| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
04 Jun 2004 02:38:12 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Worst is yet to come as US pays price of failure |
Worst is yet to come as US pays price of failure
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1231121,00.html
David Hirst
Friday June 4, 2004
The Guardian
In the New York Review of Books, veteran commentator Edward Sheehan
wrote from Nablus recently about a Palestinian expectation that this
summer would witness a simultaneous "explosion" in both Iraq and the
occupied territories.
That amounts to an ironic comment on perhaps the most fundamental
aspect of the Iraqi enterprise. For the Bush administration's
neo-conservatives, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to be nothing if
not region-wide in ultimate purpose, "transforming" the entire Middle
East, and bringing a final Arab-Israeli settlement.
David HirstDavid Hirst
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0312230342.57612de6%40posting.google.com
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Worst is yet to come as US pays price of failure |
05 Jun 2004 10:54:45 PM |
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On 4 Jun 2004 12:38:12 -0700, (maff), Message ID:
<18510aff.0406041138.620458b1@posting.google.com> wrote in alt.atheism;
Worst is yet to come as US pays price of failure
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1231121,00.html
Worst is yet to come as US pays price of failure
David Hirst
Friday June 4, 2004
The Guardian
In the New York Review of Books, veteran commentator Edward Sheehan
wrote from Nablus recently about a Palestinian expectation that this
summer would witness a simultaneous "explosion" in both Iraq and the
occupied territories.
That amounts to an ironic comment on perhaps the most fundamental aspect
of the Iraqi enterprise. For the Bush administration's
neo-conservatives, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to be nothing if not
region-wide in ultimate purpose, "transforming" the entire Middle East,
and bringing a final Arab-Israeli settlement.
The neo-cons were right about one thing: the Arab world, however
fractious otherwise, is bound by strong psychological and cultural ties,
and whatever happened in Iraq would profoundly affect the whole. The
trouble is that just as American success in Iraq would have made it
likelier elsewhere, so the failure that now so ominously threatens will
breed it elsewhere.
Not merely does the situation in Palestine get worse because of Iraq, so
it does via the rebound in Iraq too. An American disaster in Iraq always
had the built-in propensity to become a regional one.
For years it had been all but axiomatic that any western intervention to
bring down Saddam needed to be matched by an essentially pro-Palestinian
in the Arab-Israeli conflict too. The west had created Israel at the
Palestinians' expense, and any realistic settlement had so far as
possible to redress that historic injustice.
Otherwise, all the war's official objectives would be dismissed out of
court as just another blatant episode in the history of western conquest
and exploitation.
The neo-cons bought the axiom - but turned it on its head. Thanks to
them the invasion of Iraq was really the supreme expression of US double
standards in the region. In theory, the settlement was to come about
through region-wide democratisation and other blessings of America's
"civilising mission".
In practice, it would come about through a far higher level of external
coercion than ever applied before, and by a yet more extravagant bias in
Israel's favour. Even now, as he slips further into the Iraqi quagmire,
George Bush has put America openly behind prime minister Ariel Sharon's
expansionist designs.
So while the Palestinians have their own, American-created reasons for
stepped-up resistance, they naturally view that of the Iraqis as an
integral part of the same anti-imperialist struggle.
More tellingly - and despite their widespread disillusionment with
pan-Arabism, a Saddam legacy, from which the neo-cons had hoped to
profit - the Iraqis have adopted Palestine as part of their own.
Now, in Falluja, Sunni Islamists do battle in the name of Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin; in Najaf, the rebellious Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr calls
himself the "striking Iraqi arm of Hizbullah and Hamas".
So in Iraq and Palestine, more obviously than anywhere else, the US has
directly or indirectly empowered the very forces - Islamist and
nationalist, populist, violent and fanatical - it came to quell, because
that is where western interference has gone further than anywhere else.
But such forces are also the progeny of the moral and political
bankruptcy of Arab governments, which - in addition to their strictly
domestic shortcomings - have collectively failed in what should be the
basic duty of any state, the defence of land, people and sovereignty
against foreign assault and domination.
From that standpoint, the Islamists, or "Islamo-nationalists", are
simply non-state actors who have assumed that duty themselves, with
jihad, terror and suicide as their means. A Palestinian scholar said:
"They are profiting from a climate in which the Arab masses' greatest
joy is to see the US invasion of Iraq becoming ever more painful."
Al-Qaida, the quintessential expression of pan-Arab, pan-Islamic outlook
and action, is the most fearsome of those profiteers. America has turned
Iraq into the perfect arena for conducting the pan-Islamic struggle
against the western infidel and the "apostate" Arab order.
Lebanon's Hizbullah is strictly local in origin and membership, but it
enjoys greater region-wide prestige than al-Qaida, because it confined
itself to fighting - and besting - Israel in a classical guerrilla war
which few but Israelis and America classified as terrorist. It now
regards Iraqi resistance as accessory to its own.
Increasingly accused by the Israelis of aiding and abetting Palestinian
Islamists, and of accumulating a vast new firepower, it is ready and
waiting for a cross-border conflagration; but it wants Israel to start
it, so that its re-entry into the jihadist arena is legitimate as well
as spectacular.
Iraq cannot but hasten the day. Last week, breaking new ground, the
Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah announced that the struggle against
Israel and America was one; he only awaited the call from his Iraqi
brethren to join the latter.
An American failure will give also free rein to a whole other category
of non-state forces. Some are Islamist too, and hostile to the US, but
their defining characteristic is that they are ethnic or sectarian, and
hostile to each other. The danger is anarchy and civil war,
Lebanese-style.
In 1990 Arab regimes finally put out the Lebanese fire that threatened
to burn them all.
But Iraq will be a Lebanon writ large. So pivotal a country at
inter-communal loggerheads with itself will infect a whole region
replete with potential conflicts. Kurdish disturbances in Syria,
stirrings among Shias of the Gulf, are premonitory tremors of
convulsions to come.
The flow of oil and the security of Israel are fundamentals of US policy
in the Middle East. As its soaring price portends, the spread of the
Iraqi contagion to the Gulf will pose a real threat. As for Israel, an
American debacle will be very disturbing indeed.
Israelis already voice well-founded fears that the US public will come
to blame them for pushing their government, via the neo-cons, into
catastrophic misadventure, that America's will to stand by Israel
whatever the cost to its interests in the Arab world will be grievously
impaired, and that anti-American forces in the region will strive to
make the cost unbearable.
How the likes of Sharon would react, against Arabs and Palestinians, to
the mere hint of abandonment by Israel's indispensable superpower patron
will become one of the most pregnant questions in a Middle East where
the worst is yet to come.
(c) 2004 Guardian Newspapers
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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