According to Brown University, more than 20 years of US wars in the Middle East have directly killed an estimated 940,000 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other ‘conflict’ zones. The Lancet Global Health journal estimates that Israel's genocide of Palestinians has killed over 75,000 people in Gaza since October 2023. The actual death toll is believed to be significantly higher.
American and Israeli intervention and destruction is nothing new. Both of these nations have a well established history of warmongering and maintaining extreme military presence in the Middle East, claiming hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in the process. These forces carry out their atrocities in the name of self-defence and national security. In reality, this military aggression is a means of imperialism that seeks to destabilise the Middle East, extend the influence of the Empire, and maintain control of valuable land and oil commodities.
The distinct lack of US political control over Iran, coupled with the nation’s staunch support of Palestinian resistance, threatens the consolidation of the Western Empire in the Middle East and the continuation of Israel's genocide of Palestinians. This threat has led the US and Israel to join forces to destabilise Iran and create an Iranian regime that can be controlled.
Addressing the threat of Iran is crucial for the US and Israel's political interests, as their target is one of the very few Middle Eastern nations that modern Western imperialism and Zionism have yet to successfully sink their claws into. The sheer number of US military bases that are present across the Middle East — which were recently targeted by Iran — is very telling of this.
Hope for the end of a longstanding oppressive authoritarian regime should not come from the intervention of genocidal imperial forces. These forces have proven to be murderers and oppressors themselves. Their hands are permanently stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians from across the Middle East.
It does not stand to reason that two imperial powers with an exhaustive history of waging war, vying for control of nations, and seizing land and resources within the Middle East are now attacking yet another Middle Eastern nation with the noble intention of freeing its people. The notion of liberation does not exist in the playbook of oppression. The Empire does not care to free innocent people from the grips of another oppressor. It simply seeks to become the one doing the oppressing by repackaging its tyranny as mercy.
Strategic intervention by the Empire does not liberate women who are forced to wear hijab or men who have been condemned to jail for opposing a repressive regime. It does not reduce the supposed nuclear threat that the Western world faces. What it does is mercilessly kill over 150 innocent schoolgirls who were simply exercising their right to an education.
Evidently, an Empire that has been built on violence and death will continue to bring violence and death everywhere it goes. The intentions of such an Empire could never be to bring an end to oppression when it relies on this very oppression for its sustenance. It is abundantly clear that the US and Israel’s joint assault does not have the peace and freedom of the Iranian people in mind, or else the US would not have abandoned its upcoming diplomatic negotiations with Iran in favour of ‘preemptive’ air strikes.
Now is not the time to side with one oppressor over another. It is time to remember that Empire is not your saviour. Empire does not bring freedom or hope for the oppressed. Instead, it brings a promise of renewed death and destruction to innocent people at the hands of soldiers wearing a different uniform.
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