Here’s a tiny question, for Americans. What have we been fighting for? You know the wars we’ve been embroiled in…forever…what’s their purpose, exactly? Can anyone say? Now, I don’t ask that question to be difficult. I ask it to clarify. You can judge for yourself if by the end of this essay I have.

One way to look at the terrible, gruesome disaster — the latest one — unfolding in Syria is this. The US suddenly withdrew its troops, which left the Kurds to be slaughtered by the Turks, because in a Turkey where a neofascism is ascendant is also where long-standing sentiments that the Kurds are subhumans is also one happy genocide them.

That’s the simplest — and probably least thoughtful — way to see it. Here’s a more complex way. America supported the Ba’athists, because the Ba’athists were anti-communists. And that ultimately produced the monster known today as Bashar Assad. Without American support, the very Arab dictators Americans mock would never have come to be at all. And the atrocities they now commit, too, were half a century in the making. People like Kurds — or even average Syrians — were simply considered expendable in this calculus.

None of that’s inaccurate. But it is incomplete, a little superficial. Episodes like this should make us — especially us Americans — ask the difficult question above: what have we been fighting for?

Every age has its hegemon, it’s superpower, it’s dominant “rule-setting” nation. Today, that’s America. It’s bombed, destabilized, invaded, more than half the countries on earth. One of the downsides of doing such a thing is that when you “withdraw” your troops..maybe all hell breaks loose. That’s how we understand now — but that doesn’t go nearly deep enough.

Let’s imagine a better America — a totally different country. If you or I, thoughtful people, were put in charge of the globe — sure, that’s an ugly sentiment in itself, but let’s explore it for a moment — what would we do? What would we want?

What I think we should have wanted is something like this. An education for every child on planet Earth. Healthcare for every life on planet earth. Savings, income, shelter, food. Stability, safety, opportunity. A fair and decent life — not just “a chance” at one. Now, the world would probably have wanted all that — and joined us on the quest towards becoming such a planet.

(We should have wanted something very much like a global social democracy in other words — not as in the “one world government” of the paranoid American right wings’ fever dreams, but as in things like healthcare, education, media, income, savings, shelter, food…all becoming constitutional rights, backed by institutional powers of states.)

So imagine for a second if we — the hegemon — had done all that in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. The world today would have been very different.It wouldn’t be so unstable, either. And neither would we. Why? Because the world might have joined us in that fight. But fighting for a thing the world didn’t want — well, it’s only really produced a world of endless, brutal, hopeless civil wars, like the one we’re seeing in Syria, now, too. But what else do you expect when you’re trying to give the entire world something it really doesn’t want?

Let’s imagine that in some war-torn, beleaguered, backwards place, there was a dictator that arose, who said: “My people don’t deserve healthcare! First, they must exterminate the subhumans among them!” And no amount of gentle persuasion or diplomacy worked. Then, perhaps — and only then — might we have invaded, destabilized, bombed, and so on.

Do you see my point? If we’d known what we were fighting for, and if what we’d been fighting for had been a truly worthy vision for the globe — healthcare, education, retirement, rights, freedom, for every single life on the planet — then we ourselves would have been better off, too.

We wouldn’t then have ended up mired in the morasses that Syria is becoming, or Iraq became, or Afghanistan still is.

Contrast what we could have been with what…we actually did. We fought a hidden world war for capitalism. We invaded nation after nation and installed dictator after dictator — from Saddam to Pinochet — because they were people we could do “business” with. Never mind if the people themselves abhorred those very tyrants. What took priority was our wants, our needs, our desires. But for much of the world — we the hegemon installed fascist, hard-right dictators and movements in their countries, instead of democracies. The idea that America “promoted” democracy abroad is a terrible and foolish myth.

And so, quite naturally, many regions of the world grew mired in civil war, or something very much like it. On the one side, tyrants and dictators, with extreme right political leanings. They sent out death squads, like Pinochet, or built secret polices and tortured people in jails that became synonymous with atrocity, like Saddam and the Ba’athists.

But we didn’t care — why would we? Those dictators and tyrants and movements were ours. Everyone that arose against them was a “terrorist.” That included many, many democratic movements across the world, from Nicaragua to Argentina to Syria and Turkey themselves. So today, the PKK — the Kurdish Workers’ Party — is a terrorist organization, according to us. So should anyone be surprised we…abandoned the Kurds?

Now, it’s true that many of the movements that arose in the wake of our support for dictators and tyrants were those worthy of the word “terrorist.” Like, for example, ISIS. Please don’t imagine for a moment I’m “sympathetic” to them — quite the opposite. What I am saying is that declaring everyone who opposed the hard-right fascists governments we installed all over the globe a “terrorist” then left us less able to fight…the real terrorists, the actual bad guys. Today, you see a stark example of that. The Kurds are terrorists. ISIS are terrorists. Who do we support? Nobody…withdraw.

Perhaps you see my point. When everyone’s a bad guy except the fascists we installed…there are fewer and fewer good guys left at a all. Even at home. Did you even notice when Trump said the other week something like: “They get away with it in other countries — so why can’t I do it here?” He was referring to various authoritarianisms. “They” “get away” with it because we let them. But an empire can’t support authoritarians and fascists around the globe without them coming home, either. Because eventually, people who embody those sentiments and ideals eventually rule the fatherland, too.

So. What were we fighting for? Have you ever wondered? I don’t know you, so I can’t say. But I bet the question’s entered your mind, once or twice. The better one, though — the clarifying one — is this. What weren’t we fighting for?

We weren’t fighting for things like healthcare, education, retirement, schooling, justice, shelter, food, to become basic human rights for all, constitutionally guaranteed. Why not? Well, because we didn’t have such things at home, in the hegemon, in America. We could hardly therefore fight for them for anyone else, either. The only thing we could really fight for anywhere else was the only thing we had at home, which was a kind of aggressive, predatory capitalism. Hence, we installed dictators and tyrants across the world to provide us a steady flow of the raw materials capitalism needed — cheap oil, cheap minerals, cheap cotton, cheap food, cheap labour.

We only cared, in the end, that the world produced capitalism’s raw materials as cheaply as possible — not that people anywhere else enjoyed advanced human rights. We Americans ourselves didn’t have advanced human rights — only Europeans and Canadians did — because we’d been brainwashed into believing that such advanced rights were bad things, liabilities, burdens, signals of weakness. Hence, until very recently, most Americans just happily denied each other healthcare and retirement…so how could they give it to the world?

Americans weren’t always jubilant to fight a hidden world war for capitalism. Sometimes, they objected vehemently, as during Vietnam. But mostly, they assented — whether meekly, timidly, or a little hesitantly. So today, the list of countries that America bombed or destabilized or invaded for capitalism’s sake is nearly endless — Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Chile, Panama, many, many more.

But that world that this hidden world made was not a happy, pleasant place. It became a place of civil war, of populist movements forever pitted against dictators and tyrants — the ones we supported, and then turned right around and declared any and all opposition to them “terrorism.” That is why so many countries are war-torn places, from Latin America to East Asia.

They were the frontlines in the Cold War — which was not Cold at all, unless you were happily sunning yourself on a California beach. If you were in Laos, in Cambodia, in Santiago, in Buenos Aires…the Cold War was anything but cold. It was a thing of terrible, constant, perpetual violence, of mass graves, of mass disappearances, of death squads, of secret polices.

And we, my friends — the people of the hegemon — totally, utterly ignored all this. We were blinded, dazzled, and confused — what were we fighting for? Freedom! No, liberty for all! No, justice!! We were the home of the brave and the land of the free!! We were left bewildered, stupid, ignorant. Yes, really.

Why didn’t Americans know or care they supported Ba’athist dictators who tortured journalists in prison cells…Latin American tyrants who sent death squads to kill university students? Why don’t Americans know they’re the ones who installed the very Ba’athist dictators they mock now and make war on? What do you expect from giving the world something it doesn’t want except civil wars…that you yourself have to endlessly try to police, manage, repress, in which you have no good option? You are only giving people this choice: our violence, or our indifference.

Nobody asked any of these questions in America. Nobody was allowed to. Because the uncomfortable truth is that nobody cared. So do we care now? Can we go deeper than merely repeating foolishly simplistic lines like: “Oh no! We withdrew troops and betrayed the Kurds!”…at the very same time we officially consider Kurds terrorists, and al-Assad a historic friend? Can we understand why it’s urgent to become the kind of hyperpower that no longer supports dictators and tyrants — and therefore produces a world of endless civil war, stretching from Asia to Arabia to Africa?

Can we understand that there are better things to fight for than cheap stuff to feed capitalism’s insatiable machine — and that if we’d fought, perhaps, for advanced human rights for every life on planet earth…maybe we ourselves would have been better off, too, fighting fewer, better, and juster wars, on which the people themselves would have been on our side, not against us, like they always seem to be?

Our reality was turned inside out by being the hegemon, the world’s superpower — as it so often is. The Romans, too, came to believe their emperors were Gods. We act a little like that, us Americans. We believe that caring about the world is raining hellfire down from the sky. That tending to a broken world is sending in the remote controlled killing machines. It is no such thing. It is a mark of our hubris and moral failure — just that.

One of our great challenges as Americans is to understand that what we have been fighting for hasn’t been worth it. For them — or for us. A world of civil war is also a world where we perpetually trying to unmake them, and our choices are either withdrawal and chaos, or staying and fueling destruction. Neither choice is good. We leave ourselves in a dilemma. That is because we are on an inhuman mission to begin with: support global capitalism, or we’ll give you a fascist movement, or better yet a tyrant who does, and if you don’t, we’ll just be indifferent to your slaughter. Catch-22. Nobody else in the world wants those choices, my friends — and they limit us to fighting for all the wrong things, which is a fight that goes on forever, and no one can win.

We ourselves must become the kind of people who support a world with advanced human rights for all. Then perhaps we will be up to the difficult, ugly business of running a world. But to do even that, we must support such rights for ourselves. And that, my friends, is the great and grave lesson of all this. We are a failed hegemon. The world around is collapsing, just like America is, because our model for it failed. We were selfish, abusive, and cruel — which is what hegemony produces.

If we were truly wise, then, we would have aspired to be the world’s last hegemon. To have built a world in which every life is empowered enough never to need the protection of a bully who shakes it down ever again. One in which every life has the resources for true self-determination, self-governance, self-direction.

A world without a hegemon is what we should have wanted to build — not to be yet another one of history’s failed hegemons, because being one at all is not a job worth having. Perhaps we still can.

Umair

October 2019