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