Imperialism

Imperialism, or the desire to exercise authority over the interests of others, is the antithesis to justice. Although imperialism may no longer manifest itself as colonialism, it still exists and pervades the thinking of powerful ruling elites today.

The biggest current imperialist state is the USA. The USA has a long history of imperialist behaviour, particularly since the end of the Second World War, when it became the world’s greatest superpower. It has sometimes used its immense power responsibly but has also used it for terrible ends - in Japan, atomic weapons were deployed against the helpless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a vicious war was wrought on the people of Korea, and those unfortunate enough to live in the southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were subjected to a brutal and relentless campaign of carpet bombing and other indiscriminate and sickening violence.

The US have a depressing recent history in Central America. When popular left-wing movements took control of Nicaragua and parts of El Salvador, the US Reagan administration of the 1980s saw a threat to US business interests and financed and trained violent right-wing groups, such as the Contras in Nicaragua, which contributed to civil wars in the region that left many thousands dead.

In South America, the USA has trained and funded right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia who have massacred thousands of innocent civilians in the country’s ongoing civil war, all in the name of a “war on drugs”. The “war on poverty”, of greater importance across the whole world and not least in the USA itself, remains largely forgotten, despite poverty causing many problems of drug use and supply.

In Chile, the US were not prepared to accept the democratic rule of an elected Marxist President, Salvadore Allende, so assisted the tyrant General Augustus Pinochet to power in a coup on 9/11 1973. A seventeen-year campaign of brutal human rights abuses against the Chilean people followed. Many of the Chilean military torturers were trained in the US, at the notorious “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia.

More recently, in Afghanistan the USA funded both the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, and treated them as allies against communism during the time of the Soviet invasion. This represented a classic case of imperialism creating cruel, fascist organisations to serve its own purposes, before disposing of those fascists when they became a liability, along with thousands of innocent civilians who lived in the same region as them.

The most infamous effects of US imperialism can be seen in the Middle East. The injustices caused by US imperialist foreign policy in this region are extensive and have led to the US becoming the subject of hatred and terrorism from groups and states all over the world.

As the world’s largest consumer of oil, the US have for many years been keen to exercise control over the oil interests of the Middle East. They have supported dictators, such as those from the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, in order to ensure the continued supply and price stability of oil. The price of oil has consequently remained artificially low.

The argument that the price of oil is actually artificially high, because not all of the world’s oil is being put on the market, is premised on the imperialist assumption that oil producing countries exist only for the benefit of oil consuming states such as the US, and have a duty to put all of their oil on the market to ensure that it can be sold to the US at the lowest possible price.

What oil producing countries should actually do is restrict the supply of oil on the market to keep the price of oil high, which would make economic sense for them. Democratic movements in the Middle East would do this, which is why the US are anxious to ensure that their own favoured dictators remain in power.

The US have sold arms to states such as Saudi Arabia that have been used to quell internal rebellion, such as calls for democratic change that could affect the US hegemony over the oil in the region. The US arms trade has also fuelled wars in the region, such as the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988 that left a least a million people dead. The US supplied arms to the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, because they believed that the fundamentalist Iranian regime was a threat to US interests. The interests of those in Iran and Iraq who wanted to be free of war did not seem to matter.

The US have been active in supporting and funding Israel, not least because Israel, as a non-Muslim state, can be relied upon to provide the US with support should any democratic movements or non-compliant dictators challenge US control over oil in the region. The US puts its own interests in oil and money ahead of the importance of protecting the lives of the Palestinian people, who have been subject to a sustained campaign of repression by the Israeli government.

The US have exercised power without responsibility against states with high Muslim populations, which has further inflamed Arab opinion in the Middle East. They have launched unilateral military strikes against countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, which have led to the deaths of many civilians.

US actions against Iraq have also led to much bloodshed and death. The initial Gulf War in 1991 saw the US massacre Iraqi soldiers retreating from Kuwait on the Basra road, waving white flags and trying to surrender. This amounted to a clear war crime. Up to 200,000 civilians were killed in Iraq as a result of the 1991 war and the subsequent starvation and disease that it caused. Many more Iraqi civilians died between 1991 and 2003 as a result of US-led United Nations sanctions, before the US brutally asserted its power over Iraq by embarking on an illegal war there in 2003.

This war was designed to remove a non-compliant dictator in Saddam Hussein and increase US influence over the oil resources of Iraq. Although officially the US leadership stated that Iraq’s oil belonged to the Iraqi people, the leadership knew that much of the oil could not be drilled without the assistance of foreign oil companies. The war ensured that US oil corporations drilled Iraq’s oil and repatriated the profits back to the US, with the Iraqi people seeing nothing of this bonanza.

The dictatorships the US support in the Middle East permit the US to station military bases in their predominantly Islamic countries, despite the devastating effect US policies have had on the lives of ordinary Muslims in places such as Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. The presence of the US military in the Middle East in these circumstances further enrages many Muslims and non-Muslims alike.