Ever since the Russia-Ukraine war started, you would have seen politicians from the US and Europe preach peace lessons to the world. The Western Media has been screaming to the world about how evil Vladimir Putin is; how terrible the war has been and how innocent people are suffering.
From the way they speak, it appears as though they care terribly about innocent people, right?
But what we don’t see is the side that western media doesn’t show us; the dark side of the geopolitics of the US and Europe.
Once you learn of the ruthless actions of the West, it will make you question if they are truly ambassadors of peace or ruthless hypocrites who act only for profit.
Recently, the Foreign Minister of India even pointed out the hypocrisy of the West in many interviews.
Let’s use a case study to understand a few things:
- How does the US play geopolitical games to dominate the world?
- How does the Western Media propaganda cleverly portray the US as a warrior for peace?
- Most importantly, as citizens of India, what are some study materials that will help you understand the brutal and hidden truth of Geopolitics?
1) A primary strategy that the US uses is ‘Overthrowing the unsuitable leader and empowering the puppet.’
A classic example to understand this is the ‘US affair with Iran and Iraq’.
This story dates back to the early 1900s. The Industrial Revolution in the West was picking up, and oil was becoming more and more important.
Oilfields had not been discovered in the UAE, Dubai or Qatar. So Iran was then one of the biggest suppliers of oil.
Although Iran had humongous oil fields, the government made very little money from oil. But why?
This is because the British cleverly established a joint venture with Iran called the Anglo-Iranian company!
Just like the East India Company exploited our Indigo Farmers in India, this company extracted oil from Iran and made a deal such that the British got 84% profit and the Iranian people got only 16% of the profits.
This was such an excellent arrangement for the British that despite not having their own oil fields; they still took away more than 80% of the profits. It was practically a gold mine for them.
But then Iran saw the rise of a new Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh who did something revolutionary. On 15th March 1951, he nationalised the entire Oil Industry of Iran and asked the British to get out of the country.
Now Iran was about to emerge as a powerful nation because they had complete control over one of the largest oil reserves in the world!
That’s when a coup was held and the Iranian people turned against Mosaddegh. This visionary leader was house arrested.
How? Because the CIA and the British ran Anti-Mossegh propaganda by portraying him as a threat to the Shah of Iran.
Once the Iranian population believed it, they arranged a coup, took him off power and gave the power to an obedient puppet called Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was already the Shah of Iran so the transfer of power was easily done.
There was no more talk of ‘Nationalisation of Oil’ after that. In the next 25 years, British and American companies set up their plants in Iran.
This included Exxon, Gulf Oil, Mobil, and Standard Oil of California. These companies started extracting oil by giving a mere 50% share of profits to Iran.
The US and British again made billions of dollars.
This was the first strategy of the US, to overthrow an unsuitable candidate and place him with a puppet who will work to their tunes.
This exploitation went on for the next 20 years until a religious revolution sparked up in Iran which overthrew the government! This is when a leader named Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power. As previously done, he kicked out the US and British and nationalised the Iranian oil.
Back to square one? The US has lost control over both Iranian oil and the weapons trade.
But this is where the second strategy of the US comes in:
2) Funding and Weaponising the Opposition.
By this time in 1979, the world had already found oil in UAE, Saudi and Iraq.
Of all these countries, Iraq was in strong opposition to Iran and saw the emergence of a leader called Saddam Hussein!
(The guy who started the Iran-Iraq war that went on for the next 9 years.)
This time instead of overthrowing the government, the United States sold weapons and funded Iraq to defeat Iran!
From 1983 onwards, Ronald Regan, the then president of the United States offered aid worth billions of dollars to Iraq.
This included funding, weapons and even military intelligence to make sure that the Iraqi army could destroy the Iranian army.
Do you see what happened?
Both sides of the war were selling US weapons.
People were dying on both sides; property was being damaged on both sides; the economy was collapsing on both sides.
But the US made money with the weapons trade!
After 8 years of war, a half million lives were lost, another million people were injured and the economic cost of the war exceeded One Trillion Dollars, shattering the economies of both Iran and Iraq!
Saddam Hussein was said to be a ruthless dictator who massacred close to 2.5 Lakhs people, used chemical weapons and poison gases to kill the Iranian army.
But despite knowing all this, the USA kept assisting Iraq and contributed to one of the bloodiest wars in human history!
Eventually, the economic damage prevented both Iran and Iraq from becoming oil superpowers.
Sadden Hussein had taken a huge loan of as much as 37 Billion dollars from countries in the Middle East that he was in no position to repay. Even OPEC lowered the price of oil because Iraq’s economy was crumbling.
This is where something crazy happened.
Out of nowhere, Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait, the 6th largest oil reserve in the world.
(If he was successful, he would have controlled a major chunk of the world’s oil trade.)
Kuwait Invasion
As soon as this happened, the United States turned against the same Saddam whom they once supported. The US formed a coalition of 35 countries and drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Again you had lots of weapons being used, lots of lives being lost, and lots of damage.
After the war, just like Russia today, Iraq had sanctions imposed on them, causing the economy to collapse further.
They were no longer a threat to the US.
So for some time, Saddam Hussein continued with his atrocities and Iraq continued with its struggle.
But 13 years later, the entire world was shocked to see this in 2003:
US Invasion Of Iraq
If Iran and Iraq both were facing a crisis, why did the US invade Iraq?
After 1999, the demand for oil across the world increased drastically; primarily because China and India were beginning to consume an extraordinary amount of oil for their development.
As a result, the oil prices started, going from just 21.57 dollars in 1999 to 49.86 Dollars in 2002!
Iraq is the 5th largest oil reserve in the world and the cost of oil extraction in Iraq was very less.
According to a study conducted in 2004, the cost of extraction in Saudi Arabia was 4 dollars per barrel; in Iran it was 4.5 Dollars per barrel; in Russia it was 7 dollars per barrel; but in Iraq the cost of extraction was as low as 1–1.5 dollars per barrel.
It was like a goldmine waiting to be extracted.
So the United States was now interested in Iraq.
But how could they justify the invasion of an economically weak and non-threatening country?
This is where the third strategy of the US comes in:
3) Propaganda! They used storytelling to tell the world about the dangers of Saddam Hussein.
The horrific 9/11 incident became an excuse to weave a story that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were involved in the attacks. They even speculated that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction; both of which have no concrete proof even today.
Then they started painting Saddam as an evil man who did terrible things to people like using chemical weapons, genocide and murders.
But funnily enough, 20 years ago, the same country gave military assistance to Saddam Hussein; after which he dropped chemical weapons on the Iranian Soldiers in the 1980s.
But during that time, Saddam was beneficial to the US, so no one spoke against him.
Everything that he was blamed for (genocide, murder and torture) was already being done even before 1995; but it was not publicised until 2002–2003.
This is pure western hypocrisy.
Unlike the Russian Invasion, which is being considered a cruel act against mankind, the US invasion was considered to be Liberalisation.
The harsh truth is, while the Ukraine invasion has killed 14,000 people, the invasion of Iraq killed a minimum of 1,34,000 people; even after which it was portrayed as an act of peace to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction.
But if killing 1,34,000 people is not mass destruction I don’t know what is!
After the invasion, Saddam Hussein was hanged, the Iraqi oil industry was privatised and US oil companies like Exxon and Chevron set up their bases in Iraq. Since then, they have been extracting billions of dollars worth of oil.
This is how the United States plays the game of geopolitics using warfare, weaponising and storytelling.
Now it’s upon you to decide for yourself if this is ethically right or wrong!
Study Materials:
1) Articles on how the West has benefited from the weapons trade during times of war.
2) A political science report on the invasion of Iraq
3) A foreign policy report that will tell you how the US helped Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war and did not act upon it despite it being illegal to use chemical weapons and then invaded Iraq for the same reason.
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1089&context=political_science_facpub
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/arms-trade-margaret-thatcher-kuwait-saddam-hussein
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/oil-dependence-and-us-foreign-policy
