By Joshua Denniss from Darwin, Australia.
On Tuesday the U.S began bombing ISIS targets inside Syria, in concert with its five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan. It began doing so without the approval of the U.S. Congress nor the United Nations, making the war in Syria unconstitutional and illegal. As it is, empires are rarely held accountable for their actions, including switching sides i.e. who they fight and who they support in the Middle East.
It was just over a year ago that officials from the U.S were insisting that bombing and attacking Bashar al-Assad (president of Syria) was a moral and strategic imperative. To combat Al-Assad, the U.S government armed and trained Syrian rebels that opposed President Al-Assad’s regime. These men, once rebels turned into trained soldiers, went on to join ISIS. This was due to the fact that both groups are opposed to President Al-Assad and the ISIS success in fighting the Iraqi government. The ISIS existence, its growing number of members and its resources are mostly the result of U.S. interference.
Now that U.S interests have changed they’ve turned and switched sides, declaring war on the very people that they have armed and trained. If, when I broadly blanket the entire reason for the ongoing war in the Middle East to be the United States and its allies’ fault, you sit there and say “Well, it’s easy to just say something like that without providing proper reason of how or why.” Let me tell you why I believe it is. The U.S. and its allies constantly provide arms and resources to both sides of a conflict under the pretense that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
In reality, they are just creating more enemies; strengthening them and then having to fight them in some future conflict. Weapons do not rain from the sky in the Middle East like some of you may think. Seventy nine percent of them are shipped there by the U.S, with the rest mostly by its five allies mentioned above. When loyalties and alliances change as with ISIS, the only answer they have is to bomb the ISIS stronghold which, in actuality, kills more innocents than terrorists, destroying civilians’ homes.
These actions create more anti-American sentiment in the area, resulting to a soar in ISIS recruits. The increasing number of people wanting to join ISIS is understandable — why not join the group who defends you from the people bombing your home and your people? This exact situation has been created and emulated time and time again just pertaining to different groups. This same reason is the cause for the ongoing conflict.
Do we, as the people of this world, honestly not see how this works by now? Do we, as global citizens, honestly believe going to war AGAIN is the right answer? Do we want our fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters dying on both sides in another futile and frivolous war? Stop following your government blindly into war because this is not the answer!
We, as a people, need to begin prompting our governments and leaders to form peaceful and solution-based efforts, not more wars. I, for one, feel that a large portion of the world is also sick and tired of the hatred and violence being perpetuated by these groups, sick of people believing borders drawn on a map define who we are, sick of people thinking these men, women and children are any different from us! Some of them may be angry and misguided, but so are a great number of us. It’s time we think of each other as ONE people because that’s what we are.
