Ukraine, Gaza Wars Will End With A Bang Not Whimper
Saeed Naqvi
Ukraine and Gaza are TV serials streaming interminably on our screens because the authors do not know how to script the final scene. The general drift of the story is known but not the end.
The end to the Gaza war is in perpetual delay because both, the US and Israel are embarrassed admitting that global exceptionalism for one and regional exceptionalism for the Jewish state ring hollow with global power shifting rapidly from the North to the South since the collapse in 2008 of Lehman Brothers.
It had taken decades to recover from the Vietnam syndrome, the deep resistance US public opinion developed to foreign involvements after the debacle in Saigon in 1975.
Post 9/11 wars caused an adrenalin rush as the neo-cons embarked on expediting the American century. With the US embroiled in numerous wars, big and small, maintaining 760 bases worldwide, candidate Trump asked President Jimmy Carter: “China is going ahead of US; what should we do?” Carter’s response was precise. “Except for a skirmish with Vietnam in 1978, China has not been at war; we have never stopped being at war.”
US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was, in many ways, even more destructive of American, indeed Western, self esteem than was the Vietnam debacle 50 years ago. Indefatigable Vietnamese nationalism was a factor, but it was American public opinion, stoked by outstanding journalism by anchors like Walter Cronkite which helped precipitate the dramatic end.
In Afghanistan the mainstream media played a negative role. It covered up. Indeed one of the current tragedies of the West is the collapse of the credibility of the western media. There is a complex bunch of reasons for this enormous reliability deficit but let me touch on two.
A uniform Murdochization mistook the fleeting Sole Superpower moment as a more durable happening. Editorials in the Washington Post in their general drift became indistinguishable from, say, Le Monde. Even though the unipolar world passed, the media has remained frozen in its habit. It still deludes itself that it is in the service of a unipolar moment.
Also, when wars break out the war correspondent in any case becomes a propagandist and mythmaker. Since the US has been continuously at war from the 1990s, journalists have tended to be propagandists’ sans credibility.
The narrative in both the wars is in conflict with the ground realities. The narrative, amplified by the media dreamt up a scenario in which Putin invaded Ukraine without any provocation to fulfil his “imperialist dreams.”
Forgotten were the promises to Gorbachev made in 1991 by Secretary of State, James Baker that “NATO would not move by an inch any closer to Russia.” At the Bucharest Summit of NATO in 2008 President George W Bush virtually poked Putin in the eye by announcing that Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO. This Red line, Putin would not allow to be transgressed. For Russia this was an existential threat.
There were worse provocations, including the coup in 2014 in which elected President Yanukovych, who sought neutrality, was replaced by a West friendly candidate. All this and much more the western media developed an acute amnesia for.
Likewise, on the Gaza front Israel’s genocide and mass murder by starvation, spread over two years are justified as punishment for Hamas’s temerity for having murdered 1,200 Jews and taken 251 hostages with stunning audacity on October 7, 2023.
In Ukraine the might of NATO, EU, Europe and the US are all pitted against Russia. What has thrown a monkey-wrench in western plans against Russia is the friendship “with no limits” which Russia and China announced earlier in the same month that Russian troops moved into Ukraine.
What is actually fueling the two wars was blurted out by Boris Johnson when he, trapped in partygate, scuttled a deal arrived at as early as April 2022 in Istanbul. According to a Foreign Policy article Johnson turned up in Kyiv to stay Zelensky’s hand. “The West was not ready to end the war yet.” To him, the war was not about Ukraine but western hegemony.
The casualty figure of Ukrainians is 1.7 million. By all reliable accounts the Russian advance on the battlefield is relentless. The seven leaders of what Donald Rumsfeld disparagingly described as “old Europe”, chaperoned Volodymyr Zelensky to the Trump Durbar in the Oval office with what purpose? Please don’t talk to Putin? Don’t end the Ukraine war on Putin’s terms. Cite European security even though it is western hegemony which is on the line.
On the Gaza front, nearly two years after the October 7 “Al Aqsa flood” attack, what is the scorecard? Hamas’s audacious, bold, bleak attack was not designed to inflict defeat on Israel but invite Israeli retaliation. The Jewish state walked straight into the trap with such unspeakable barbarity as to make the world gasp and close its eyes.
Supposing Hitler had survived in some Satanic scenario, would he have been welcome in any post war assembly. The answer, obviously, is a resounding No. Why would any other logic apply to the apartheid state which has perpetrated genocide, murdered by starvation on live TV and whose only expertise in war is to assassinate popular leaders.
The day after this war is over, I cannot visualize Netanyahu being showered with petals. Neither he nor the “river to the sea” project he strives for has survivability.
How will the West cope with two more defeats – one in the heart of Europe and the other in its most powerful outpost in West Asia? This will not be allowed to happen easily. There has been talk of Taurus missiles and medium range missile to bolster Ukraine. In desperation these could be brought into play with cameras prepositioned around Moscow and St. Petersburg for fireworks which will temporarily drown out the reversal on the ground. Israel, with its back to the wall, may target Iran with something, more lethal. The world will keep a steady gaze on Moscow and Tehran in mortifying suspense.
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