Not so long ago it was the white man’s burden to civilise the world by killing hundreds of millions, stealing their land and resources and sending many into slavery.

Today modern colonialists and imperialists cannot hide their actions under the cloak of the white man’s burden, although some, like Tony Abbott, still give a hat tip to our ‘civilisation’ in the fight against their ‘barbarism and ‘death cults’.

ISIS is a barbaric force. It is the mirror reflection of Western barbarism, in particular the 2003 invasion that killed up to 1.5 million innocent Iraqis, based on extrapolating the 2006 Lancet study (which estimated an extra additional 654,965 deaths between the invasion in 2003 to 2006) to today. US imperialism (and before it British and other Western imperialisms and colonialism) has killed many, many more innocents than ISIS ever has or ever will.

If ISIS is a death cult our rulers worship at the altar of death. Every day for them is a celebration of the day of the dead that they create either directly or through upholding a system that unleashes violence, poverty and starvation on many in the world.

In 2003 the lie for invading Iraq was weapons of mass destruction. None of the war criminals involved – Bush, Blair and Howard, for example – have ever had to face justice for their crimes.

That invasion was an attempt among other things to reimpose US ‘order’ in the region and to send a message to China that the US was prepared to use its military to enforce its ways. Instead, and as the left predicted, it did neither. It not only has shown the Chinese the weaknesses of US military intervention, it has also given rise to ISIS, a direct challenge to US order in the region.

Have our Western rulers learnt anything from the rise of ISIS? Apparently not, for now we have Tony Abbott, the very model of a modern Major-General, considering a US ‘request’ for us to bomb ISIS in Syria.

I put the word request in quotation marks because it may well be that Abbott pushed the US to ask us to bomb ISIS in Syria. The same thing happened with Vietnam. The South Vietnamese request for Australian troops was in fact in response to Australia urging them to ask us.

The US wants the cover of other nations alongside them to help justify their decision. By being involved – Abbott will say yes – Australia is making a big down-payment on the home, contents and life insurance policy it has with US imperialism, giving the Americans, our ruling class hopes, less wriggle room in the future to avoid supporting us in our own regional military adventures or in the fight against Chinese imperialism.

If we look at some of the most recent obvious examples of US invasions – Vietnam, Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan – all have been abject failures. So too will bombing Syria.

Yet that does not deter the imperialists and the warmongers. Abbott would love a khaki election in 2016, with the as usual compliant Labor Party likely to be out Tampa’d once again. An election full of war hysteria (and of course terrorist ‘threats’) may well be his only chance of winning.

To sell it to us we have former Labor Party Foreign Minister Bob Carr telling us we have a moral duty to protect the innocents in Iraq. In part bombing ISIS means bombing innocents, but what is a bit of ‘collateral damage’ when you have a world to subjugate. And where was Carr when US imperialism and its Australian sock puppet (among others) invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in the first years? Nowhere. His selective moralism suggests that this moral duty is neither moral nor a duty but a cover for Australian imperialism in its support for the most criminal regime known to history, US imperialism.

Australia has a moral and legal duty to asylum seekers too, but I didn’t notice Carr in government dismantling the detention centre concentration camps and welcoming refugees. Our society has a moral duty to Aborigines but I didn’t notice Carr campaign against the ongoing genocide or for a treaty with their sovereign representatives. The list of moral duties is long and Bob Carr is sadly missing from most of them, except when it is in the interests of the ruling class to use high moralism to justify low murder.

The last big demonstrations in Australia were against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the lies of our leaders. Maybe it is time to organise protests against the next instalment of that madness, bombing Syria.

Bombing Syria – beware bloodthirsty imperialists and their moral duties