Global Conflict: throughout the ages has been caused by Nationalism, Religion, Revenge, Economic and Territorial gain and will eventually destroy this planet if we don't do something about it

Mankind is digging it's own grave

Wars have been a part of human history for thousands of years, becoming increasingly destructive with industrialization and the subsequent advances in technology.

Typically a war is fought by a country, or group of countries, against an opposing country with the aim of achieving an objective through the use of force.

Wars can also be fought as Proxy Wars, or within a country, however, in the form of a civil war, or in a revolutionary war.

Of course, the causes of a war beginning are often numerous and several reasons for war can be intertwined in a complicated way, rather than there being just one single, clear cause. The ego's of some world leaders can also play an important part.

Many theories have been put forward over the years for why wars happen and some of the greatest minds have offered their ideas.

The main reasons why wars usually start were given as being the result of:  Nationalism, Religion, Revenge, Economic and Territorial gain

This phenomena unfortunately begins already at a very basic local level, were most people in the world still show to have a very nationalistic, tribal, territorial viewpoint, specially when it comes to how they identify themselves.

When a Dutchman visit another country, he or she will usually identify herself or himself as " I am Peter/Anna and I am from Holland".

This goes for just about any nationality visiting another country.

Maybe it would be better, if we all  would adhere to what one wise man once said: "the world is mine and wherever I can live in peace and harmony I will call home.

Yes indeed aren't we all citizens of this planet we call earth, regardless of were we were born or what religion we profess?.

At least if we could all agree on that, it would be far easier to deal with all those other causes of war

EU-Digest

Middle East - Syria: Trump Is on a Collision Course With Iran - by Dennis Ross

Rarely has the Middle East been more baffling. The United States sells fighter jets to Qatar, a country the American president accuses of sponsoring terrorism. In Syria, the U.S. is relying on Kurdish fighters that Turkey, a NATO country closely aligned with Qatar, says are terrorists, supporting their mission to take Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital, with airstrikes launched from a giant U.S. base outside of Doha. The U.S. accuses Russia of complicity in the Syrian government’s chemical attacks on its own people, and hits Syrian forces, but hopes to collaborate with Moscow to fight ISIS.

Got all that? Amid this confusion, Iran is pressing ahead to strengthen its grip on Syria, even as Trump goes after ISIS. Iran’s intervention to save President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has involved sending not just elite Iranian military advisers but also bringing in Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shia militias from as far away as Afghanistan. While estimates vary on the size of these forces, the numbers are in the tens of thousands. Iran’s sectarian shock troops are being used to extend the regime’s writ, especially as the Syrian regime’s deployable military manpower has shrunk to about 20,000 forces.

Regrettably, if the Trump administration cannot do more to counter Iran’s actions in Syria, it is not likely to be able to “demolish” ISIS and prevent its return. Iran is using its Shia proxy militias both to fight ISIS and to challenge U.S. efforts to train local forces in southeastern Syria. Last week, an Iranian-made drone fired on al-Tanf, an area along the Damascus-Baghdad highway and the Syrian border with Jordan where U.S. Special Forces have been conducting the training. The U.S.-led coalition destroyed the drone. The White House statement after the attack pointed out that the United States has maintained a presence at Tanf for the past year and that this location was part of the de-confliction understanding with the Russians—and yet Iranian-backed Shia militias in Syria moved against this area and fired on the U.S. presence anyway.

What’s going on? Iran is actively trying to create a land corridor through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. To that end, Iran is pushing from within Iraq and Syria, using its Shia militia proxies on both sides of the border. On the Iraqi side, the Shia militias have now largely cleared ISIS from border crossings. Within Syria, Iran has sent significant Hezbollah forces eastward to Deir ez-Zour, a major Syrian city along the Euphrates River. With the U.S.-supported effort to liberate Raqqa under way, Iran wants to prevent any U.S.-backed groups from establishing themselves in eastern Syria—something that could preclude the Iranian aim of controlling Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan. (With Hezbollah also now active in the area of Deraa, a southern Syrian city close to the Golan Heights, the Iranians have their eye on the Syrian-Israeli border as well.)

Note EU-Digest Editor: the details on Iran in the above report by the usually very accurate Politico this time seem to be leaning towards "conspiracy theories". First of all, who cares if Iran takes over the job of cleaning up ISIS from the US, which, lets face the facts, is a US creation as a result of the Bush Iraq war in the first place. 

The other question one must ask: what is the position of Saudi-Arabia in all this and why is that country kept out of the story?  Iran, at least, has an elected government, which we certainly can not say about Saudi-Arabia.  So, if the US and Russia can be in Syria, why can't Iran.  All of these countries have their own objectives for fighting these proxy wars, which, let's face it, certainly have nothing to do with democracy. 

Come on Politico - even though we should pray this does not happen, our prediction - and all signs are pointing in that direction - is that the US in close cooperation with  Israel will soon bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, for the sake of "peace in the Middle East". Unfortunately if that happens, we have the sneaky suspicion it will not end well.

Read more: Trump Is on a Collision Course With Iran - POLITICO Magazine

Peace and War: Whatever happened to peace? Arms, oil and war by proxy- by Jonas Ecke

The end of the Cold War was one of the few historical moments in which people around the world looked forward to a future that promised to be more just and peaceful for everyone. The Berlin Wall was finally torn down, following years of tireless civil society activism in one of the world’s few peaceful revolutions. Liberal democratic systems seemed to be spreading everywhere, compelling Francis Fukuyama to craft the (nowadays often-scorned) argument that “The End of History” – and consequently the cessation of constant conflict – had finally arrived with the falling of the Iron Curtain.

The promising world 'peace dividend', a term initially coined by US president George H.W. Bush and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was on everyone’s lips. Hope was in the air. The Soviet Union and United States vowed to work together to further cut down on a nuclear arsenal that could have blown up the world many times over. And they also seemed to be hard at work getting rid of another major – and often underestimated – impediment to peace: proxy wars, the type of war waged in the developing world for most of the Cold War, from Latin America to Central Asia to the Horn of Africa. 

These were wars in which the Soviet Union and US did not directly fight, but paid and favored local fighters, often through highly classified operations and byzantine financial networks that have inspired generations of spy novelists. Before the Cold War, colonial regimes paid local proxies to advance their agendas and “divide and conquer”.

As the Cold War finally came to a close, it was hoped and anticipated that weapon donations would be replaced by UN Peacekeepers and a new generation of NGO activists. Indeed, the new crop of peacemakers seemed to be more liberated. Free from the stifling imperatives of geopolitics, they could implement deals that had previously died prematurely at the conference tables of diplomats, anxious over the advances of an enemy superpower. The tit-for-tat strategies that would reap destruction seemed to be a thing of yesteryear.  

The “War to End all Wars” is a coinage that stems from the First World War. In the global public imagination: the Cold War would be the real “War to End all Wars.” Following its conclusion, an era of enduring peace was within immediate reach. Or so it seemed.

Fast forward 28 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and few such promised realities seem to have materialized. On the contrary, we have entered a new era of proxy wars.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria,Yemen, Somalia etc.

To bring these complex wars to a halt, we have to be very precise about what keeps them going. Saudi Arabia and Iran, probably the two main players in proxy wars in a destabilizaion of the Middle Eastern region that is steadily increasing, fund proxy forces to bolster their versions of Islam—Sunni and Shiite Islam, respectively. It is safe to assume that from the perspective of Riyadh and Teheran, furthering sectarian interests, inextricably intertwined with access to resources and geopolitical influence, are of more importance than peace in the region.

But it is not only sectarian strife—often highlighted in the western media—but also global unregulated capitalism that pours kerosene on a Middle East that is already in flames. 

Western weapon companies see the newly emerging proxy wars as momentous opportunities for increased revenues. During a 2015 conference of Lockheed Martin in Palm Beach Florida, its executive vice president Bruce Tanner predicted “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria. Similarly, as the Intercept reports, Raytheon chief executive Tom Kennedy spoke of “a significant uptick” for “defense solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East.” Referring to Saudi Arabia, Kennedy elaborates, “It’s all the turmoil they have going on, whether the turmoil is occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with ISIS.” And sure enough, stocks for arms have soared in recent years.

But it is not only weapons but also oil which disincentivizes policy makers from de-escalating proxy wars. As Christopher Davidson, who the Economist called “one of the most knowledgeable academics” writing about the Middle East, shows in his 688-page long tome “Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East,” how many covert operations in the Middle East were historically supported to advance the explicit geopolitical or economic interests of the funders. 

According to Davidson, the emergence of the US as a major oil producer has motivated US policy makers (Trump included) to let Saudi forces engage in exhausting proxy wars throughout the region so that a weakened Saudi Arabia is forced to sell its state assets.

Whatever the precise motivations, aside from the publicly touted humanitarian rationales, oil and weapons play a role in the decisions made by states, even when lives are at stake.

But whatever the argument, the evidence in support of proxy wars as an effective means in the interest of peace is scarce. At least this is the case if one follows the analysis coming from the proverbial mouth of the horse, the CIA. The spy agency has funded proxy fighters for most of its history. 

Reportedly president Obama, at least an initial skeptic in the use of proxies, was interested in finding out if funding insurgents generally accomplish the stated strategic goals and commissioned an internal study.

The report concluded that conflicts were not decided in the interest of the US following the funding of proxy actors, unless, according to the report, US personnel were on the ground along with the proxies. The notable exception—according to the study—was the support for the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. However, although the Mujahidin did ultimately chase the illegally invading Soviet forces out of the country, Afghanistan did not regain stability. One thing to come out of this instability was the merging of the Mujahidin into Al Qaida: the very same enemy the US fights in the current global 'War on Terror'. 

This is not just one war, but multiple new proxy wars that cause immense suffering and which have, according to the Global Terrorism Index, contributed to an almost nine-fold increase in deaths caused by terrorism between 2000 and 2016. If we consider the entire historical context, the Afghanistan example serves, at best, as a very cautionary tale. 

Tthe Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), demonstrates that 2014 saw an increase in the number of active conflicts and also the casualties from battle. Forty armed conflicts were active in 2014, whereas in 2013 34 conflicts were designated active. The increase in conflicts since 1999 stood at 18 percent. Whatever gains were brought about by the 'peace dividend', they have been reversed, with people all over the world paying the greatest price.

President Donald Trump, by contrast, initially critical of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, has stepped up military activities since he took office. For example, drone strikes, an important component in the theater of war in Yemen, have gone up by 432 percent and his $ 110 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia also won't help in getting hostilities slowed down.

A new type of vigorous and principled peace movement must be formed in this time of crisis. Peace movements in rich countries should join Middle Eastern peace movements that rally for more democratic and less sectarian governance. Social movements can become stronger by integrating divergent points of view, histories and ideologies, which inform interpretations of complex conflicts. It necessarily has to look at the various internal roots of conflict, and also at how foreign governments, from Moscow and Washington to Riyadh and Teheran, fuel conflicts.

Supporting and holding political platforms accountable will be key to demilitarizing political ideologies and stopping the world in its “ruinous race” to global war, to use the words of Gorbachev. More often than not, a call to arm a party to a conflict prolongs said conflict. 

The public’s immediate question with regards to conflicts probably shouldn’t be “Whom should we support militarily?” Instead, we should more seriously consider questions such as “Who keeps a conflict going?” and “How can we de-escalate it?”

Somehow we the people—who, against all odds, want to raise our children in a more peaceful world—have to let our politicians know that arms should be removed from most regions of conflict.

Far from being out of touch with reality, the global peace movement—though worryingly weakened—in fact holds the most realistic solutions to conflict. Given the data, it is clear that negotiation with the actors in a conflict is the best route to peace. De-escalation is the only framework in tune with the realities of the contemporary world as well as the lessons of recent history. 

We the people have to compel and force if necessary regional and global political forces to work towards de-escalating conflicts. Challenging the financial conglomerates that bring weapons into the hand of proxies may be one of the most effective ways to do so.

Please get out of your comfort zone and act- the future of your children and grand-children are at stake. 

EU-Digest

Cold war: Russian PM Medvedev says new cold war is on

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said strains between Russia and the West have pushed the world "into a new cold war".

"On an almost daily basis, we are being described the worst threat - be it to Nato as a whole, or to Europe, America or other countries," Mr Medvedev said.

He cited Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg's speeches and films depicting Russia starting a nuclear war.
"Sometimes I wonder if this is 2016 or 1962," Mr Medvedev said.

The Cold War was a period of ideological confrontation between the former Soviet Union and Western countries. It began after World War Two and ended with the collapse of the Soviet-led communist camp in the 1989.

The 45 years of tension were marked by espionage and proxy wars involving client states - all undertaken with the knowledge or fear of the nuclear catastrophe that actual war would bring.
The Nato alliance was established in 1949 to protect Western countries.

Read more: Russian PM Medvedev says new cold war is on - BBC News

Middle East: How Bibi and Bush Made a Mess of the Middle East - by J.J. Goldberg

War Damage in Gaza

By now it’s become a Washington cliché: Barack Obama stumbling cluelessly through a Middle East in flames. He’s leading from behind, surrendering to Iran, withdrawing from the world, pivoting to Asia. He tried to disengage from Middle East entanglements, but the region sucked us back in.

Or did it? Here the cliché gets muddled. In one version, we’ve abandoned longtime allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are left to battle the Iranian threat alone. In another version, we’re fighting on too many fronts — Iraq, Syria, Yemen — with no clear idea who’s the enemy.

We’re fighting alongside Sunni Saudi Arabia against Shiite Iran’s proxies in Yemen. We’re fighting alongside Shiite Iran against Sunni ISIS in Iraq. We’re supporting Syrian rebels battling against both ISIS and Iran’s Syrian proxy, the Assad regime. Meanwhile we’re jawboning in Switzerland to make Iran eliminate half its centrifuges. And keep half.

In one telling, Obama lacks an overall foreign policy vision, a must for real leaders. In another, he’s secretly adopted the arcane theory of “offshore balancing,” a modified isolationism. The idea is, you use naval and air power rather than ground troops to defend your friends. Which doesn’t sound quite like isolationism, but never mind. One neoconservative, Lee Smith, wrote in Tablet last year that Obama had adopted Israel-bashing “balance” maven Stephen Walt as his foreign policy guru, though Walt’s never been to the Obama White House.

How did things get so confused? Actually, it’s rather simple. Let’s start at Square One.

In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.

Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.

Israeli leaders continued pooh-poohing Iraq all spring. Dismissal turned to alarm in August, when Iranian dissidents released evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. In September Sharon told his cabinet to stop discussing Iraq. It was annoying the White House.

On September 12, however, a different Israeli voice visited Washington: ex-prime minister-turned-private citizen Benjamin Netanyahu. A longtime Sharon rival, closely allied with Washington’s neoconservatives, he’d been invited to address the Republican-led House as an expert on Iraq. Baghdad, he said, was hiding mobile centrifuges “the size of washing machines.” Moreover, “if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” Throughout the Middle East, including Iran, populations will be inspired to topple their own dictators.

Bush, of course, listened to Netanyahu and the neocons, not Sharon and his generals. Alas, Sharon was right. Iraq imploded. Iran surged.

The invasion had reverberations, but hardly positive. The rest is history.

Iran, we later learned, briefly halted nuclear research in 2003, fearing it was next on Bush’s hit list. Once it realized it was safe, it resumed work. The United Nations now started churning out resolutions condemning Tehran for violating its signed commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran dutifully sat with France, England and Germany and agreed to behave, but kept working anyway. There was nobody to stop it.

In Iraq, as Sharon predicted, removing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated dictatorship allowed the Shiite majority to take over. Sunnis were marginalized. Saddam’s army was disbanded rather than coopted. The Shiite-controlled government, though U.S.-backed, effectively allied itself with Iran, which now controlled an arc from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

In late 2003 Iraq’s Sunnis began fighting back. Leading the insurgency was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terrorist with a gruesome penchant for decapitation. In 2004 his organization, swollen with Saddam’s veterans, intensified the fighting and took the name Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but the organization was undeterred and renamed itself the Islamic State in Iraq. In 2011 it entered Syria to join the growing civil war there, eventually renaming itself yet again as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

In 2009 two more regimes changed: Washington and Jerusalem. Barack Obama entered the White House on a wave of popular disgust with the long, pointless Iraq war. Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon’s protégé, was forced from office amid scandal and his Kadima party was replaced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud.
Netanyahu immediately set about sounding the alarm about Iran’s nukes.

A series of U.N. sanctions got nowhere. Ditto U.S. and European sanctions under both Bush and Obama. In 2006 the three powers negotiating with Iran were joined by Washington, Moscow and Beijing. But Bush’s Washington took a back seat, reluctant to engage the enemy. Russia and China, noting America’s passivity, weren’t serious.

Obama upgraded U.S. participation in 2009. This jolted Russia and China to attention but outraged Netanyahu and the Republicans. Netanyahu now began eyeing a military attack. His generals and spymasters resisted, warning that a solo Israeli attack wouldn’t work and America wasn’t ready for another war. Iran’s working centrifuges multiplied from 164 in 2009 to 10,000 in 2012.

Netanyahu tried pressuring Obama, but the gambit got mired in Washington’s partisan infighting. Relations turned poisonous. Looking for other answers, Bibi fired one security adviser after another but kept getting the same response: Work with Washington. Finally in 2013 Obama opened a back channel to Tehran, leading to the current compromise talks. Then came the explosion in Bibi’s relations with Obama — and, less noticed, with his generals.

And what of those democratic regional reverberations? They came. In January 2011 an economic protest in Tunisia was coopted by hopeful democrats and became a revolution. Protests spread to Egypt, then Libya, Syria and Yemen. It seemed to be just what Netanyahu had predicted, an Arab Spring reverberating from Saddam’s downfall. So, at least, said Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and a bevy of academics.

But it didn’t work out as Netanyahu promised. The autocrats fought back. Liberal democrats, never a significant force, collapsed before Islamist radicals. Libya descended into chaos. Syria became a slaughterhouse. Yemen fell into civil war. Obama dithered, looking for bloodless diplomatic solutions to the whirlwind. America’s Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, fumed at the inaction. Washington wanted the moderate Arab powers to take charge of their own affairs, but that wasn’t how they rolled.

The final straw came last summer, when Yemen’s capital fell to a little-known Shiite sect, the Houthis. In the 1960s, backed by the Saudis, they’d battled Egypt’s Nasser to defend the traditional imamate against his republicans. They’re still battling the republic, but now Iran’s backing them, part of its Shiite imperial ambition. The Saudis, seeing an Iranian pincer action on their southern flank, are finally fighting back, with backing from the full Arab League. As in Syria, as in Libya, Obama’s providing air cover while Arabs see to their own affairs. It’s Pax Americana for a post-Iraq, post-abundance era.

Nowadays you don’t hear much about Iraq being the inspiration for the Arab Spring, except in academic papers and intelligence assessments. It’s too embarrassing.

Read more: How Bibi and Bush Made a Mess of the Middle East – Forward.com