Opinion Editorials, November, 2016

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Trump Presidency and the Continuous Invasion to Destroy the Arab Middle East  By Mahboob A  Khawaja Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, November 12, 2016

Arab Leaders Facing Consequences of Their Own Follies

Should the global community pity or ridicule the Arab leaders for engineering their own pitfalls of self-destruction?  Life and wisdom are narrated by compassion and positive moving stories of human peace and harmony. The cruel rivalries forging sectarian bloodbath at Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Mosul, and Yemen make no sense. Had they believed in God, humanity and purpose of life with tangible accountability, the Earth could have been a better place for all to co-exist peacefully. Viewing the perpetuated moral, sectarian and economic and political disintegration overshadowing the Arab Middle East – anarchy turned into insanity overwhelms the daily reports of massive deaths, and destructions.  Post 9/11, the American leadership tried to reconstruct the Arab political landscape by multiple configuration of animosities and intrigues to make the Arab leaders fight against one another. The mindless Arab leaders followed the George Bush dictum to stir unwarranted internal sectarian warfare and to take sides in making conflict situations that lacked rational sense of understanding.  George Bush was egoistic and with missing rational foresight followed the neo-conservative war agenda to divide and defeat the Arab people. The fake simplicity combined with built-in transgression surpassed all previous historic record as Arab stood against Arab to annihilate each other for reason unknown to any rational observers.  There are no declared wars and  no known initiatives to conflict management but the Arab Middle East is the theatre of absurdity – petty individualistic rivalries, bloody authoritarianism enforcing daily sectarian warfare and unending brutality for the innocent people trying to escape the prevalent insanity.  No carefully reasoned and politically verifiable analysis can predict how and where the entire Arab region will escape to from the amassed misfortunes. The Arab Middle East is a galvanized region, too dangerous to be ignored for the ultimate global consequences. Rationality begs to ask what are the Arabs leaders fighting for and why?  George Bush’s egomaniac sense of political superiority precluded knowledge and promoted fatal disintegration of the Arab moral and intellectual culture under the guise of “war on terror.” The Arab authoritarian leaders lived in palaces, not with people to realize the truth and futuristic consequences of their own follies. Does the informed global community want to see the Arab world to determine its own fatal ending? 

The America-led “war on terror” enlisted Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to provide massive logistic support for the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein from power.  The decade long occupation of Iraq saw increased sectarian divides and hatred perpetuated by the American- British forces, dismantling of the state infrastructures, killings of approximately three million people and use of uranium depleted weapons against the civilian population in Fallujah, Baghdad, Basra and other locations. Across the Arab world, people saw it happening, yet they could not question the insanity of prolonged deaths and destruction. When political incapacity is joined by complicity, the outcome is the worst possible combination of tyranny and planned destruction.  When reason replaced indifference, the Arab people became the net casualty of  fatal judgment of prevalent reality.  Ostensibly, American policy makers and the European allies (British, French and German), prepared the groundwork to victimize the Arab people under the pretext of “war on terrorism” and the so called Islamic State- ISIL.  For more than a year, they continued to bomb the Arab heartland without causing any major losses to the ISIL.  The Western leaders pretended to be doing something to favor the Arab states and peace and security of the region. It was all fraudulent adventure mystified by the aim to incapacitate all the Arab states and control their natural resources and to ensure Israel strategic supremacy over all the Arab states.  That is where President Obama and his European partners have brought the Arab world to the brink of dismemberment.  Now Mr. Donald Trump has been elected the new President of the United States to take office on January 20, 2017.  Unlike conscious exaggeration, it is inventive rhetoric that President - elect Trump would review or change some of the traditional military agreements with countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea. Reflecting on the Arab mental microscope, it is obvious that none of the Arab leaders have any communication strength to interact with the next American President. When leaders and nations live in darkness, they surely lose sense of direction and rational thinking. By engaging into the bogus wars, American leaders took over the Arabian thinking hubs from within to greater political intrigues, external challenges, temptation and sectarian tumult over which they had control. The sedition of American-led wars overwhelmed with hypocritical dubious policies and practices in situations of critical humanitarian crises such as happening in Aleppo, Baghdad, Yemen, Mosul and Damascus, million are being starved to death and bombed by the Russian and American and Syrian armed forces.  Russian and Assad forces face no military challenge to undo the transgression. Hypocrisy is a state of indecision in the choice of between good and evil. There is nothing to be described as good happening on the ground which could be of benefit or impetus to peace and security for the Arab victims of the wars.  President Obama and Secretary Kerry pretend having a dialogue with the Russian that involves implicit or explicit communication with the regime of Bashar al-Assad too as a way of talking about the ceasefire or pause in bombing of the civilians and raging hostilities. Otherwise, the rest of the Arab leadership has no avenues to talk about the end of hostilities or ceasefire or stopping of aggression against the masses or extending humanitarian food aid to the besieged people.   To suffer the prolonged penalties of the “war on terror”, one wonders how will the future generations view the contemporary Arab leaders – will they call them insane, traitors or just hypocrite  who were simply pawns at the global political chessboard.

The President-elect Donald Trump will be Vigilant to Global Affairs

Like other political leaders, President Elect Mr. Trump has his own competitive influence and deficiencies to cope with in order to straighten out his futuristic governance. America is torn apart between many contrasts and alleged evil plots during the presidential campaigns. It is nothing new but a paradigm of American political culture. Those with open communication and political strength will be able to manage the futuristic relationships with the new US administration. Arab leaders as a whole stand no chance of any meaningful outcomes with the new president. Yet, many times, election politics and issues disappear with the election season and never make to the active agenda items. If the Arabs had political institutions and men of new ideas, they could have imagined to deal with President-elect Trump even on a tight rope policy making and behavior in the coming months and years. Mr. Trump is businessman, not a Washington-based customary politician and will strike many deals and balancing acts to be an effective leader. Contemporary global affairs do not signal a fixed impulse of American foreign policy and relations but there are always certain measures of change and adaptability to the world of rationality with which Mr. Trump would have to deal for his own relevance in changing global affairs. There are soft corners and hard corners in American policy formulation and practices. Whatever President Obama claimed to pursue more than eight years earlier, his record is far less than being satisfactory and American public seem to have major concerns and issues and consequently as revulsion, Trump won the majority delegates to make history under volatile political circumstances. Mr. Trump in his acceptance speech outlined several conciliatory strategies to unite the American people as One Nation and  refute political discords which were compelling during the election hysteria. He sounds more realistic than unimaginative of the surroundings while meeting with President Obama at the oval office.  If the historian were to ask President Obama about his achievements as a leader, his claim “Yes, We Can” would defy logic and insert his failure to cause the American masses a naive optimism. If President –elect Donald Trump would be asked about his action plan, surely, he could cite challenges as opportunities to make a better future for America. If the Arab leaders were questioned, they would cite erecting mystified palaces and foreign bank balances and the rest of the book will have blank pages. The Arab world embodies a terrible sense of helplessness consequential to its own leadership’s triviality and authoritarian viciousness. If the Arab states had educated and legitimate intelligent leaders in governance, they could have bridged the mental and intellectual gaps through result-oriented interactive communication with Mr. Trump.  Arab leadership’s dreams of glory and triumph are nowhere to be seen on the political horizon. If the Arab leaders were united, they could have approached the current affairs with focused mind and commitment to safeguard the interests and security of the people, not the palaces.

Wake-up the Arab People, for too long you were Victims of Poisonous Cruelty

Aaron David Miller (“Where Have all the Arab States Gone” Foreign Policy: 4/14/2015) asks directly: “The Arab world’s a mess and its leaders don’t appear  ready to assume much responsibility for fixing it. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to start demanding they step up.”  If there were legitimate Arab leaders, should they not be accountable for the misfortunes of the suffering masses?  Miller wants to know why the Arab leaders are indifferent to pursuing a policy of normalization for peace in the region.

The Arab world’s a veritable mess. The cosmic leadership deficit, the absence of legitimate institutions, the lack of transparency, disrespect for human rights, abysmal regard for gender equality, and too much conspiratorial thinking make it impossible to come to terms with the magnitude of the problems. In short, this region will remain broken, angry, and dysfunctional until the leaders who purport to take responsibility for governing these unhappy lands get their proverbial acts together. And that’s … well, a generational enterprise at best, and I suspect something that will take a good deal longer.

Across the Arab political landscape, leaders do not appear to have any moral and intellectual capacity to deal with crisis management, peacemaking or futuristic challenges.  The core problem of the Middle East remains Palestine and its freedom and normalization of Arab-Israel relations. With the coming of Mr. Trump, Israeli leaders are quick to make overtures to invite Trump although Israeli –American lobby was strong supporter of Hillary Clinton. They do have capacity to mend the unthinkable broken affairs peacefully or otherwise. Comparatively Arab, political crises are left to be endured by the masses while leaders try to get away as if wars were meant for the innocent people to be sent abroad to unknown beech cemeteries somewhere in Italy, France, Germany, UK and Greece as is the case on the daily television screen. Time and history shall hold the inept and indifferent Arab leaders for moral and political accountability.  History shall judge them by their actions, not by their claims. This author offered the following analysis in “Who are Real Barbarians - The West or Muslims?” (Information Clearing House: 3/24/2015): 

Incapacity joined by insane egoism makes complacent oil producing Arab rulers to follow the Western dictates despite internal challenges and intrigues of their governance ….Morally indifferent and intellectually exhausted and incapacitated as they look, Arab and Muslim leaders are waiting and waiting to see what happens next, missing initiative and new imagination to the world of reason and prevalent reality – planned violence and resulting cruelty are becoming the societal hallmark across the Arab-Muslim world…..The Arab and Muslim world is turning into complete political cruelty and quagmire. Man killing fellow man, all killing all, and reason not to be questioned. The leaders and people appear to be on the same page of bloodbath, insecurity and breathing oxygen in a conflicting time zone falling apart into the unknown. They believe in nothing as if the Earth was dormant, as if there is no God and life ceases to have a noble purpose of peace, harmony and co-existence. Western war strategists are a crucial factor in bringing them to this perverted status-quo of moral and human equilibrium. In an advanced 21st century of knowledge, wisdom and information, man remains ignorant and arrogant of his wrong thinking. Arab-Muslim authoritarianism enforced by the self-image to commit planned violence and aggression against the revolutionary masses is radiating across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. After five years, the global community is just a symbolic spectator watching the heinous crimes of the few against many. 

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja as an academia spent more than a decade in Saudi Arabia and pioneered the development of two new liberal education universities and teaching the new generation. He specializes in international relations-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Germany, May 2012), and a forthcoming publication - One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Security, Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org.

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