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Lebanon’s turmoil has more to do with the internal political setup of the country than Bush’s supposed democracy vision. |
By reviewing the evolving rhetoric that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, one can easily observe how the attacks bolstered the position of the pro-war crowd in Washington. And yet, one can hardly fathom the rush to war against a country that had no relations to the attackers nor had in any way contributed to their foul deed.
Numerous US officials inundated the American public with stories of clandestine conspiracies and secret meetings between Iraqi officials and top Al-Qaeda commanders, as they plotted to transfer Iraq’s supposedly fully fledged nuclear technology to terrorist hands so the latter might use them to blow up American cities. The declaration by top US illicit weapons inspector David Kay that “we were all wrong” and that Iraq had no such weapons brought the official embellishment of facts, at least temporarily, to a halt. Could it be possible that every attempt to link Iraq to 9/11, then the elaborate, albeit phony allegations of an imminent Iraqi threat were all an innocent, unintended intelligence error, and that Iraq was not in fact marked for invasion even years before 9/11 took place?
According to Mr. Phillips, we must now concur that the war crimes committed in Iraq during the war (let alone the hundreds of thousands who died during the US sanctions as verified by former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark) and the atrocities that are still being committed throughout the country in the name of freedom and democracy can all be forgotten now that Iraq is democratic and free and that the majority of Iraqis, as Mr. Phillips claims, are better off than before.
| Could it be possible that the attempts to link Iraq to 9/11, then the phony allegations of an imminent Iraqi threat were all an innocent, unintended intelligence error? |
The humanitarian crisis in Iraq has intensified profusely after the US invasion. Human rights abuses are on the rise, this time at the hands of US forces and their US-trained Iraqi partners. Not only did the war ravage the already arduous lives of most Iraqis, but it also jeopardized the security of America as a nation, including thousands of US soldiers who have been killed, maimed, and wounded.
Some critics have accused the president of having no long-term plan, neither in Iraq nor in the Middle East as a whole. So why not jump on the democracy bandwagon? But even here there is a hitch: the first outcome of a truly democratic process in any given Arab country would naturally be giving the boot to the dominating political elite and their business allies who have guarded US military and economic interests for decades. This is creating quite a debacle for US policy strategists, who on the one hand understand that the democracy pretext is an inescapable diversion considering the off-putting view in Iraq, yet, on the other hand, cannot cope with a real democracy that undermines their political influence and business interests; the solution invited itself during Lebanon’s political turmoil, which evidently had more to do with the internal political setup of the country than Bush’s supposed democracy vision. The Bush administration’s claim of credit in Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” took the Arab media by surprise.
Similarly, how can the Occupied Palestinian Territories ever be truly democratic under a ruthless and ironically US-supported Israeli occupation?
While Rice’s recent visit to Egypt included negotiations to free one pro-democracy activist in an Egyptian jail, what about hundreds of thousands of activists that are arrested and inhumanely imprisoned every day? Do they not carry enough weight because they hold Islamic, socialist, or other ideological affiliations that don’t suit the United States’ regional interests?
I invite Mr. Phillips to examine two important public opinion polls, one of Iraqis, conducted one year after the invasion (when violence was more containable than it is today) and a more recent one of Americans this September.
Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor reported:
“An overwhelming majority of Iraqis, 71 percent (and that figure rises to 81 percent if the Kurdish areas in the north are excluded), now see the US-led coalition as an occupying force and not as liberators. USA Today reports that a solid majority, almost 60 percent, want the US and its allies to leave immediately.”
On the second (conducted by Newsweek), AFP reported:
President Bush’s “approval rating stood at 38 percent, while some 52 percent of Americans polled said they lacked confidence in Bush's ability to make sound decisions in a crisis, whether domestic or international.”
After all of this, it’s disquieting to see how Mr. Phillips continues to reiterate the same outdated banter of virtuous wars that are saving lives and inspiring change. What is in fact needed is some recourse to truth, some sensibility, and an urgent exit strategy, not only out of Iraq, but also out of the self-destructive foreign policy stratagems that the US government continues to employ across the Muslim world.
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