![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/mayerplow.jpeg\" "\\"mayerplow\\"")
<\/a>Afghan casualties, both military and civilian. For Iraq, estimates range between 110,000 and 600,000, and though the estimates of civilian deaths among them vary widely, they most likely run into the tens of thousands. In Afghanistan, while a total of some 14,000 anti- and pro-government military combatants are estimated to have lost their lives, there are not even any ballpark body counts of civilian casualties. The media make little, if any, effort to inform and enlighten the American peuple about the incidence, nature, scale, and aftereffects of civilian casualties. This may be congruent with the near total neglect by American historians of civilian casualties and afflictions\u2014including those of widows, orphans, and the elderly\u2013in America\u2019s own Civil War in which some 750,000 men died, out of a population of 30 million.<\/p>\nPresently the 11-page Federal complaint accuses Dzhokbar Tsarnaev, the younger and surviving terrorist, with having \u201cused a weapon of mass destruction . . . against persons and property.\u201d This (mis)use of the toxic term \u201cweapon of mass destruction\u201d for a ball-bearing-packed pressure-cooker bomb staggers belief. The U. S. holds the palm in the development, production, stockpiling, and deployment of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, and biological. It also leads the world in delivery systems. To boot, America is the only country ever to have used a weapon of mass destruction: on August 6-9, 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took a toll of an estimated 200,000 lives. That was five months after the \u201cconventional\u201d firebombing of Tokyo in which some 100,000 people are estimated to have died. To be sure, this air strike on the Japanese capital was one of the deadliest and most destructive of World War II. But it was the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the post-attack blight of sickness and death due to radiation-induced leukemia and other cancers that marked a radical qualitative \u201cgame-change\u201d in military and diplomatic statecraft.<\/p>\n
Of course, the pressure-cooker bombs and the jihadis are all the more terrifying because of that ominous Chechen connection. Just as in its anti-Soviet obsession Washington not so long ago partnered with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, so until only yesterday it extolled the Sunni Islamists\u2013jihadis\u2013of the Caucasus as valiant freedom fighters against an oppressive and repressive post-Soviet Russia. It is nothing short of reassuring that President Vladimir Putin, a tried and true ex-KGB operative, execrated and distrusted by America\u2019s foreign-policy wonks, is now praised for ordering his anti-terrorist and security apparatus to lock arms with President Obama\u2019s CIA and FBI\u2013\u201cintelligence\u201d and security \u201ccommunity\u201d\u2013in tracking down that ominous Al-Qaeda trail that purportedly led to the Boston Marathon Massacre.<\/p>\n
This is only the beginning of the reinflammation of the Sunni-Shiite fratricide reminiscent of the fratricide between Protestants and Catholics, and the attendant religious wars, in 16th<\/sup>-17th<\/sup> -century Europe. Judging by developments in the Greater Middle East, notably what the West hastened to label the \u201cArab Spring,\u201d grosso modo, the United States and its allies tend to support the Sunnis, including the Sunni states, while the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are inclined to support the Shiites, including the Shiite states. Needless to say, the interventions of both coalitions of powers are driven primarily by geopolitical and mercantile interests shrouded in ideological mist. In today\u2019s non-Western precincts, Sunnis and Shiites, and their external backers, are equally close to or distant from Allah, just as the Protestants and Catholics in 16th<\/sup>-17th<\/sup>-century Europe were equally close to or distant from God.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the analogue of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years\u2019 War (1618-1648), might serve as a guide in thinking about the incipient general crisis and thirty years war in today\u2019s Greater Middle East\u2013and beyond. To be sure, the negotiations between May and October 1648 in M\u00c3\u00bcnster and Osnabr\u00c3\u00bcck resulted in peace treaties between and among the major belligerents which included territorial adjustments. But above all, in addition to ringing down the curtain on the Holy Roman Empire, Westphalia marked the triumph of national sovereignty and rule over the principle and practice of imperial ascendancy. Indeed, Westphalia articulated and warranted the emergent principle of the sovereignty of the state along with the equality of sovereign states in an embryonic European state system. Though implicit and unwrought, the Westphalian settlement also spawned not only the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other states but also that of self-determination.<\/p>\n In its post-colonial and waning imperial era the Western World, not to say the First World, continues to approach the problems facing so many of the non-Western, not to say Third World political and civil societies in the spirit of Westphalia, leavened or exploded by a latter-day \u201corientalist\u201d mission civilisatrice. To be sure, the states of the Greater Islamic Middle East, notably the Arab states, are sovereign, have frontiers, and have autonomous political regimes. But most of the borders were drawn and most of the regimes were invested by the colonial-imperial powers with little or no concern for the principle of cuius region (whose realm), <\/i>cuius religio (whose religion), except perhaps with a view to play on religious divisions to better divide ut regnes (divide in order to rule).<\/p>\n Today especially the Western powers artlessly intervene, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of sovereign states to foster, weigh in the balance, or prevent regime change. Targeted drone and cyber strikes merely symbolize and facilitate such interventions, most of them in countries caught up in religiously, ethnically, tribally, and socially charged civil wars whose outcome will affect the ongoing regional geopolitical refiguration, including frontier revisions.<\/p>\n Of course, whereas the interventions by the West and its regional allies are cried up for legitimately and overtly promoting the cause of democratic governance, secularization, women\u2019s emancipation, antiseptic free-market capitalism, those by the non-Western countries\u2013most notably Iran and Russia\u2013are decried for illegally and covertly encouraging and supporting the antithesis, or polar opposite.<\/p>\n The so-called Arab and kindred springs in the West\u2019s far-flung bygone colonial-imperial realms are neither mere rebellions, nor popular uprisings, nor full-blown revolutions. Indeed, as yet there is no heuristic term or concept with which to characterize and capture their essence and thrust. Meanwhile it seems evident, however, that their course will be all but determined by the headlong global geopolitical realignment along with the major powers, trapped in globalizing corporate and finance capitalism, bent on pursuing neo-mercantilist policies in an emergent cut-throat competition for critical energy resources, rare metals, and commodities.<\/p>\n One can only hope\u2013against hope?\u2013that the current great transformation of the political and civil societies of the nation-states of the West\u2019s ex-imperial realms will be less turbulent, violent, and interminable than the great transformation in early modern Europe. Specifically, that their civil and sectarian wars as well as foreign wars and internal political skullduggery will be less ferocious and bloody than in England in the time of Oliver Cromwell, in France in the time of the Saint Bartholomew\u2019s Day massacre, and in Greater Europe during the General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the Twentieth Century.<\/p>\n In the Greater Middle East, given its tried statehood, governance, moderness, and national identity Israel may be said to be best steeled to weather the high winds of change were it not for its indeterminate and unrecognized borders, which make for a crying deficit of sovereignty compounded by a boundless expansion into Palestinian land. This will continue to feed a deep-felt hostility throughout the turbulent region and sap Israel\u2019s ethnic coherence and nationhood. Indeed, governed by a hubristic and parochial political class Israel is a formidable wild card in a neighborhood of seething geopolitical and international power plays fraught with potentially grave, nay existential self-endangerment for a country which has been its own worst enemy all these years and can no longer claim to be \u201ca light unto the nations.\u201d<\/p>\n Arno J. Mayer<\/i><\/b>\u00a0is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>He is the author of\u00a0The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions.<\/a>and\u00a0Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel\u00a0<\/a>(Verso).\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n