A certain predictable phrase is doing the rounds amongst those who imagine themselves level-headed and reasonable in polite society, as war escalates, yet again, in the Middle East: “Both sides are bad as each other.”
It sounds sensible. Balanced. Reasonable. Just like my Mother who would diplomatically and resolutely never take sides in the petty sibling disputes she endured (and sometimes still endures).
For a mother it’s one thing to treat all her children equally. But when it comes to war, this reductionist, simplistic view of bothsidesism is folly. It is simply not rooted in political analysis. It is more a way of avoiding a much more uncomfortable question: who actually holds the power?
Irish people, you’d think, should recognise this pattern immediately. Wolfe Tone didn’t spend his time telling the Irish people that the British Empire and Ireland were simply two flawed sides in a complicated dispute. He understood that when a powerful empire dominates and colonises weaker nations, the central political question isn’t whether the weaker country has internal problems. Of course it does. Every country does. Show me a country where human rights abuses don’t exist. And while we’re at it, what is more abusive than 4,000+ Irish homeless children, in one of the world’s supposedly richest countries?
But I digress… well kind of, and kind of not.
The real question is who is exercising power over the world right now, and who is paying the price for it?
So when people say a conflict is simply “two bad countries fighting,” it’s worth asking a few basic questions.
How many countries has Iran invaded in the last half-century?
Now compare that with the record of the United States.
The United States has carried out aggressive, illegal military invasions or interventions across the world, from the war in Vietnam, to the invasion of Panama in 1989, to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the long war in Afghanistan beginning in 2001.
Historians and analysts have documented over 100 U.S. military interventions abroad since the Second World War alone.
This isn’t ancient history, lads. It’s the political reality of the current (no) world order.
And let’s talk about the presidency of America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whose administration oversaw major military operations and interventions in Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrat or Republican, ‘Yes We Can’ applies to the impunity of both parties in the U.S. - two kompromat parties with close links to the pedophilic Epstein class, and in receipt of millions of dollars in AIPAC funding.
The consequences of U.S. imperialism are visible everywhere. Wars, coups, sanctions, siege, and economic upheaval displace millions of people, forcing them to leave their homes and migrate in search of survival. 36 million refugees were displaced worldwide under Obama’s administration during his 8 year term. And don’t get me started on Shannon Airport, data centres, big pharma, Shannon LNG…breaking the econmoic, political and military chains of Zionism is not for the faint hearted. Just look at Spain.
Yet in Western political discourse, the narrative regarding who started the war is almost always reversed: the empire becomes the responsible actor, while countries like Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, on the receiving end are framed as the primary source of instability, and instigators.
That’s where the “both sides are bad” argument becomes a useful tool of imperialism.
If every conflict is simply two equally bad actors clashing, then no one has to examine the deeper structures of capitalist power that keep producing these neverending, lucrative wars. No one has to ask why one country, the U.S. maintains hundreds of military bases across the world while other countries wouldn’t dare do that. No one has to ask who benefits from a neoliberal regime sustained by constant NATO military pressure.
And most importantly, ordinary working people in the countries that dominate the system are never asked to hold their own governments accountable.
Ireland’s revolutionary tradition offers a much clearer way of thinking. The first responsibility of politically conscious people is not to moralise from the pulpits of 4X4s and D4 dining rooms about faraway governments, or parrot racist, imperialist language that is used to manufacture consent for war, such as “regime” and “dictator”. It is to examine the actions carried out in their own name, with their taxes, by the entities, or puppets that claim to represent them.
That doesn’t mean pretending other governments are virtuous or perfect. It means refusing to accept a false equivalence that hides the enormous imbalance and abuse of U.S. power in the modern world.
Or put simply:
When Uncle Sam says it is going to war with another country, the most important question is not whether the other country is flawed. The real question is why the Epstein empire is doing it, again — and who actually stands to gain?