The World Crisis
Faced by spiralling food and fuel prices and a property crisis, in the last few months the mood of the Western world has turned sour. In heavily-indebted Western countries, especially in the USA and many countries in Western Europe, the property bubble, financed by huge debts, has, just as predicted, burst. Just as it has burst on all the other occasions in the recent and distant past, when the gullible public, manipulated by advertising and government irresponsibility (‘deregulation’) borrowed so much money from greedy and corrupt banks that it could never be paid back. The US economy is shuddering, as two of its largest mortgage corporations, which underpin five trillion dollars of home finance, face possible meltdown.
The massive debts of Western governments, especially in the USA, have also mounted enormously because of their invasions of other countries. We cannot forget that this process began with the bombing of Serbia at the end of the last century and the invasion and occupation of southern Serbia by NATO. Now that southern Serbia has illegally been prised from Serbia, Washington and Brussels are faced with financing their rogue state of gun-runners and drug-smugglers, which they have called Kosovo.
As for the UK, it is desperately short of funds after years of wasteful spending on useless bureaucracy by its minority Blair government and billions of pounds wasted in Blair’s invasions of Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to impose modern Western political systems on people whose civilisations are far older than the Western ‘civilisation’ of cluster bombs. The unelected UK Prime Minister, Mr Brown, who has reaped all the foolishness of ten years of Blairite profligacy and war-mongering and his own failure to show any sort of principled opposition to unnecessary wars, faces self-imposed bankruptcy. As for the United States government, financed largely by the Chinese purchase of its government bonds, it is said that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may yet top one trillion dollars. One trillion dollars that US taxpayers and the new homeless would be only too glad to receive in tax cuts and welfare.
And all of this for nothing, unless it was worthless politicians’ vanity.
For example, the headline of a report by the journalist Sally Neighbour in the online ‘The Australian’ of 10 July 2008, reads: ‘Taliban conflict 'cannot be won' in Afghanistan’. The article goes on to say: ‘The growing fears that have gripped the city were graphically realised with Monday’s bombing (7 July) at the Indian embassy in the heart of Kabul, which killed 41 people and injured more than 100. The carnage in the heavily secured diplomatic enclave reinforced a dawning reality…Coalition forces are winning every battle but losing the war’, a private security consultant told me. ‘You can go out and kill Taliban all day long. You kill 20,000 - and there’s another 20,000 that will follow them’.
‘This Government is completely failing. This Government should resign’, says Ahmad Shah Amadzai, the leader of one of about 90 political parties vying for support in Afghanistan. ‘The Afghan Government has no authority. Karzai's Government is a puppet government, it has no power, it just represents Western interests’. Amadzai claims Afghanistan was better off during the Soviet occupation. ‘The Russians came as occupiers, but they respected the culture, the religion and traditions of the country. NATO do not have any respect for any human being or human rights. It’s like (being invited to) a friendly dinner where they poison you. The Russians were not killing innocent men, women and children and old people. If they were fighting, it was fighting face to face. Now NATO and the Americans are bombarding villages, and they don't care who is killed’. Amadzai, a former sworn enemy of the Taliban, says anything would be better than the status quo. ‘We were all driven out by the Taliban, but right now we are all convinced the Taliban regime is much better than the current regime’.
It seems as though the West will have to leave Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, their demoralised armed forces abandoned by their bankrupt governments and collapsing economies. The great winner of the Middle Eastern adventures will be Iran, whose great enemy used to be Iraq, successfully, and conveniently for Iran, demolished by the US-led invasion. Ironically it was Iran and Iran alone which always was probably the only country to be feared in the area – certainly Afghanistan and Iraq did not pose any threat. Now the United States is supplying arms to nuclear-armed Israel to carry out possible proxy attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, just as Israel already did some twenty-five years ago. The United States itself cannot possibly finance or face yet another failed invasion of a Middle Eastern country.
So the Western meddling that began in Serbia nearly a decade ago, when NATO bombs fell on churches celebrating Easter, finishes in bankruptcy for the very countries which launched the meddling in Serbia. This is called Nemesis. And countries where perhaps Western meddling would once have been welcomed by all countries in the world, the Sudan or Zimbabwe, are now left scot-free. Having seen the West’s injustice and incompetence in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, few countries support Western meddling anywhere, even in countries where it might actually do some good.
The lesson is that arrogance is rewarded by bankruptcy and that this financial bankruptcy is always the result of moral and spiritual bankruptcy.
The thousands of brave but dead and mutilated US, British and other troops, whose lives have been squandered by morally and spiritually bankrupt Western leaders, and the hundreds of thousands of dead and mutilated Serbs, Afghans and Iraqis, cry out for justice.
The only question is whether their calls will be heard, whether the humiliation of the West will lead Western leaders to repentance. May the cynics fall silent and grant Western governments the benefit of the doubt.
Fr Andrew
The Holy Glorious and All-Praised Leaders of the Apostles Peter and Paul,
29 June/12 July 2008
(My thanks to Mirko Ocokoljic)
