American National Security in the Age of Insecurity - Part 1
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Part 1: American National Security and Presidential Doctrines
The notion of total national security has never been a reality, neither during the heydays of Egyptian, Assyrian, Byzantine, Persian, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Empires nor now for any nation, big or small. All nation-states, therefore, crave for national security through a combination of economic, political and military power plus an effective diplomacy. Simple bullying has never been a guarantor of national security.
In his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress on December 2, 1823, President James Monroe stipulated America’s national security principles, which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. It said that European powers were no longer to colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas. The United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and their colonies. However, if later on, these types of wars were to occur in the Americas, the United States would view such action as hostile. The Doctrine was a proclamation of America’s moral opposition to colonialism.
Unfortunately, the same Doctrine was reinterpreted later, which came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary, to establish America’s exclusive hegemony over other smaller nations in the western hemisphere. The Corollary allowed America to colonize (as it happened to Puerto Rico and Cuba) or intervene in small Caribbean and Central American states like Cuba (1906-1910), Nicaragua (1909-1911, 1912-1925 and 1926-1933), Haiti (1915-1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), in the name of stabilizing the economy of those nations. In 1928, the Clark Memorandum concluded that the United States had a self-evident right of self-defense and need not invoke the Monroe Doctrine as a defense of its interventions in Latin America.
The Cold War (from mid 1940s to mid 1990s) was a period marked by costly defense spending, arms race – conventional and nuclear, and proxy wars in which the USA competed with the Soviet Union to expand her zone of influence in the world. America sought “containment” strategy to stop the domino effect of nations politically moving towards Soviet Union and socialism/communism as against United States and capitalism and used military force to “rollback” communism in countries where it had taken root. To this end, America forged numerous alliances, particularly in Western Europe and the Middle East.
In 1954, the U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles cited the Monroe Doctrine to justify America’s intervention in Guatemala that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, through a CIA-sponsored coup d’etat. A year earlier, the CIA had also toppled Dr. Mossaddeqh’s nationalist government in Iran, perceived to be pro-Soviet. Such a rollback policy, however, pushed Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland and Hungary) further toward the Soviets.
During Kennedy Administration the policy of containment reached its most expansive and consensually accepted stage to oppose Soviet influence, or what was dubbed as “the Communist menace” in Cuba. During Nixon Administration, America relied on friendly regimes to police their regions.
As the Vietnam War ended, the Clark Amendment of 1976 was adopted prohibiting aid to anti-Marxist fighters in Angola. Congress, therefore, refused to support war against indigenous Communist dictatorships, no matter how heavily supported by the Soviet Union or its proxies. However, even after the Clark Amendment became law, clandestine aid to Angola would continue under the CIA Director, George H. W. Bush. Israel stepped in as a proxy arms supplier for the USA.
In the final year of Carter Administration, Dr. Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, adopted the “containment” strategy, to be continued overtly and aggressively later by President Reagan, to aid the Mujahideen in their fight against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That stopped not only the Soviets from reaching the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, but also helped to bring about the collapse of the regime.
President Reagan’s program of CIA support for the Nicaraguan contras, that did not fight foreign occupation, broke post-Vietnam precedent of “containment” strategy and instead, adopted the “rollback” strategy. Like the Nixon Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine turned to proxies. Unlike the Nixon Doctrine, however, it supported not the status quo but revolution. Subsequently, during the 1980s Reagan would justify America’s intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala and Grenada. He would also support the rebels in Angola, Cambodia and Eritrea. To pledge his adherence to international law, Reagan declared: “Support for freedom fighters is self-defense and totally consistent with the OAS and U.N. charters.”
As can be seen in the post WW II Cold War era, American national security strategy increasingly became intertwined with a strategy for global hegemony. As argued by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, quite a few of America’s engagements in the third world countries had little to do with legitimate American security needs. Instead of draining Soviet military and financial resources America was ending up dissipating her own.
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9/11 and the Road to Afghanistan
In this age of modern technology and globalization, total national security is simply unattainable. It is only a myth. Modern technology is diminishing the effect of geographic distance and is punctuating traditional protective umbrella for any nation – strong or weak. It is capable of importing and exporting violence long distance through a variety of means. So, national security will continue to be an increasingly difficult task for any government in our very fast paced world.
Prior to 9/11, American national security concern was heavily focused on the possibility that unfriendly states might launch or threaten to launch a missile attack with nuclear warheads on the USA. Missile defense system was thus a rational choice and workable strategy that gained some popularity, especially among the Reaganite Republicans. (This idea has not quite died down as is apparent from Senator McCain’s recent remarks in the wake of Iran’s firing of long and medium range missiles on July 9, 2008.)
9/11 was like a cluster bomb that shattered all such perceptions about national security. It showed that to puncture national security of the most powerful nation on earth, the foe does not need much – no nuclear bomb, no missile, not even enough money. It just has to be extra-smart, thinking outside the box, to improvise and be resolute to its cause. Truly, those 19 terrorists that attacked America had only box-cutters and a willingness to forfeit their own lives. They weren’t cowards. So how can America secure itself against an enemy that is physically weak but endowed with an unfathomed passion?
In the wake of 9/11, the rising inclination in America to seek enhanced national security is quite understandable. But Americans must ask: what is the guarantee that those surveillance cameras, metal detectors and long checkups in airports, terminals and stations can stop the next 9/11 from happening? The hard truth is: none, zero! In its effort to stop global terrorism, how many people can the government spy on, how many bank accounts can it freeze, how many conversations can it eavesdrop on, how many emails can it intercept, how many letters can it open, how many phones can it tap? Doesn’t too much data actually hinder intelligence and decision making? As Arundhati Roy has argued, rather prophetically, back in October 21, 2001, “The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the first casualty. It’s already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.”
Just nine days after 9/11, on September 20, 2001, President Bush issued an ultimatum to the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had sheltered al-Qaeda demanding handover of Osama bin Laden (OBL) to the USA. The next day, September 21, 2001, at a news conference in Islamabad, the Taliban ambassador said that he was sorry that people had died in the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but appealed to the United States not to endanger innocent people in a military retaliation. He said, “Our position on this is that if America has proof, we are ready for the trial of Osama bin Laden in light of the evidence.” On October 4, 2001, the Taliban offered to turn OBL over to Pakistan for trial in an international tribunal that operated according to Islamic Sharia law. Under pressure from the USA, President Musharraf rejected the offer saying that he could not guarantee his safety.
On October 7, 2001, before the onset of Anglo-American military operations, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan offered to “detain bin Laden and try him under Islamic law” if the United States made a formal request and presented the Taliban with evidence. This counter offer was immediately rejected by the U.S. as insufficient. [America had maintained that the “evidence”, which would not stand up in a court of law, against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the “coalition”.]
Within hours of the Taliban offer, President Bush declared war against Afghanistan. The UN wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. Thus, in an instant, centuries of jurisprudence were carelessly trashed. With massive bombing campaigns from the air for two months and cooperation on the ground from the Northern Alliance (made up of non-Pushtoon speaking minorities from the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek communities), the NATO forces were able to overthrow the Taliban government (made up of majority Pushtoons). Afghanistan, a country that had already been reduced to rubble since the Soviet invasion days (thanks to 45 billion dollars worth of arms and ammunition that were poured by Soviet Union and the USA), was now pounded into finer dust.
While the NATO-backed Hamid Karzai government rules Afghanistan now, the Taliban has become a resurgent force lately, which in all likelihood could topple the government there unless NATO’s military presence is beefed up significantly. That resurgence can best be explained through NATO’s daily bombing campaigns and the indiscriminate slaughter of local populations. Pakistan, with a 1500-mile long border with Afghanistan and some 30 million Pushtoons living inside its porous border along the contentious Durand Line, is also in a serious national crisis. She is vulnerable to disintegration along major ethnic lines.
If America is serious towards sustaining a friendly government in that region, as part of her long term strategic objective, she and her European and Australian allies must stop wanton killings of civilians and pour in tens of billion of dollars towards massive reconstruction projects in the war-torn area. That is too little a price for decades of abuse, manipulation and devastation of the region! That would surely be a worthy investment to garner trust from the affected communities.
Part 2: Bush Doctrine of Lies and Deceptions: The War in Iraq
The Bush Doctrine echoes many of the ideas of the neoconservative think tank - Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was founded in 1997. PNAC, in its founding “Statement of Principles”, stated the “need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.” The following year, it called for deposing Saddam Hussein. Among the signers of PNAC’s original Statement of Principles were a number of people who later gained high positions in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
Therefore, it was not surprise that, as with Afghanistan, Bush did not want to give diplomacy a chance before invading Iraq. On March 2003, just 13 days before the invasion, Dr. Hans Blix, the Chief UN weapons inspector, reported, “No evidence of proscribed activities has so far been found” in Iraq. He said that further inspections would continue. But the U.S. government, unhappy about the Blix report, announced that “diplomacy has failed” and that it would proceed with a coalition of allied countries, named the “coalition of the willing”, to rid Iraq of its alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The U.S. government abruptly advised U.N. weapons inspectors to immediately pull out of Baghdad.
Under the declared pretext of disarming Iraq of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and as part of overall strategy towards minimizing threat to the USA from unfriendly nations, President Bush invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003 and subsequently toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The invasion was condemned by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declaring that it “was not in conformity with the UN charter” and was “illegal”.
After some two years of frenzied search, when no WMDs were found, Bush conveniently described the Iraq War as a “central front in the war on terror.” In that process of invasion and subsequent occupation, in the last five years more than a million (and counting) Iraqi civilians have been killed (most of these in the first three months of the war) by the Coalition forces. Iraq’s economy and infrastructure, once the envy of the entire Middle East, have been vastly destroyed by massive aerial bombing campaigns, and missile, tank and mortar attacks.
In recent months, with a surge in deployment of American armed forces, violence seems to have become manageable. However such a reduction in violence may be too superficial and short-lived. Unemployment runs too high and grievances against America’s orgy of slaughter, rape and destruction are too deep to be either ignored or forgotten in an area where people have long memory. These are sure recipes for disaster and, unless redressed properly would continue to challenge the goal of bringing about stability, safety and security in Iraq, plus phased withdrawal of American forces. These may haunt American vital interests both inside and outside Iraq.
It is important to remember that there were many concerned human beings that objected to America’s invasion of Afghanistan and (more so for) Iraq. According to Dominique Reynie, a political scientist from the University of Paris, between 3 January and 12 April 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against war in Iraq, the demonstrations on February 15, 2003 being the largest and most prolific. Even NATO members like Canada, France and Germany opposed the invasion suggesting disarmament through diplomacy. Russia also cautioned against invasion. However, all such voices of reason and restraint were snubbed by the war party and their paid agents in the corporate media.
What is also so horrible and evil about the entire Iraqi episode is that President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to manufacture a false pretense for the war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This charge is made in a recently published book “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind. The author says that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003, three months before the invasion, that Iraq had no WMDs.
Can the end justify the means – no matter how criminal these may be? But that is what President Bush and his trusted lieutenants were set to do towards the regime change in Iraq. In an earlier book – The Price of Loyalty - Suskind wrote that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even dividing up Iraq’s oil wealth. Six months before 9/11, a Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts” surfaced, which included a map of potential areas for exploration of oil in Iraq. Suskind said, “It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions.”
Bush wanted so much to convince American people of the need to invade Iraq that the White House set up a secret team in the Pentagon to implant evidence. The Office of Special Plans (OSP) routinely rewrote the CIA’s intelligence estimates on Iraq’s weapons programs, removing phrases like “probably,” “likely” and “may” as a way of portraying the country as an imminent threat. They also used unreliable sources to create reports that ultimately proved to be false. In this regard, one may recall that Bush said, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” in his State of the Union Address. The documents supporting that statement were forged.
Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell also claimed that some aluminum tubes Iraq had attempted to buy were intended for use in a uranium centrifuge to produce nuclear weapons. These were the only physical evidence that Bush had against Iraq. But as CNN and New York Times have shown this evidence had been rejected by the Department of Energy and other intelligence agencies long before Bush used them in his speeches. According to Ron Suskind, Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and is a crime of greater impact than Nixon’s Watergate.
As is quite evident, President Bush and his entourage of advisers chose war over diplomacy, carnage over common sense, unilateralism over multilateral cooperation, revenge over reconciliation, and deception over truth. Unapologetic and stupidly stubborn, the Bush Administration and its neocon advisers still continue to preach the wisdom of regime change and staying the present course in its Global War on Terror (GWOT). Thus, to many of them war against Iran is the only option to settle the dispute concerning her nuclear enrichment program.
The architects of war within and outside the White House and Pentagon forget that once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the difference between right and wrong often gets blurred; morality and political tolerability of terrorism (insurgency or liberation movement) become rather touchy, bumpy, ticklish terrain. One country’s terrorist is too often another’s freedom fighter. The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world; e.g., while it supported the Contras in Nicaragua, it violently opposed the rebels in El Salvador. Violence only breeds more violence and is no recipe for guaranteeing national security. Today’s witness to massacre can become tomorrow’s avenger or terrorist. As is well-known people rarely win wars, and governments rarely lose them; people get killed. So, why this preference to kill people, especially when the President likes to portray the USA as a “peaceful” nation?
Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days after attacking Afghanistan, President Bush said: “This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire.” Once again through his murderous campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq, targeting civilian population, Bush proved that his actions belie those lofty ideals on which America was founded. While he is not alone to dump those lofty ideas, only the worst, many of his predecessors similarly have dragged America – the “most free nation in the world” - into denying the same freedom to others – all in the name of national security. Even before the current crisis, stemming from 9/11, America in the post-WW II period has bombed China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), and Yugoslavia (1999). Hardly a decade passed uninterrupted without America’s declaration of war against some country! This shows that far from being a ‘peaceful’ nation that is “not tired of rejecting violence” America has opted for violence frequently to settle international disputes. As Arundhati Roy so aptly pointed out “Infinite Justice” for some may mean “Infinite Injustice” for others, and “Enduring Freedom” for some means “Enduring Subjugation” for others.
In retrospect who would disagree today that if the early findings of Dr. El-Baradei’s IAEA and Dr. Blix’s UN weapon inspection team on Iraq were believed by the Bush Administration and the team given more time for inspection, we could have avoided the carnage in Iraq today?
As Americans search for viable strategy for national security, they must also ask about the cost of the war so as to be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on competing options. Credible estimates of Iraq’s war to the US economy are believed to range anywhere from 1.2 to 3 trillion dollars. (It is worth mentioning here that America’s GDP is less than 13 trillion dollars.) That’s a huge burden for America!
In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans must come to the grips that America’s criminal actions outside – the “freedom” to dominate, humiliate and subjugate others - can seriously impair their own freedom at home.
National Security Choice:
If America is earnest about national security in this fast-paced technology-driven age of globalization, she must approach this new task with introspection and a modicum of honesty and humility. She must acknowledge her past mistakes in judgment and approach the task rationally and objectively without any bias and influence from any particular lobby. She must analyze how things might have been if America had not opted for violence in its recent engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would those options jeopardize or compromise American national security adversely?
The real issue in relation to America’s national security ought to be how much insecurity can she live with while promoting her interests in an increasingly interactive and interdependent world? Given her status as the only true superpower of the 21st century, how much of America’s security is dependent on multilateral cooperation and how much of it can be or should be sought unilaterally? These simple questions offer rather highly complex and very difficult national security choices, with sweeping domestic implications. Ultimately, given the fast changing and dynamic nature of both modern technology and the international setting, any answer will have to be contingent and temporary.
In his book, The Choice, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that power and force alone are not sufficient to preserve American national security. It needs cooperation and not coercion at the global level. As I have argued elsewhere legitimate political grievances require political solutions that are just and equitable, and not bombs and missiles. When such issues are ignored, they simmer and produce natural backdrops for breeding new recruits that are willing to die much like Udham Singh of yesteryears and Mohamed Atta of our time. Can American afford another attack from the likes of Atta?
Part 3: Finding Common Grounds for Global Security with Dar al-Islam
Thanks to 9/11 and the merchants of war, the myth of “clash of civilization” between the technologically superior West and the technology-starved House of Islam (Ar. Dar al-Islam) has been getting much notoriety. So pervasive is this propaganda that we often forget that these two powers, while sometimes colliding in the last 14 centauries, did also have comparable periods of peace, compatibility and cooperation.
The lowest point in this encounter between these two world powers in the last two centuries has to be the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the last vestige of an Islamic Caliphate. This I say, because while the office of the Caliphate by the late 19th and early 20th century had become rather feeble and ineffectual, it nonetheless exerted a sense of belonging and rallying ground for hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the Dar-al-Islam from Indonesia to Senegal. Naturally, this united front of Dar-al-Islam against an already fractured Europe, divided along nation states, was perceived to be too dangerous and defiant by the expansionist powers of the West—the precursors to today’s Globalists. Thus came the Freemasons and their paid agents, aided by European powers, to destroy the Caliphate. They pondered while religion has been in decline in the West and in most of the East, and spirituality has been traded for materialism as living standards have increased, and popular culture has become almost completely secular to the level of becoming almost agnostic, why has the situation been different within the Islamic Middle East?
So, as part of a long-term strategy, the British were to promote racism and nationalism, alcohol, gambling, fornication and tempt Muslim women to uncover themselves – all in the name of emancipation of Muslims. But most important was the strategy to “insert heresies into Muslims’ creedal tenets and then criticize Islam for being a religion of terror.” It was like cutting religion with the scissor of religion!
The rest is history. The Ottoman Empire was broken and sliced into pieces, and heretical beliefs, including extreme brands of Islam, were promoted and patronized by the European colonial powers – the latter process to be continued later by certain Muslim governments in the post-colonial era. Conspiracies against Islam are nothing new to Muslims and, thus, have often been fought by their uncompromising ‘ulama. Truly, clerical Islam was a necessary response to the imperial Europe that degraded Islamic religion, plundered Islamic resources, and cast the Islamic way of being and living as inferior to theirs. While weakened considerably from the post-colonial (minus-Caliphate) experience in Muslim nation states, they still refused to remain silent. Speaking thus of the imperial (Globalist) plan in the post-colonial era, one such Muslim scholar once said, their aim “is to keep us backward, to keep us in our present miserable state so they can exploit our riches, our underground wealth, our lands and our human resources. They want us to remain afflicted and wretched, and our poor to be trapped in their misery … they and their agents wish to go on living in huge palaces and enjoying lives of abominable luxury.”
It’s, therefore, not difficult to understand the frustration of the Globalists in the post-colonial, secular era. They pondered: how come when the Judeo-Christian ethos has eroded the Islamic ethos continued to experience an apparent resurgence? They sought to remove this obstacle from their path by disparaging Islam and besmirching its noble messenger. They resorted to malicious propaganda so that today, we imagine that Islam simply consists of a handful of legal topics and has nothing to offer for peaceful coexistence in a modern world. They have also tried to destroy the reputation of the genuine fuqaha and the ‘ulama that stood uncompromising at the head of Islamic society.
And yet against all odds, the Islamic revolution took place overthrowing America’s trusted friend – the Shah of Iran. This change was like an earth shattering event that showed Muslim refusal to settle for a system that was dictated by the West and. culminated in the further worsening of uneasy relations with the USA that had taken over the mantle of leadership in the West from her allies – the former European colonial powers. In recent years, since President Bush’s declaration of Iran to belong to the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, the American-Iran relationship is one of the worst it has ever been.
There is no escaping from the hard, bitter truth that most of the crises that have plagued our world in the last hundred years grew out of western world’s two world wars. For its selfish sense of security and unfathomed greed, the West seeded poisonous plants of permanent insecurity in all the territories it once controlled, devastating our world with war and carnage that would become a recurring theme. And the same goes for the Dar al-Islam where artificial frontiers were created: the people that were together were separated and the people that were separated were forced to live together. The most glaring examples of this injustice can be seen in Africa and how the Kurdish people were divided.
In this age, a major task facing the USA towards global security will be the pacification of a volatile region that stretches from the Middle East to the Central Asia. This region, part of Dar al-Islam, contains two-thirds of world’s proven oil reserves and vast quantities of natural gas – energy supplies that are absolutely essential for very survival of the western civilization. A stable and uninterrupted flow of oil and gas from the region is thus very critical to the USA and her allies.
However, as we have noticed, American relation with the world of Islam has been a very precarious one for several years. Over the last three decades, outside America’s intervention in the Balkan territories of former Yugoslavia to stop the massacre of Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian Muslims, there is hardly a single major event that could be cited towards a gelling of the relationship.
In more recent years since 2001, this relationship between the Dar al-Islam and America is mediated by horrible images of 9/11, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. A March 2008 Zogby International poll of 4,000 people in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Jordan found that Arab opinion of the U.S. was at its lowest since 2002, with unfavorable ratings ranging from 80 percent in Egypt and Jordan to 71 percent in the UAE and Morocco. Coming as it does from the most reliable polling group, these are worrisome signs for America to pay attention to. Her public diplomacy is simply not working.
Reciprocal prejudice is at an all time high, and Islam is now equated as a terrorist faith in the West. Interestingly, as outlined in an article by Peter Goodgame - “The Globalists and the Islamists” - the Globalists have had a hand in shaping and financing all the “terrorist” organizations of the 20th century, including the mastermind of 9/11. Following the dictates of Hegelian dialectic to force us into the acceptance of their final alternative - a New World Order - the Globalists, according to David Livingstone, have created two antagonizing forces - the “Liberal-Democratic” West and Terrorism or “political Islam”. It is essentially the philosophy of “us” against “them”. That is, these two cannot occupy the same space together; one has to leave for the continuation of the other. Thus, the GWOT becomes a necessary tactic at the disposal of the Globalists to fulfill their strategic objective of eradicating untamed Islam – the Islam that resisted foreign occupation and hegemony. Obviously, in their “new” world order, the pristine Islam that was preached by the Prophet Muhammad (S) has no place even among the Muslims. Their prescribed role is one of subservience and unquestioned loyalty to the Globalists, as so dutifully now parroted by cultural coolies like Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji. Not surprisingly, to the Globalists of our time, the Caliphate - once the unifying, emotive force amongst Muslims - is proscribed as an evil political system, an utterly dirty word in their dictionary!
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What Can Be Done?
From the standpoint of America’s national security (and those of other western countries) vis-à-vis the Islamic world, the key question is: how the world of Islam will define itself politically and economically? Will the Dar al-Islam allow easy access to western goods in trade and commerce while it mostly exports raw materials, e.g., oil and gas, to sustain the modern, prosperous life-style in the West? The answer to these questions will vary depending on the bumpy nature of unrest and stability in the Muslim world; after all, Dar al-Islam is disunited and there is no one-shoe-fits-all answer. It is politically unstable and militarily weak, and in all likelihood, will remain as such for quite some time.
In general, the Muslim world is not against modernity or technology (although there is no escaping that there are some risks or unintended consequences of that juxtaposition). Nor is the Muslim world hostile to democracy. (As a matter of fact, fearing a repeat of the Hamas victory in Palestine, the USA and her allies have been against such democratization in the region.) It is not against capitalism either (with some checks and balances, of course). Hence, it would be impudent and foolish of anyone to assume that the Muslim world is so culturally distinct that it is incapable of making the necessary transition to become a more progressive society.
On the economic front, global strategists like Dr. Brzezinski argue rather strongly in favor of a massive undertaking in the Muslim world (shouldered by the USA and her European allies) that is much more daunting than what the Marshall Plan had been for Europe in the post-WW II era. They opine that economic prosperity—translated into job opportunities and capacity to buy goods within one’s means—would have a calming, soothing effect on millions of people that live in the region. The rationale in favor of this undertaking should come from the mere realization that while the cost of this undertaking may run into billions of dollars, it is still a “peanut” investment compared to the trillion dollar cost of the war that is now borne by the US economy.
The current GWOT is simply not succeeding, and will fail miserably in the long run. By demonizing the enemy and exploiting fears, it may have rallied American people to support government initiatives on domestic and international fronts. However, as a long-term strategy, it lacks vision, can be highly divisive at local and international levels, can breed intolerance and xenophobia and unleash paranoid emotions. At international level, it also risks America being dumped as a self-appointed plaintiff, police, jury, judge and hangman. A pragmatic thinking outside the current paradigm is necessary for greater good of America and her people.
On the political front, there is no denying that of all the grievances in Dar al-Islam, the most important one is Arab resentment of American support for Israel. That has to change from a blind support to a cautious one, when warranted. A one-sided history, scripted by Christian-Zionists and rehearsed, promoted and recast by pro-Israeli zealots in the media, has forced millions of gullible Americans into believing that Palestinians don’t belong to the Holy Land. It does not teach them that it was the Palestinians who were the original inhabitants of the land, and that the European influx of Jews to the territory was rather a more recent incident dating less than a hundred years ago. It is immoral and criminal to steal someone’s land and give it to someone else. And that is what the British Mandate did to the Palestinian people, who have become undesirables inside the Occupied Territories and, as refugees outside, are at the mercy of the world community. Finding a peaceful and equitable solution to their sixty-year old plight is the most urgent need of our time. This is at the heart of the Middle East crisis and Muslim resentment towards the USA.
The right of return of Palestinian refugees is considered one of the thorniest issues towards finding a workable formula for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. However, if America cares deeply about regional peace, she must stand for truth and justice on this vital issue the same way Erich Fromm (1900–1980), one of the great Jewish philosophers, had stood nearly fifty years ago. Speaking on the right of return of the Palestinian people to their homes, he said, “It is often said that the Arabs fled, that they left the country voluntarily, and that they therefore bear the responsibility for losing their property and their land. It is true that in history there are some instances — in Rome and in France during the Revolutions when enemies of the state were proscribed and their property confiscated. But in general international law, the principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his rights of citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the [European] Jews. Just because the Arabs fled? Since when is that punishable by confiscation of property and by being barred from returning to the land on which a people’s forefathers have lived for generations? Thus, the claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse. ... I believe that, politically speaking, there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the State towards the Arabs — not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the complete moral obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants of Palestine.”[Jewish Newsletter, New York, 19 May, 1959; quoted in Prophets in Babylon (1980) by Marion Woolfson, p. 13.]
[It is sad to see that such voices of reason and fairness are now routinely choked off from mainstream media debates concerning the Palestinian problem.]
On the military front, America is perceived, and not so inappropriately, as fighting Israel’s dirty war in the region – from her invasion in Iraq in 2003 to any future war against Iran (under the pretext of denying latter’s inalienable right to the nuclear energy). American one-sided favoritism is interpreted as nothing short of being immoral, sadistic, criminal and cruel. Such favoritism only exhibits American deep-seated hypocrisy on a matter of vital importance to the security of our globe and is not sustainable.
I agree with Dr. Brzezinski that the internationally sponsored adoption of a viable formula for the Palestinian people would not resolve the wider region’s manifold conflicts, but it would surely bring in triple benefits: reduce terrorism against America, reduce tension in the region and permit a more concerted effort to address the region’s security problems without seeming to embark on an anti-Islamic crusade. The resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict would also allow for progressive democratization of the adjoining Arab states without appearing, as it does today in Muslim eyes, to exploit the democratization issue as yet another pretext for Pax Americana. A peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis would also go a long way towards bridge building between the West and the Muslim world.