Orientalism, and the belief that centralized powerful dictatorships are necessary to impose law and order, in a very Hobbesian manner, on the uncultured masses of the Levant. ISIS is the direct consequence of an ideology, which argues that it is possible to “build” a nation from scratch, in the 21st century. This is expected to be done in the same manner as it was done after the First World War, by drawing meaningless borders and hoping to bring about stability. Needless to say, that experiment was a dreadful failure.

In opposition to this foreign belief that the peoples of the Middle East are somehow incapable of sorting out their own affairs, is the idea of Democratic Confederalism: a communal form of self-governance that has been applied by some sections of the Kurdish authorities, notably by the PKK. Throughout the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Northern Iraq, several new forms of participatory and autonomous self-governance have taken root. It is the main explanation for the era of stability and prosperity the Kurdish people have come to know, since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. For the time being, the Kurdish authorities have been able to apply a new radical form of federalism, but unfortunately they’re still prisoners of the oil industry.

And maybe that’s the main problem: the suffocating grip that the oil multinationals and their cronies have throughout the region.

Self-determination will always be a step away from completion until oil is the object and not the subject of control. Democratization of the extraction of natural resources is a necessity for the development of true autonomy. And this is why any movement striving to define new spaces of self-determination in the Middle East is automatically an enemy of the world’s economic elites. The PKK is currently considered a terrorist organization in the same vein as is ISIS by the “international community”.

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The main reason behind this never-ending “War on Terror” is the perpetual destabilization of the Middle East, through a divide and conquer strategy of instilling brutal dictatorships and a reign of terror. This has been ongoing ever since the mid-1920s, when Western powers decided to divide the region into imaginary states and zones of influence. The main weapon of the “War on Terror” is terror, and this is why it is a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle.

The Kurdish model is a glimmer of hope in a windwhirl of chaos. The decentralized model of Kurdish communities is a blueprint for something that has the capacity to shift the balance of power from the hands of an elite, from the hands of a few to the hands of the many. This is the only solution, if put into action, that might end the state of perpetual war, and the era of “Western intervention” in the region. Yet this isn’t in the interest of those, who profit from such chaos.

A luta continua.