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Two Sides Of The Same Coin

By Roger H. Lieberman

24 July, 2004
Jordan Times

The flagrant illegality of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the flint-hearted brutality with which it was executed should offend every intelligent human being's sense of decency. The imposition of a pro-American client regime in Baghdad through direct foreign aggression was an act as illegitimate as the Soviet take-over of Afghanistan in 1979. Moreover, the devastation to human life wrought by the Bush administration's wanton assault will fuel unprecedented violence and instability in the region for years, perhaps decades, to come. In short, there can be no justification — military, economic or moral — for George W. Bush's Iraq policy.

That being said, however, one should be very careful not to let feelings of outrage at the foreign plunder of Iraq translate into feelings of nostalgia for the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. No honest person can dispute the fact that he was a cruel, despotic and narrow-minded tyrant whose actions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. His attacks upon the sovereign nations of Iran and Kuwait were motivated by the same kind of selfishness and chauvinism that drove Bush to assail Iraq, and they squandered precious time and resources on naked aggression. Furthermore, his ruthless repression of Iraq's Kurds and Shiite Arabs rendered it impossible for the country to mature into a tolerant, pluralistic nation. Thus, notwithstanding the dubious means by which Saddam is being tried for his crimes, few can argue that a guilty verdict would be unjustified.

What ails the prevailing “mainstream” Western intellectual attitude towards the Middle East is not its condemnation of Saddam's behaviour as Iraqi strongman, but its failure to apply the same moral standard to the rest of the region. Those who have taken it upon themselves to learn the broader scope of modern Middle Eastern history know that Iraq's Baathist regime was hardly alone in perpetrating major atrocities or in alienating large segments of their population.

Several hundred kilometres west of Iraq is a country literally drenched in the trappings of militarism; it is presently engaged in the vicious subjugation of illegally occupied lands. That country is Israel, and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is a man with a resume as sordid and bloodstained as the grizzled ex-dictator now on trial in Baghdad. The litany of crimes against humanity attributable to Sharon spans half a century, and encompasses nearly the whole length and breadth of the conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

In the early 1950s, Sharon commanded a paramilitary brigade known as Unit 101, whose sole purpose was to slip across Israel's borders, and terrorise Palestinians and other Arab civilians under the official rubric of “counterterrorism”. In October 1953, Sharon's thugs fell upon the Jordanian village of Qibya, and massacred 66 innocent men, women and children. In February 1955, Sharon directed a bloody raid into the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip — a deliberately provocative act with repercussions that led to the 1956 Suez War.

After the occupation of Gaza in the June 1967 war, Sharon led operations to “pacify” it — which meant the wanton destruction of property belonging to thousands of Palestinians, most of them refugees expelled from what became Israel in 1948. In 1982, Defence Minister Sharon orchestrated Israel's infamous invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut on behalf of the openly fascist Lebanese Phalange Party — a campaign of carnage that left more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians dead, and climaxed in the heinous Sabra and Shatilla massacres. Now, as Israeli prime minister, Sharon has added new ghastly “accomplishments” to his resume: the ongoing construction of the illegal apartheid wall on confiscated Palestinian land in the West Bank, the wanton destruction visited upon Rafah and Jenin, and the murder of more than 3,000 Palestinian men, women and children.

This horrific record would, in any reasonably just world, earn Sharon a reputation as black as that of Saddam's in American eyes. Yet, in today's world, the leader of the world's last remaining superpower tears up 37 years of international consensus in a puerile attempt to legitimise Sharon's unilateral redrawing of Israel's borders. More obnoxiously still, Sharon's regime still enjoys the syrupy devotion of countless politicians, celebrities, “think tanks” and legions of irrationally exuberant teenagers who go off to “find themselves” in Israel. The former Iraqi dictator, who never managed to garner loyal support outside of his corrupt clique of military cronies — and a smattering of sleazy international “notables” — must have secretly envied Israel's propaganda colossus.

It should not be surprising that underneath the superficial labels of nationality, ethnicity and religion, Saddam and Sharon bear such similarity. They are both ugly by-products of decades of “divide and rule” foreign policies imposed on the Middle East by foreign powers.

When the British seized Palestine and Iraq from the dying Ottoman Empire after World War I, they sought to maintain control over the resources of the Middle East by discouraging political unity among the inhabitants of these countries. Certain ethnic or religious communities in both these lands were given preferential treatment under the mandates, and their political leaderships were groomed as the desired successors to the colonial rulers. In Palestine, this policy produced the state of Israel — a discriminatory regime reserving full democracy for its Jewish population, while excluding, dispossessing and persecuting Palestinian Arabs. In Iraq, it gave birth to a monarchy and, in turn, a series of military regimes which concentrated power within the Sunni Muslim Arab community and in direct proportion alienated Iraqi Shiites and Kurds — as well as a Jewish community that once numbered more than 100,000.

In view of the incredible price in human life exacted by such selfish imperial agendas, why should the United States — heir to much of Britain's former imperial mantle — continue down the same dismal, deadly path? Why should my country finance Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians, and why should the American president reward Sharon's crimes with a “second Balfour Declaration” — as he did last April? Why should we doom Iraq to yet more years of poverty and social strife though our stifling military presence and underhanded political shenanigans?

It is high time for the United States and its allies to get behind those in the Middle East who are working night and day for peace, justice and interethnic understanding — and stop hindering their efforts through our reckless pursuit of short-term power and ideological self-gratification. Until we make a conscious decision to do so, more Iraqis, more Palestinians, more Israelis and more Americans will pay an unacceptable price for our government's arrogance.

The writer is a graduate student at Rutgers University studying environmental science. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004





 

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