War Or Humanitarian Mission: That Is The Question

By: Reza Bahar Tehran, June 21, IRNA – When the Allied forces landed in Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944 to stop the Nazis, they were fighting an overwhelming war to presumably change the world forever; but 70 years on, the world seems to be on the same track. In 1941 and two years after the start of the great war in Europe, Adolf Hitler publicly proclaimed “Neuordnung Europas” or the New Order of Europe to impose the Nazi government’s political order over the Continent and guarantee a German dominion over an important part of the world. ˈThe year 1941 will be, I am convinced, the historical year of a great European New Order,ˈ claimed Hitler. The Nazi policy was based on a desire to essentially redefine state borders within Europe to create a new geopolitical structure. The Nazis believed that by invading the European countries and promoting a so-called fair rearrangement of territory in Europe, they could work towards the ˈcommon benefitˈ of a new, economically integrated Continent. And of course, from a wider perspective, they were mulling over a way to ensure a global domination by first mastering all Europe. “The Führer gave expression to his unshakable conviction that the Reich will be the master of all Europe,” said Joseph Goebbels in 1943. “We shall yet have to engage in many fights, but these will undoubtedly lead to most wonderful victories. From there on the way to world domination is practically certain,” added Reich Minister of Propaganda and close associate of Hitler. “Whoever dominates Europe will thereby assume the leadership of the world.” The Nazis used the idea of providing common benefits for an integrated Europe as a pretext to expand their hegemony over the Continent and possibly the world. They never succeeded to realize their dream of course, as their war machine was destroyed and their grip over the vital continent came to an end on the D-Day. Yet, regardless of what makes world powers pursue expansionist policies, the trend still prevails and only the pretexts they use to justify the end have transformed. The strategy though, remains intact: redrawing state maps and building nations. Hitler invaded Europe to shape a so-called new order. Similarly, today world powers are trying to redraw state maps and restructure the global geopolitics by imposing yet another new order, i.e., the New World Order. Hence, those who made history by defeating the Nazi expansionism, as Ted Galen Carpenter a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute puts it, soon were on a renewed path of intervention to create the new order, this time on a global basis. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the absence of any reason to launch a military operation, Panama was attacked to open a new chapter in big power expansionist policies. “There were no more monsters to destroy, no Nazi war machine or global communist conspiracy,” Carpenter writes in an American Conservative Magazine article referring to the 1989 US military Operation Just Cause, undertaken against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. US President George H.W. Bush cited the “noble goals” of democracy, peace and freedom as the main reasons for the US attack on Panama. “The Panamanian people want democracy, peace, and a chance for better life in dignity and freedom. The people of the United States seek only to support them in pursuit of these noble goals,” Bush said. It seemed that the big powers had discovered convenient pretexts to pursue their global expansionist policies: Peace, democracy and freedom. “The ideology of democracy, human rights, and nation-building had become a motive for police action anywhere in the world,” writes Carpenter. By manipulating the values such as democracy, human rights and freedom, the big powers successfully engineered a new façade for the expansionist wars they were waging against other nations. The new façade even gave them to draw a rosy picture of their interventionist policies. Dee Dee Myers, President Bill Clinton’s spokeswoman, described the 1992 US intervention in Somalia as a humanitarian mission. “We went in there with a clear vision of humanitarian relief and nation-building,” she said. In a world where expansionist wars are misrepresented as social services, rather than bloody phenomena that take the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, not surprisingly, the foreign invading soldiers are, as Carpenter says, nothing less than global social workers in arms. This way they can secure restructuring the modern world to promote Western-style values like peace, democracy and freedom and guarantee the foreign interests of the big powers. “This is an important moment for our nation’s post-Cold War role in Europe and the world. It tests our commitment to the nurturing of democracy and the support of environments in which democracy can grow and take root,” said Warren Christopher, Clinton’s Secretary of State, during his tenure. With the post-Cold War process of nation-building underway, the 9/11 terrorist incident took place to act as a catalyst and accelerate the whole process. Now the “armed social workers” had a brand-new excuse to invade countries around the world in their “humanitarian missions”: Fighting off terrorism. The invention of the new pretext paved the way for the big powers to deploy their armies in the strategic regions of the world and to justify all this by allegedly fighting off terrorism. But 13 years after the global war on terror, terrorism is on the rise and global security quite fragile. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: During these years, big powers have secured a foothold in the resourceful and strategically sensitive areas of the world. And needless to say, more than a decade of the global war on terror has boded for nothing but killings, destructions and insecurity. ˈI think war is as terrible as any time and some of the things youˈve done yourself you wouldnˈt want to do again,ˈ veteran fighter pilot Fred Riley, 95, said during a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the World War Two in Normandy, France. Wireless operator Phil Elger, another WW2 veteran who flew over Normandy in Lancaster shares the same view on the ugly face of war. ˈWhen I see the damage that we did afterwards it makes me shudder,” he said. The million-dollar question is how the world is going to remember the war on terror in the future./end