Of Current Conflicts and Chaos (#106)

Over the last three decades, as greater connectivity through information technology ushered in a time of rapid and extensive awareness of all the far flung corners of the globe, one would have reasonably expected the understanding of different peoples to have dramatically increased, and thus conflicts to have lessened.  

Additionally, lightening fast communications, extensive information, coupled with efficient transportation systems and unprecedented global monetary liquidity had made global trade all encompassing, and brought unprecedented prosperity to the World.  

To top it all off, there came with the prosperity and ease of transportation and greater co-operation among nations, unprecedented global mobility, and the freedom of movement of most nationalities across most borders.  

But then it all changed.  

As one surveys the World today, all that is observed is a World racked by conflicts, mistrust and suspicion, closing or threats of closing borders, shrinking global trade, commodities collapse, economies and corporations collapsing, high unemployment, regression in reforms, potentially greater trade barriers and increasing economic chaos with a potential and pending collapse of the global economic system?     

How did we get here?  

As far as our observations tell, the change took a turn for the worse after the financial crash of 2008. Till then most conditions seemed to be improving, in spite of the untruthful, immoral and disastrous wars of Iraq and Afghanistan that ignored the facts that the perpetrators of 9/11 came primarily from Saudi Arabia. In spite of the Bush Family (best of Saudi friends) initiated wars, economically, the rest of the World continued to prosper until, as is prone to happen in such conditions, greater prosperity brought out the greater greed, and Wall Street and its far reaching global network, crashed the global financial system with the sub-prime credit debacle.

After that, the World not only did not recover, but it has doggedly gotten much worse.

In their wisdom, since then, the powers that be, have tried to put out the global excessive credit/debt and resultant greed conflagration - by continuously pouring more fuel on it through the means of increasing liquidity and debt, exponentially.  

As most major governments around the World printed money on a hereunto unprecedented scale, most of it went into fueling speculation, artificial boosting of asset prices and mal-investment, leaving the economies struggling to recover from the 2008 hit, and encumbering them additionally with excessive debt loads.  

As if this unnatural and excessive experiments, to try and save the situation with more of the same past injurious actions were not enough, the U.S. government, with their willing and unwilling ‘coalition partners’ embarked on the most savage Middle East (Islamic countries) destruction campaign, in history.  

It was all done on the pretence of “war on terror”, leaving out of course the prime suspect Saudi Arabia, which has always been a most important friend and ally to the U.S., even if it does export the most virulent Islamic extremism, and the ‘9/11 terrorists’ were mostly Saudi.    

In Afghanistan, the terrorist training camps became the targets, as did Osama Bin Laden (who ironically and ultimately was found hiding in ‘war on terror ally’ Pakistan, near a military facility), and of course the Taliban, which had originally been the creation of the CIA and the Pakistan Intelligence Service, created to specifically fight the Soviets invasion of Afghanistan, and to drive the Soviets out (which they did, as they are doing to the Western forces more recently).

The limitless printing of money, badly used, and the indiscriminate destruction of Islamic countries, with unconscionable innocent civilian causalities, which spawned a far more ferocious terrorism blow back the World over, and the Islamic State, is what we are facing now, and is how we got here from a World of interconnected, well informed, increasingly open trade utopia, to a dystopian one, with everything regressing and global economic calamity staring us in the face.

So, even though it may be not be entirely the case, but in a large part, the post Soviet collapse United States, became the one Super Power that went a bit giddy by finding itself the uncontested heavyweight champion of the World. And in its hubris, unleashed a tsunami of toxic global debt (the misapplied cold war dividend?) and a wave of illegitimate conquests that destroyed entire Islamic regimes, thereby unleashing far greater terrorism, and in the process creating the biggest refugee crisis the World has seen, since the World War II.  

Welcome to the World 2016…