Well, no it isn’t.

The new Iraq war – the Turkish attack on the Kurdish North – is intensifying.  The last ten days have seen “hundreds” of deaths by the Turkish military’s own count, and I don’t particularly trust them to have made a list and checked it twice; who knows what the true figure is?  Turkey’s own Kurdish population has been brutally repressed for decades; their suffering is largely ignored by the West for political convenience, as was that of the Iraqi Kurds under Saddam.  In Freedom Next Time, John Pilger remembers:

When, in 1988, Saddam attacked the Kurdish village of Halabja with nerve gas, killing five thousand people, the British and American governments did their best to discourage coverage of the atrocity; the Americans went as far as blaming it on Iran. When I enquired at the time, I was told by the Foreign Offic in London that it was ‘far too easy’ to blame Saddam.

However, in 1991, when Saddam displeased his sponsors in Washington and London by attacking another of the clients, Kuwait, and was now an official enemy, the plight of the Iraqi Kurds suddenly became a great charitable cause in the West.

The Kurdish North, uniquely, did fairly well out of the blocades and bombing regime between the two Gulf Wars, gaining de facto independence, and has remained relatively safe and stable during the second war and the subsequent occupation.  Now the Turks’ bombing campaign is bringing them the pain that the rest of Iraq has known.

Speaking of the rest of Iraq, we’ve seen intensification there too.  The media have focused on the slow British retreat from Iraq, helping Gordon Brown announce each homecoming soldier about five times, and on the “successes” of the “surge”.  However, they haven’t been reporting on the new air war.  Figures released by the CSIS this month show an enormous jump in the air attacks in Iraq, with 2007 seeing nearly five times as many as 2006 and four times as many as 2004.  Combine this with the surge in counterinsurgency troop levels and you have the bloodiest year so far in what really has been a very bloody war.

The Afghanistan graph is scarier still, showing 34 times more air raids in 2007 than in 2004.  The logic behind these increases is partly military – both wars have been looking quite unwinnable lately – and partly political – nobody really likes the war these days (precious few having liked it in the first place), and the fewer American, British and NATO troops we see dying the less of a fuss we are likely to make (the Muslim foreigners, apparently, being of little concern).  It’s not surprising, then, that more and more of these attacks are being carried out by UAVs – flying robots of death with names like Reaper.  In fact, they look like normal bombers but slightly scaled down and with a bulge at the front – phallic even for a high-tech high-powered war machine – but, in the spirit of the season, I prefer to imagine the robots that bring death and misery from the skies as looking a little like this:

Speaking of seasonal goodwill, there won’t be snow in Somalia this Ecksmasstime.  Or maybe there will, but there’ll also be the worst humanitarian disaster in all of Africa.  That’s right, the Ethiopian invasion has made things worse than the Congo, where a civil war dragging on for 12 years has reached WWI-level body counts, or Darfur, the scene of the one and only humanitarian crisis the Western media actually care about has been unfolding.  Well, I’m not actually convinced it’s even meaningful or priductive to make such comparisons, but such at least was the judgement of the United Nations’ top official in the country, Ahmedou Ould-Abdullah, and his staff.

Almost a year ago to the day, in true Christmas spirit, the Ethiopian army invaded Somalia, with their brave American patrons providing bombing support, intelligence support and financial support, nipping in the bud a popular movement that was rebuilding Somalia after a decade and a half of anarchy, gang warfare and poverty.  Ould-Abdullah described the brief reign of the Islamic Courts as a “golden age” for Somalia, at least compared to what preceeded it and what followed it.  And it was crushed, with predictably painful consequences, and why?  There were certainly fears that the emergeant Somalian state would ally itself with Eritrea, a state which seceded from Ethiopia and has been a persistent thorn in its side, and whose increasing association with the word “terrorist” in the American government’s lexicon implies that it’s being prepared as a potential addition to the Axis of Evil should the addition of Sudan prove insufficient.  However, I don’t see why the U.S., who have everything, couldn’t have reached a political settlement with the Somalians, who have nothing.  I think they just don’t like grassroots mobilisation; better, for America, that the people stay out of their countries’ politics, and leave things to a bureaucratic elite.

This is perhaps just the opening battle in a new scramble for Africa, where Europe is trying desperately to renegotiate its colonial trade treaties quicker than they expire, and where the U.S. is establishing the AFRICOM military strategy as an attempt to counter the influence of China.

And then there’s Palestine, where an event took place 2000 years ago which we’re all ostensibly celebrating today, in town which now, as then, is occupied by a brutal regime which doesn’t hesitate to murder children if it helps it stay in control.  The West Bank, in which Bethlehem is located, is still being colonised to this day, although it has seen many restrictions lifted this year in an attempt to strengthen one faction of Palestinian politics in order to isolate the other.  The other half of this strategy is being implemented in the Gaza strip, where a seige has been being slowly tightened over the past year, where clean water is a distant memory, as are medical supplies, and where malnourishment is now the norm.

Anyway, merry Christmas.