Opinion Editorials, May 2015

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Arab Leaders and Insanity of Sectarian Warfare
 
Wars kill human beings and destroy human habitats. But the Western warmongers flag it as a positive development for change and economic necessity. Its net result is the militarization of the societal thinking and geopolitics. Peace is not the outcome of wars and human cruelty. The ongoing Arab sectarian warfare spells out dark images of human paradoxes. The global community is watchful of all the developments shaping the sectarian bloodbaths in the Arab Middle East. What surprises most across the Arab bewildered human consciousness that continuing deaths and destructions are the agenda-making items, whereas, reconciliation and peace-making leading to conflict management are not the top strategic priorities. America and Britain control and manage the Arab leadership mindset. Terrorism myth and the ISIL war advances warrant rethinking and nobody is ready to face the reality check. Facts speak the language of reality loud and clear. Time and history are not on the side of American-led war adventures and humanitarian disasters happening daily throughout the Arabian Peninsula. All war monsters are on the losing end. None can explain logically why and for what purpose are they engaged in humanitarian catastrophes. Logic seeks truth. Simply put, America, Britain and its Arab coalition do not have the moral and intellectual capacity to face the truth. The fake war paradigm is expanding to create favorable opportunities for the warmongers to trade-in oil supplies for weapons of mass destruction to the affluent oil exporting Arab countries. Arab leaders do not enjoin moral and intellectual capacity to think of their own national interests and priorities. There is no critical thinking and no public institutions amongst the Arab elite to determine what is right and what is wrong. They are faithful followers of foreign military dictum.
 
Conflicts can be Managed by Reconciliation and Peacemaking
 
In an interview to AlJezeera TV news (05/22/2015), Hillary Leverett, a former official of the US State Department and a current Professor at Georgetown University clarified that American and British invasion of 2003 had created the political disasters in Iraq. She outlined how both of them had incapacitated the Iraqi political governance and ushered the era of sectarian warfare. When asked, what is needed to change the strategic balance against ISIL advances, she made it known that reconciliation and peacemaking should have been the strategic agenda and now it is a lost game. America and Britain are fighting proxy wars and the ten years of illegal occupation of Iraq and deliberate dismantling of its institutions are the real factors for Iraq’s political defeat.  Do the US leaders have any strategy for a navigational change?  The Arab coalition and America are not winning the war but creating Arab cultural annihilation and destruction of the human habitats.
 
 
Ironically, America and Britain both have enriched capacity in military planning and strategic development. Yet, none seems to offer any possibility for change and successful strategy to encounter the ISIL fighting strategy. Is it a deliberate policy to imagine the enriched Arab nations to be bogged down in foreign dictates of bloodbath and human destruction on such large scale unknown in modern history?  If so, who will gain most out of the religious divides and political defeats across the Arab world?  Even most intelligent strategic planners lack understanding of the immediate and long terms consequences of their own military actions. Most would draw comfort that wars are the continuing phenomenon across the Arab world, not in any parts of Western Europe or American sphere of ethnic and cultural influence.
 
The rise of sectarian bloodbath, the ISIL-Alqaeda and the emergence of Arab military coalition are planned distractions from the real issues of the Arab Middle East. The issue of Palestine and the prospective establishment of an independent State of Palestine and formation of normal ties with Israel are the pertinent issues to be addressed. The Western proponent of animosity view it blessing in disguise for opportunities to distract and to carve-up a war theatre by collapsed Arab leadership lacking courage and intellectual vision for change and political development. There is no righteous cause and harmony between the rulers and the ruled. They live in conflicting time zones manned and infested by foreigners to support the secretive police apparatus and continuity of authoritarian governance denying Islam a place for change and human manifestation as was the case in the Arabian history. 
 
Arab Leaders Lack Rational Understanding of Global Affairs
 
What went wrong to the Arab leadership mindset?  They are so divided and enjoin moral and intellectual discord that one cannot foresee any signs of modest recovery in the near future. Often leadership’s individuality is a factor to propel belligerency and feuds. There is no creative thought or coherent search for a navigational change and more so, to look for reconciliation and innovative approaches toward conflict management and peacemaking. Professor Fouad Ajami (Arab Predicament) noted it all: “the problems of Arab world are the result of self-inflicted wounds.”  Why can’t the Arab leaders initiate a dialogue for reconciliation and problem-solving to deal with ISIL? Until the 2003 US-led attack on Iraq, there was no al-Qaeda, no ISIL and no terrorism in the Arab heartland. The US and Britain created the havoc societal conditions to divide the Arabs into Sunnis-Shias animosities to occupy Iraq. How can the sectarian bloodbath resolve the multifaceted inherent problems when there is no viable institutionalized mechanism to address the political issues?  Strangely enough, all oil exporting Arab rulers appear to rely on America and Britain for military support and conflict resolution.  John Scales Avery (“Is the Threat of Terrorism Real?” Information Clearing House: 01/06/2014), is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Professor Avery outlines the true motives propagated for the threat of terrorism:
 
Is the threat of terrorism real? Or is it like the barking of a dog driving a herd?..... Millions starve. Millions die yearly from preventable diseases. Millions die as a consequence of wars….Terrorism is an invented threat. Our military industrial complex invented it to take the place of the threat of communism after the end of the Cold War. They invented it so that they would be able to continue spending 1,700,000,000,000 dollars each year on armaments, an amount almost too large to be imagined….So the people, the driven cattle, have been made to fear terrorism. How was this done? It was easy after 9/11. Could it be that the purpose of the 9/11 disaster was to make people fear terrorism, so that they could be more easily manipulated, more easily deprived of their civil rights, more easily driven into a war against Iraq?
 
Towards Unity of Purpose and New Thinking for Political Change
 
Islam taught and practiced unity in cultural diversity. Yet, the message of Islam has been ignored and denied a rightful place in the contemporary Arabian political governance. There is a rational criterion for moral and political accountability to God if they believe- in and the people they claim to serve. None of the Arab leaders have capacity to face the reality check. They are wrong people, embedded with wrong thinking and continued to do the wrong things in global political affairs. All Arab states appear to be on the path self-engineered destruction because of the authoritarianism. The wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and entrapment of Saudi Arabia will continue until the Western masters are sure of ultimate cultural, economic and political destruction to make the Arabs captive for future-making. It is already happening, why to wait for the coming future.
 
To change the course of time and history, Arab people deserve new thinking and new- age proactive and intelligent leaders from the young and educated generations to imagine a new world of hope and optimism for political change and future-making. Wars and man-made conflicts will not disappear on their own but will continue to have ripple effects on the future generations. The cancerous egoism of the few has dislodged the world of new thinking and political change through peaceful means.  Why are there more than four millions Iraqi refugees in their own homeland?  Why the Government of PM Al-Abaidi not allow several thousands displaced Sunni people from Ramadi to enter Baghdad’s protective sanctuary? Why do Shias and Sunni daily commit crimes against each other? Do they long for paradise by cold-blooded massacres of fellow Muslims?  Are the Arabs and Muslims so mean and inhuman that they cannot distinguish between right and wrong?  Arguably, wickedness and piety cannot be combined in one human character. Arab leaders and the masses live in conflicting time zones often unable to connect with one another. The US orchestrated militarization has dehumanized the Arab moral, spiritual and intellectual culture in which all positive and creative thinking for political change are viewed as anti-state acts of terrorism. Its imagery is fast becoming a culture of political nuisance and absurdity draining out the primary values and principles of Islam as a way of life.  The Arab masses urgently need transformational leaders who can think rationally out of the box and act intelligently to protect the people, the culture and future from deaths and destruction. This does not sound like a day dream but an attainable goal only if the Arab people take action to change the course of history or else wars and perpetuated sectarian belligerency will consume all that is morally and intellectually valuable and credible assets for a sustainable future. There is no military triumph in seeking a peaceful transformation for political change and future-building.
 
 
(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, May 2012).

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