Time is short for US to wrap up its many wars

Brian Cowen should remember Ozymandias before his Newsweek listing among the foremost leaders of the world goes to his head.

Ozymandias, alias Ramses II, who ruled another legendary empire around 1,250 BC for all of 66 years, was the subject of the famous sonnet by the English poet Percy Shelley in 1818. It ended with the lines:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

They could be saying that about Offaly in a few millennia. Some are saying that about Offaly already.

I recently returned from a fortnight’s holiday in western Sicily.

There, the ruins of several civilisations lie lonely and barren: Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Spanish and, maybe most famously, Carthaginian. 

The Carthaginian elite from around 650BC to 150BC thought they ruled the world - and they did rule what they saw as the world, from what is now the tip of Tunisia.

They controlled all the northern coast of Africa, a good bit of southern Spain, all the islands in the western Mediterranean and western Sicily.

They fought three wars against the Roman empire, the Punic Wars, and were defeated and finally destroyed.

The only Carthaginian remembered nowadays is Hannibal, and that is only because of his crossing of the Alps with elephants. That is invariably the way of empires, and the Offalyman had better remember that.

There is another Offalyman, or a bit of an Offalyman, who had better remember that too: Barack Obama.

Eight days ago, on August 14, the New York Times published a major news story revealing that the Obama administration had not just continued the ‘‘war against terrorism’’ initiative by George Bush, but had expanded it significantly.

The newspaper said that, in two dozen countries ‘‘from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics, crippled by ethnic and religious strife, the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to train terrorists’’.

It added that the Obama administration had intensified the CIA’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. It also recently worked with the French armed forces in a strike against ‘‘terrorists’’ in Algeria.

One of its most significant operations has been in Yemen, the country on the tip of the southeast coast of the Arabian peninsula, across the Red Sea from Somalia. A secret bombing campaign has been conducted in both Yemen and Somalia by the US in the last year.

There is no Congressional oversight of what is going on; no disclosure to the American public.

The initial air strike in Yemen was on December 17 last year, according to the New York Times. The Yemeni government claimed (untruthfully) that its air force had killed 34 al-Qaeda fighters at a training camp in the south of the country.

However, the Yemeni media identified the US as the instigator of the assault. Instead of 34 al-Qaeda fighters being killed, 41 members of two families were blown to bits.

The US had used cluster bombs in the strike.

There was another strike on December 24, and another last May, again with civilian fatalities. Among the victims was the governor of one of Yemen’s provinces.

The New York Times did not detail the strikes in Somalia, but these have been going on since the beginning of last year against the Islamist faction there.

This faction briefly assumed power, but was then overthrown in a military invasion by neighbouring Ethiopia, backed by the US.

Aside from all this, two interesting characters have been recruited by the Obama administration as part of the team overseeing these clandestine operations.

One of them is Michael Vickers, who helped run the CIA campaign in the 1980s to arm the Afghan mujahideen, many of whom are now the targets of American military operations there. 

Vickers featured in the Tom Hanks film Charlie Wilson’s War.

The other is Duane Clarridge, another former CIA man. He was involved in the illegal arming of right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua to undermine that country’s democratically elected Sandinista government.

Meanwhile, as Obama continues to promise that US forces will withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011, another curious operation is underway there, involving the employment of thousands of freelance ‘‘contractors’’ who will replace the professional US army.

These will be engaged to defend US installations around Iraq - a series of new US sub-embassies is being built around the country - and they will be able to use the drones, which have been the killing weapon of choice in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the last few years. (This further dimension was revealed in the New York Times last Thursday.)

Barack Obama is as much a warlord as were George Bush senior and junior, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

The US empire is expanding but, as with the Carthaginians and Ozymandias, there will come a day when the lone and level sands stretch far away. The (mis)fortunes of the American economy may soon see to that.