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A US-UK track record that speaks for itself
The Daily Star, 2/25/03
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One of the hallmarks of Anglo-American
diplomacy and militarism in the Middle East in recent decades has been the
bountiful, often kaleidoscopic, array of explanations and rationales for
the intended actions by troops arriving from the West. This was the case
in 1990-91 and it is the case again today: Troops are massing to attack
Iraq in order to end tyranny, liberate the Iraqi people, stop the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promote regional democracy,
thwart an imminent threat against America, implement UN resolutions,
assert the will of the global community, protect Iraqis from their own
government’s violence, destroy a safe haven for Al-Qaeda and other
terror groups, and a few other variations on these basic themes. This
plethora of rationales for attacking Iraq is quantitatively impressive,
but qualitatively suspect. There is a very thin line between a
multiplicity of valid reasons and their likely underlying imprecision,
expediency and confusion.
We can think of many regimes that deserve changing in the world, and many
people that deserve liberty. In fact, we hear this call every day, from
every corner and home and office in every Arab country, and we’ve heard
the call for decades decades during which Anglo-American and other
Western and Eastern powers did not return our calls. For the past century
give or take two decades the Arab people have seen their fundamental
liberties, and sometimes even their very identities, hijacked and locked
away by a consecutive series of powerful forces. First the colonial
powers, then the overlapping constraints of the Cold War and the
Arab-Israeli conflict, and finally the enduring, heavy weight of homegrown
Arab power structures virtually decapitated the idea of the rule of law
and human rights protections in most Arab lands.
When ordinary Arab men and women asked for simple decencies and grand
concepts like freely elected representative government, the consent of the
governed, habeas corpus, or term limits, we heard a silence from our
Anglo-American and other Western and Eastern friends that was as
thunderous as the sound of the 175,000 soldiers’ boots marching toward
Baghdad this week. For decades, Arab, Iranian, Turkish and other men and
women throughout this region asked for the prevailing powers to invest in
the rule of law, only to find that the powers preferred to invest in the
instruments of control and security. Therefore one should not be surprised
to find nowadays that most ordinary men and women in this region are
highly skeptical of the numerous promises and grand designs that we hear
coming from official spokesmen and assorted New World Order Model II
groupies and hangers-on in Washington and London.
The credibility test for those powers who would use their military power
to reorder entire regions and redraw political maps half a world away is
simply a track record of promoting the rule of law on the basis of the
rich indigenous cultural, human, historical and intellectual resources
that prevail in the area in question our area, our homes, our families
and our future. That track record does not exist, and therefore local
skepticism in the region is, like the Anglo-American promises, bountiful
still.