The missile strike unleashed on Syria by the US, UK, and France, citing an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma as justification, was as clear and pristine a violation of international law as the world has seen. Fifteen years after hell was unleashed on Iraq, and seven years after Libya was turned upside down, imperialism and hegemony not legality or democracy remain the driver of Western foreign policy.
Not since the 1930s has 'might is right' been normalized to this extent. Justified on the spurious and illegal basis of humanitarian intervention, the world once again finds itself separated between powerful states that are privileged to speak, and the rest condemned to listen and obey.
"Crimes pile up until they become invisible," Bertolt Brecht observed back in that era of rising fascism and European colonialism, and by any measure they are piling up again in our time.
Those missiles, launched from warships and by fighter bombers, were intended not to send a message not to Damascus but Moscow. Unipolarity, the message states, will not go into that good night without a fierce struggle, measured in an increasingly belligerent neocon establishment in Washington and across the West.
Thus the priority for a world committed to stability, peace, and the primacy of diplomacy and international law is how to manage what is now, without a doubt, the snarling beast of imperialism unleashed.
Analyzing the fall out from the West's missile strike on Syria, John is joined by editor of Politics First, Dr Marcus Papadopoulos.
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