A year of living dangerously

As far as wars go, 2014 seemed mostly "ordinary" at first glance. This "usually" means that twelve major wars and countless smaller ones have been fought, that multi-decade or multi-year bloody confrontations have continued in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, the Gaza Strip, Nigeria, Mexico, and this list of horrors is not very long. different from the war balance of any year in previous decades.

However, it seems that the third world war has not been talked about since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In addition to Günther Grass, the new world conflict was also mentioned by Pope Francis, who condemned those who profit from the "madness of war" and called on the world not to be indifferent to the danger of the "third world war", which, according to the pope, can be said to have partially begun . "The third war it is conducted partially, with crimes, massacres, destruction... In today's world, behind the scenes, there are interests, geopolitical strategies, the desire for money and power, and there is also the production and sale of weapons," said the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The war that "made the difference" in 2014, raising fears that world conflict is on the brink, or already underway, was the conflict in Ukraine. Since the first fierce fighting in the spring, until today, around 5000 people have died in Ukraine, and over a million have fled. Tragically, but compared to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine in terms of the number of victims and victims does not seem like a conflict that should shake the world, even with the fact that for the first time after the Yugoslav wars of the nineties, war returned to Europe - frankly speaking, the east of Ukraine is a corner of Europe, much more so than the Balkans.

The spiral of fear is fed mostly by the impression that it is not the "pro-European" and "pro-Russian" rebels standing against each other on the front lines in Ukraine, but the United States of America and Russia, the main actors of the last cold war, and that their clash seems at least as serious as the aforementioned Cuban crisis , when the world was barely back from the brink of nuclear conflict.

OMINOUS PICTURE: If Ukraine is really a point of no return, what was the trigger that turned the war in this country from a local conflict into a global one? Riots in Kyiv's Maidan Square at the beginning of the year that brought down the former President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia's annexation of Crimea, the start of the offensive by Ukrainian forces on the rebel areas in the east of the country on April 7, the downing of the Malaysian passenger "Boeing" on July 17, for which the Western media and politicians accused Putin and the pro-Russian rebels, the counter-offensive of the rebels, the introduction of Western sanctions against Russia, which threaten to push this country into chaos? Or maybe the world conflict, mentioned by Grass and the pope, started much earlier, in other places, only few people were aware of it at the time.

When the troops of the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan at the end of 1979, no one could have guessed that the country would become a world superpower. The Soviet army returned definitively across the border river Amu Darya to their country in 1989, but ten years of grueling, bloody guerrilla warfare was the final blow to the USSR.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and with it the Soviet Union, it seemed for a moment that the world was rushing towards a new order in which there would be no reason for major conflicts. The respite was short-lived, in 1991 a coalition of Western and Arab allies decided to punish former ally and friend Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, with an invasion and then with sanctions due to the occupation of Kuwait. The first Desert Storm then looked like a local conflict, just like the breakup of Yugoslavia in the nineties, the civil war in Afghanistan that replaced the fight against the Soviets, or the bombing of FRY in 1999 by the NATO pact. However, from this perspective it is hard to escape the impression that all these wars seem like a continuous series, part of a larger, ominous picture, which Grass and Pope Francis talk about, just like what followed.

FROM THE WAR ON TERROR TO THE ARAB SPRING: In the ten years of the war in Afghanistan, Soviet troops not only fought against angry Afghan mujahideen armed and trained by the US and numerous Muslim countries, but also against thousands of "holy warriors" who flocked from all over the world to fight against "communist infidels ". When the communist empire collapsed, the "holy warriors" returned to their countries or dispersed to other battlefields, looking for the next infidel opponent, and America, yesterday's ally, was the logical choice.

One of those fighters, Osama bin Laden, on September 11, 2001, became a symbol of the war that marked the new millennium. Since Al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked targets in the USA with hijacked planes, the American invasion of Afghanistan followed, in which Bin Laden and the Taliban planned an attack on America. The "War on Terror" continued with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Pandora's box of sectarian, religious and national conflicts was thus wide open. Iraq's chaos, like Afghanistan in the XNUMXs, attracted old and recruited new holy warriors, the country sank into chaos in which it still groans today.

All of the above, along with the horror that followed the events in Afghanistan and Iraq in previous years, would not have been enough to classify the war of the world's largest power against gangs of fanatics as a part of the creeping planetary conflict if it had not been for the "Arab Spring". When Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, long-time rulers and dictators, fell in early 2011, the world enthusiastically began to talk about the indigenous movement of the masses desiring democracy and justice. It quickly became clear that there was no common denominator for the protests that spread like wildfire to many countries in the Arab world. In 2011, in a rebellion supported by the bombs of NATO aircraft, its Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, as well as numerous "holy warriors" who arrived from Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Libya was disintegrated as a country, entering a bloody chaos that continues today. That chaos, however, was just a preparation for the hell that began with the rebellion in Syria in early 2011. The rebellion quickly turned into a civil-sectarian war, the importance of which long ago went beyond the local level. In that war, in one way or another, almost all important players on the world political scene took part - America and its allies against Bashar al-Assad, Russia and Iran on his side.

photo: ap

When the US drew its weapons ready to bomb Syria in August 2013, on charges that Assad's forces were using chemical weapons against rebels, it may not have seemed like a world conflict was on the horizon, even though the Assad regime is virtually Russia's only ally in the Middle East. There were no open threats, but the atmosphere behind the scenes was tense - behind Syria, Iran loomed as the real target, and that would raise the stakes in the conflict to an unpredictable level.

photo: reuters

The bombs of the Western and Arab allies did not fall on Syria in 2013, which was interpreted as a momentary victory for Russia. That situation in Syria itself did not improve, the bloodshed continued, with another side to the conflict appearing in 2014 seemingly out of nowhere. The Islamic State (IS) organization spread the ideology of terror from Iraq to Syria during the previous war years, occupying a part of the northeast of the country, only to return to Iraq strengthened so much that it occupied large territories in the north of the country, with Mosul as its crown. Both IS and other extreme groups in Syria received fresh blood in previous years from thousands of volunteers who rushed to fight in another "holy war" from all over the world, with the West's eyes closed, supported by Turkey and the Gulf monarchies. When it turned out that things got a little out of control and IS started beheading prisoners from Western countries on camera, the US and its allies launched a bombing campaign against the jihadists. The common adversary, at least for a moment, put the USA and Iran on the same side, because IS is made up of Sunni extremists who are enemies of the "Shiite infidels" as much as the Westerners.

FEAR OF TOMORROW: More than 300 million people from Libya in the east to Pakistan in the west, in an almost uninterrupted belt of fire, probably have the impression that the world conflict has long heated up. They suffer, depending on where they live, from domestic and foreign extremists, the official army, bombs from Western countries, under the attack of drones. The coming year brings with it anxiety whether the rest of the world will have a similar impression in the near future.

The synergy of continuous conflicts feeds this anxiety - regular and irregular armies are running amok in Iraq and Syria, Barack Obama received war powers against the Islamic State (he also received the same powers for Russia); before the withdrawal of most US troops from Afghanistan at the end of this year, who are leaving with the tragicomic announcement that local forces are sufficiently trained to fight extremists, it was announced that 2014 was the bloodiest year in terms of the number of civilians and government soldiers killed; the massacre of more than 140 boys in a military school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar by the Taliban showed again how far the situation in this country has gone; Libya, Somalia, the Gaza Strip, welcome the new year with no hope of being any different from the last; the Israeli threat to attack Iran still hangs in the air. And the clinch in which Russia found itself with the USA because of Ukraine, like some ominous crown, hangs above all the listed wars, which only at first glance seem distant and local. If the border is crossed in that clinch, it will no longer matter to anyone whether the third world war started thirty years ago in the ravines of Afghanistan or over there in the plains of Ukraine.