Conghaileach
16th March 2003, 11:45
Crusaders and Mongols
By Mohamed Hakki
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg
(This article will be available online in few days)
By the time this report is published, the war against Iraq would have already
started, or just about to start in a few hours. Last minute efforts by the
foreign ministers of the Arab countries has come and gone without a single
American knowing about it. The news of the humiliating rebuff by national
security advisor Condoleezza Rice on Thursday telling them to go to New York
instead was buried on page 23 of the Washington Post on one paragraph in the
middle of a long article. To add insult to wound, the Post said that it was
not clear whether Colin Powel would meet the group, which included Arab
League head Amr Mousa and the foreign ministers of Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia,
and Syria.
So much for the free press of America. I wonder what would happen if the
still insisted to go to Washington and hold a press conference outside the
gate of the White House.
But, those ministers should not feel so bad since the U.S. is already in the
process of destroying all international institutions that America has helped
create: the United Nations, the Security Council, NATO, with the World Bank
and IMF soon to follow. It was obvious that the administration was not
pleased by the report to the Security Council by Mohamed El Baradei, the
director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In it, El
Baradei asserted that the British obtained key evidence purporting that Iraq
was producing nuclear weapons was not only false, but actually fabricated.
El Baradei: also rejected an administration claim, made twice by the
president in major speeches and repeated by Colin Powell, that Iraq had tried
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use for uranium enrichment. El
Baradei asserted that IAEA found no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear
material after meticulous sweep of Iraq with advanced radiation detectors.
Most nations felt that the debate at the Security Council has come to a “
historic turning point” as the Russian foreign minister put it. He said “
the way we resolve this problem will determine not just the future of Iraq,
but the future of the Security Council itself.”
President Bush did not hesitate to show his utter contempt both for the UN
and the Security Council throughout his press conference on March 6th.
Almost all the questions asked of him, which were more telling than his
answers, went something like this: your policy on Iraq has generated
opposition from the governments of France, Russia, China, Germany, Turkey,
the Arab League and many other countries. It opened a rift with NATO and the
UN, and drawn millions in anti-war protests: what made all of them see the US
under your leadership as an arrogant, aggressive, and defiant power? The
president’s answers insisted on questioning the very “utility of the United
Nations Security Council” at all.
The question then becomes: What is this insistence on war all about? What is
to be gained that is worth destroying the UN institutions and killing 500,000
Iraqis (a figure mentioned in a congressional hearing)? When 500,000 Iraqi
children were killed because of the US dictated economic sanctions, former
Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright said it was a “fair price”. Now,
estimates are that we are going to have one million Iraqi civilians killed
which incidentally, is the very same number of Iraqis killed by the Mongol
leader Hulagu in the twelfth century. He even built a pyramid with their
sculls. Now, all the ignoramuses in the administration are saying that the
Iraqi people will be coming out with boom boxes and roses to dance in the
streets of Baghdad. Well, nobody is disputing for one minute that the
majority of Iraqis resent Saddam Hussein’s rule, but killing one million
Iraqis will immediately play into the hands of those who are saying that this
is a new crusading war of Christians and Zionists against the Muslims as a
whole.
This will, most likely, coincide with another scenario that is much talked
about inside Israel. And, that is the total “ethnic cleansing” of the rest
of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and their total “
transfer” – along with Arabs living inside Israel too – as Israel’s “final
solution” to the Palestinian problem. James Akins, former US ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, told me: “Israel has been waiting for a chance to do just that,
but they needed a war to cover it up. They even thought of starting one
themselves against Syria, which would have been gladly helped by the
subservient US media to cover their crimes claiming that Syria started it.
Israel can do this in a very short time. It is enough to create 10 or 20
Deir Yassins, i.e. total destruction of 10 to 20 villages terrorizing
everybody to leave.
They can tell Palestinians that trucks are ready to take them across the
border to Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Even those who believe and say that this
time, unlike 1948, the Palestinians will not leave, will probably cave in at
the end. If a person has eight children, is he going to sacrifice them, or
take a chance of having them all killed or take the bus to save them, what do
you think he will choose?
There are a lot of Jewish friends who are extremely worried about this
scenario and it’s ramifications all around. Yet, Israeli apologists are
still writing about it as an idea propagated by conspiracy theorists. One of
those apologists for Israel is Bill Keller. In a New York Times article, he
cited the now famous document entitled “A Clean Break”, prepared in 1966 by
a group of defense thinkers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, as an
example. He says that this study proposed a “redirection” of Israeli
strategy, including a plan to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He also
mentions that three of the authors, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wursmer, are now prominent “embeds” (his words) – meaning deeply rooted in
the Bush administration. The whole basis of his defense or rebuttal is that
the “Clean Break” group did not call for an American conquest of Saddam.
But, isn’t it much easier for this “Cabal” as they are sometimes called who
are helped and abetted by Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to do Israel’s
bidding? And, are all the people who are warning against this war mongering
policies of this group, anti-Semites? Are former President Jimmy Carter, who
brokered the first peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Zbigneiw
Brzezinski, his national security advisor and all the several other patriotic
Americans who accuse the administration of doing Israel’s job all
anti-Semites?
I received a phone call from Guyla Hills, a devout Catholic moviemaker, who
calls herself fundamentalist evangelical, without knowing me prior to that,
to share her frustration. She said that she and “thousands of other good
Christians” are appalled at the message of Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson and
others who are propagating a policy of hatred to the Arabs and Muslims and
are supporting and actually advocating this war policy. She said that they
are trying to exercise their influence on the President by supporting his war
against Iraq. She said they are actually threatening the world and pushing
us back into the dark ages by their crusading ideas. She said, “Fortunately,
not all Christians think like them, but unfortunately we don’t have a
microphone. They do.”
This is the whole issue. This war can open the gates of Hell, or religious
bigotry and hatred, or religious wars that can engulf the whole of humanity.
It can easily be manipulated and portrayed as a new crusade.
Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein with his “balady” mentality and pompously
vulgar thinking is saying that this is the new Mongol invasion, which will be
defeated before they totally devastated Baghdad. It took Iraq six to seven
hundred years to regain its population and become a viable country again.
What we fear is that the new Crusaders, or the new Mongols embedded in the US
administration are not only going to destroy Baghdad, but will set in motion
events that can destabilize and destroy much of the whole area.
One of the side effects is the destruction of history, monuments which are
part of the collective memory of mankind. The destruction of Iraqi monuments
and treasures would be a total loss to humanity. The NY Times says in a
feature about it said, “some of these hundreds of thousands of archaeological
sites were only beginning to be discovered. Only 10,000 sites of these have
been identified and only a fraction of them have been explored. The article
said, “any of them could change what we know about human history, as past
excavations have done. Some of them have already revealed the world earliest
known villages and cities and the first examples of writing.” All these
precious legacies of Islamic art and culture are threatened in the name of
Iraqi democracy!
The other pretext of the war is that the US is keen to keep Iraq “nuclear free
”. But, here too El Baradei told the world it is all a lie. Even before
disarming, Iraq was years away from developing a nuclear weapon. If Iraq’s
government was not rejected by almost all the Arabs, they would have come to
Iraq’s help, both financially and scientifically to build a deterrent. What
America ignores is that Israel has 200 nuclear bombs. It took only two small
ones to defeat another superpower during World War II – Japan - so why does
Israel need 200 bombs? At least one of the Arab countries should have a
credible deterrent, but Saddam disqualified this possibility too. In Arab
eyes, this not only exposes the fallacy and hypocrisy of the US position, it
actually ignores the existing and real North Korean nuclear threat. Again,
in Arab eyes, this Korean threat has never been a direct threat to any Arab
country, but Israel’s is.
All this leads the Arab/Islamic world to reject America’s war on Iraq. There
is nothing to warrant it. Democracy cannot by re-creating old colonial
invasions and or installing foreign pro-consuls and viceroys. It comes
through role models based on justice. The case of Japan, another oriental
country, is different. Japan is unique. Her Emperor was considered to be a
god, and he accepted total surrender. Because of their peculiar structure,
they concluded that the US beat them so, they must be better. It is also an
island, and not part of a sea of a billion other Japanese. Those advisers
are saying why did the Muslim world not rise against us after we invaded
Afghanistan. Again, Afghanistan is different. The US invasion of
Afghanistan was against Al Qaeda, which attacked America at home, and killed
thousands of innocent lives. The US asked the Taliban government (mainly
thugs) to deliver the culprits to help pursue terrorists, because they stood
against killing innocent lives, Christians, Jewish or Muslim. In contrast,
attacking Iraq is killing part of everyone in the Arab world. It represents
the destruction of their history, their entire independence. It is a return
to the age of hateful colonialism, let alone the specter of crusaders.
Had it not been for oil, it would have been easy for many to conclude that
this is the whole thing, doing Israel’s bidding. But, in fact, you have an
unholy alliance between three interest groups; the Israeli lobby, the Oil
companies (notice how the first US contract to rebuild and reutilize Iraqi
oilfields went to Haliburton Corporation, Vice President Cheney’s once and
future company), and the military industrial complex.
When Israel completes its “ethnic cleansing” of all Palestinians while the
US is busily destroying Iraq only to be able to rebuild it, will the
President say: I pray for the Palestinian people as he is now saying I am
praying for the Iraqi people?
By Mohamed Hakki
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg
(This article will be available online in few days)
By the time this report is published, the war against Iraq would have already
started, or just about to start in a few hours. Last minute efforts by the
foreign ministers of the Arab countries has come and gone without a single
American knowing about it. The news of the humiliating rebuff by national
security advisor Condoleezza Rice on Thursday telling them to go to New York
instead was buried on page 23 of the Washington Post on one paragraph in the
middle of a long article. To add insult to wound, the Post said that it was
not clear whether Colin Powel would meet the group, which included Arab
League head Amr Mousa and the foreign ministers of Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia,
and Syria.
So much for the free press of America. I wonder what would happen if the
still insisted to go to Washington and hold a press conference outside the
gate of the White House.
But, those ministers should not feel so bad since the U.S. is already in the
process of destroying all international institutions that America has helped
create: the United Nations, the Security Council, NATO, with the World Bank
and IMF soon to follow. It was obvious that the administration was not
pleased by the report to the Security Council by Mohamed El Baradei, the
director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In it, El
Baradei asserted that the British obtained key evidence purporting that Iraq
was producing nuclear weapons was not only false, but actually fabricated.
El Baradei: also rejected an administration claim, made twice by the
president in major speeches and repeated by Colin Powell, that Iraq had tried
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use for uranium enrichment. El
Baradei asserted that IAEA found no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear
material after meticulous sweep of Iraq with advanced radiation detectors.
Most nations felt that the debate at the Security Council has come to a “
historic turning point” as the Russian foreign minister put it. He said “
the way we resolve this problem will determine not just the future of Iraq,
but the future of the Security Council itself.”
President Bush did not hesitate to show his utter contempt both for the UN
and the Security Council throughout his press conference on March 6th.
Almost all the questions asked of him, which were more telling than his
answers, went something like this: your policy on Iraq has generated
opposition from the governments of France, Russia, China, Germany, Turkey,
the Arab League and many other countries. It opened a rift with NATO and the
UN, and drawn millions in anti-war protests: what made all of them see the US
under your leadership as an arrogant, aggressive, and defiant power? The
president’s answers insisted on questioning the very “utility of the United
Nations Security Council” at all.
The question then becomes: What is this insistence on war all about? What is
to be gained that is worth destroying the UN institutions and killing 500,000
Iraqis (a figure mentioned in a congressional hearing)? When 500,000 Iraqi
children were killed because of the US dictated economic sanctions, former
Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright said it was a “fair price”. Now,
estimates are that we are going to have one million Iraqi civilians killed
which incidentally, is the very same number of Iraqis killed by the Mongol
leader Hulagu in the twelfth century. He even built a pyramid with their
sculls. Now, all the ignoramuses in the administration are saying that the
Iraqi people will be coming out with boom boxes and roses to dance in the
streets of Baghdad. Well, nobody is disputing for one minute that the
majority of Iraqis resent Saddam Hussein’s rule, but killing one million
Iraqis will immediately play into the hands of those who are saying that this
is a new crusading war of Christians and Zionists against the Muslims as a
whole.
This will, most likely, coincide with another scenario that is much talked
about inside Israel. And, that is the total “ethnic cleansing” of the rest
of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and their total “
transfer” – along with Arabs living inside Israel too – as Israel’s “final
solution” to the Palestinian problem. James Akins, former US ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, told me: “Israel has been waiting for a chance to do just that,
but they needed a war to cover it up. They even thought of starting one
themselves against Syria, which would have been gladly helped by the
subservient US media to cover their crimes claiming that Syria started it.
Israel can do this in a very short time. It is enough to create 10 or 20
Deir Yassins, i.e. total destruction of 10 to 20 villages terrorizing
everybody to leave.
They can tell Palestinians that trucks are ready to take them across the
border to Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Even those who believe and say that this
time, unlike 1948, the Palestinians will not leave, will probably cave in at
the end. If a person has eight children, is he going to sacrifice them, or
take a chance of having them all killed or take the bus to save them, what do
you think he will choose?
There are a lot of Jewish friends who are extremely worried about this
scenario and it’s ramifications all around. Yet, Israeli apologists are
still writing about it as an idea propagated by conspiracy theorists. One of
those apologists for Israel is Bill Keller. In a New York Times article, he
cited the now famous document entitled “A Clean Break”, prepared in 1966 by
a group of defense thinkers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, as an
example. He says that this study proposed a “redirection” of Israeli
strategy, including a plan to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He also
mentions that three of the authors, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wursmer, are now prominent “embeds” (his words) – meaning deeply rooted in
the Bush administration. The whole basis of his defense or rebuttal is that
the “Clean Break” group did not call for an American conquest of Saddam.
But, isn’t it much easier for this “Cabal” as they are sometimes called who
are helped and abetted by Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to do Israel’s
bidding? And, are all the people who are warning against this war mongering
policies of this group, anti-Semites? Are former President Jimmy Carter, who
brokered the first peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Zbigneiw
Brzezinski, his national security advisor and all the several other patriotic
Americans who accuse the administration of doing Israel’s job all
anti-Semites?
I received a phone call from Guyla Hills, a devout Catholic moviemaker, who
calls herself fundamentalist evangelical, without knowing me prior to that,
to share her frustration. She said that she and “thousands of other good
Christians” are appalled at the message of Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson and
others who are propagating a policy of hatred to the Arabs and Muslims and
are supporting and actually advocating this war policy. She said that they
are trying to exercise their influence on the President by supporting his war
against Iraq. She said they are actually threatening the world and pushing
us back into the dark ages by their crusading ideas. She said, “Fortunately,
not all Christians think like them, but unfortunately we don’t have a
microphone. They do.”
This is the whole issue. This war can open the gates of Hell, or religious
bigotry and hatred, or religious wars that can engulf the whole of humanity.
It can easily be manipulated and portrayed as a new crusade.
Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein with his “balady” mentality and pompously
vulgar thinking is saying that this is the new Mongol invasion, which will be
defeated before they totally devastated Baghdad. It took Iraq six to seven
hundred years to regain its population and become a viable country again.
What we fear is that the new Crusaders, or the new Mongols embedded in the US
administration are not only going to destroy Baghdad, but will set in motion
events that can destabilize and destroy much of the whole area.
One of the side effects is the destruction of history, monuments which are
part of the collective memory of mankind. The destruction of Iraqi monuments
and treasures would be a total loss to humanity. The NY Times says in a
feature about it said, “some of these hundreds of thousands of archaeological
sites were only beginning to be discovered. Only 10,000 sites of these have
been identified and only a fraction of them have been explored. The article
said, “any of them could change what we know about human history, as past
excavations have done. Some of them have already revealed the world earliest
known villages and cities and the first examples of writing.” All these
precious legacies of Islamic art and culture are threatened in the name of
Iraqi democracy!
The other pretext of the war is that the US is keen to keep Iraq “nuclear free
”. But, here too El Baradei told the world it is all a lie. Even before
disarming, Iraq was years away from developing a nuclear weapon. If Iraq’s
government was not rejected by almost all the Arabs, they would have come to
Iraq’s help, both financially and scientifically to build a deterrent. What
America ignores is that Israel has 200 nuclear bombs. It took only two small
ones to defeat another superpower during World War II – Japan - so why does
Israel need 200 bombs? At least one of the Arab countries should have a
credible deterrent, but Saddam disqualified this possibility too. In Arab
eyes, this not only exposes the fallacy and hypocrisy of the US position, it
actually ignores the existing and real North Korean nuclear threat. Again,
in Arab eyes, this Korean threat has never been a direct threat to any Arab
country, but Israel’s is.
All this leads the Arab/Islamic world to reject America’s war on Iraq. There
is nothing to warrant it. Democracy cannot by re-creating old colonial
invasions and or installing foreign pro-consuls and viceroys. It comes
through role models based on justice. The case of Japan, another oriental
country, is different. Japan is unique. Her Emperor was considered to be a
god, and he accepted total surrender. Because of their peculiar structure,
they concluded that the US beat them so, they must be better. It is also an
island, and not part of a sea of a billion other Japanese. Those advisers
are saying why did the Muslim world not rise against us after we invaded
Afghanistan. Again, Afghanistan is different. The US invasion of
Afghanistan was against Al Qaeda, which attacked America at home, and killed
thousands of innocent lives. The US asked the Taliban government (mainly
thugs) to deliver the culprits to help pursue terrorists, because they stood
against killing innocent lives, Christians, Jewish or Muslim. In contrast,
attacking Iraq is killing part of everyone in the Arab world. It represents
the destruction of their history, their entire independence. It is a return
to the age of hateful colonialism, let alone the specter of crusaders.
Had it not been for oil, it would have been easy for many to conclude that
this is the whole thing, doing Israel’s bidding. But, in fact, you have an
unholy alliance between three interest groups; the Israeli lobby, the Oil
companies (notice how the first US contract to rebuild and reutilize Iraqi
oilfields went to Haliburton Corporation, Vice President Cheney’s once and
future company), and the military industrial complex.
When Israel completes its “ethnic cleansing” of all Palestinians while the
US is busily destroying Iraq only to be able to rebuild it, will the
President say: I pray for the Palestinian people as he is now saying I am
praying for the Iraqi people?