Terrorism As Pretext For Intervention In Middle East – OpEd
What if all the sheikhs of Gulf countries withdraw their petro-dollars from the Western financial institutions; can the fragile financial services based Western economies sustain such a loss of investments? In April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add its investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.
Notwithstanding, we need to look for comparative advantages and disadvantages here. If the vulnerable economy is their biggest weakness, what are the biggest strengths of the Western powers? The biggest strength of the Western capitalist bloc is its military might. We have to give credit to the Western hawks they did which nobody else in the world had the courage to do: that is, they privatized their defense production industry. And as we know, that privately-owned enterprises are more innovative, efficient and in this particular case, lethal. But having power is one thing, and using that power to achieve certain desirable goals is another.
No wonder then that the first casualty of “war on terror” after Afghanistan had been Iraq; and what did the corporate media tell us about invading Iraq back in 2003? Saddam’s weapons of mass “deception” and his purported links with al Qaeda? It is only a coincidence that Iraq holds 140 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and produces more than 3 million barrels per day of crude oil.
Then again what did the Western mainstream media tell us about the Libyan so-called “humanitarian intervention” in 2011? Peaceful and democratic protests by the supposedly “moderate and secular” Libyans against the Qaddafi regime and the Western responsibility to protect the supposedly democratic revolutions and civilian lives? Once again it is only a coincidence that Libya holds 48 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and produces 1.6 million barrels per day of most easily extractable crude.
Only thing that differentiates Islamic State from other ragtag jihadist outfits is its sophisticated weapons arsenal that has been provided to it by NATO and bankrolled by the Gulf Arab states during the Syrian proxy war; another factor that gives a comparative advantage to Islamic State over other jihadist outfits is its top and mid-tier command structure, which is comprised of professional, ex-Baathist military and intelligence officers from Saddam era.
In order to sustain their crumbling “war on terror” narrative, the Western powers now make a distinction between “the green, yellow and red terrorists” – green militants, like the Free Syria Army, whom the NATO overtly supports; yellow jihadists, such as the Army of Conquest that includes the Saudi-supported, hardline Islamists like Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaeda-affiliate al-Nusra Front, whom the NATO covertly supports; and the red terrorists like the Islamic State which is a by-product of the hypocritical Western policy in Syria and Iraq.
In the last 15 years of the so-called “war on terror” the Western powers have toppled only a single Islamist regime of Taliban in Afghanistan and three Arab nationalist regimes — Saddam’s Baathist regime in Iraq, Qaddafi’s Afro-Arab nationalist regime in Libya and they are now desperately trying to oust another anti-Zionist, Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
After invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and when the American “nation-building” projects failed in those hapless countries, the US’ policy-makers immediately realized that they were facing large-scale and popularly-rooted insurgencies against the foreign occupation, consequently, the occupying military altered its CT (counter-terrorism) doctrines in the favor of a COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy. A COIN strategy is essentially different from a CT approach and it also involves dialogue, negotiations and political settlements, alongside the coercive tactics of law enforcement and military and paramilitary operations on a limited scale.
Finally, I fail to see the reason that why do the Western powers have been blowing the Islamist insurgencies in the Middle East out of proportions, which have been anything but the consequence of their own ill-conceived wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria? What is it that the insurgents want and the so-called “liberal interventionists” cannot accept as a matter of principle? Is it the enforcement of Shari’a, or the barbaric Hudood-style executions that have earned the Taliban, Islamic State, al Shabaab and Boko Haram the odium of the international community? If that is the case, then why do the Western powers overlook the excesses committed by Saudi Arabia where Shari’a is the law of the land and Hudood-style executions are an everyday occurrence?
This contradiction speaks volumes about the sheer hypocrisy and double standards of the Western powers: that, when it comes to securing 265 billion barrels of Saudi oil reserves and 100 billion barrels, each, of UAE and Kuwait that together constitutes 465 billion barrels, i.e. one-third of the world’s proven crude oil reserves, they are willing to overlook the excesses that have been committed by such Medieval regimes but when it comes to negotiating with the Islamist insurgents to reach political settlements and to let up on all the violence and spilling of blood in the region, they stand firm against the so-called “terrorists” as a matter of principle.
Full article at;
http://www.eurasiareview.com/0906201...dle-east-oped/