What your mainstream media never tell you.
Marvel at the al-Jazeera
film crew whipping the crowd to hysteria. This is what most UK/american
mainstream media do ; get the crowds TO ACT for the cameras.
Ever noticed the STAGED gun shots or in-the-lens chanting?
It's all fake, staged propaganda for the liars at Sky/ITN/BBC?CNN/Fox.
اسامہ بن لادن ہلاکओसामा बिन लादेन को मार डाला
قتل أسامة بن لادن
Oussama Ben Laden tué
Osama Bin Laden getötet
Usama bin Ladin dödas
America transforms the Middle East, but not as envisioned
By James Carroll | July 31, 2006
IN ONE WAY, the Bush administration's Middle East
policies from Iraq to Israel have been a smashing success. The watchword
with which Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and
Condoleezza Rice defined the agenda they laid before a pliant George W.
Bush was ``transformative." A new strategy of unilateral action, applied
with overwhelming force and preemptive strikes, and focused on
protecting access to Persian Gulf oil, would transform the entire
region. Upon invading Iraq, US troops would be greeted with flowers. A
post-Saddam Hussein democracy in Iraq would spark democratic reforms
throughout the Arab world. Fundamentalist Muslims would be discredited.
Palestinians and Israelis would come to terms. Iran, faced with
ascendant American power, would retreat from its revolution. As for
weapons of mass destruction, with nonproliferation replaced by
``counter-proliferation," rogue nations would heel. Best of all,
terrorism would be defeated on its home battlefield. America militant
and triumphant. Those not supporting this new order would be sorry.
Who's
sorry now? Washington was poised to take full credit for the
realization of its transformative fantasy in the Middle East. Can
Washington accept responsibility for the transformative catastrophe that
its new strategic doctrine is even now bringing about? Start with Iraq.
``Without Saddam," Wolfowitz predicted in 2002, ``Iraq can have perhaps
the best government in the Arab world." With civilian deaths lately
running at an average of 100 a day, at what point will the Bush
administration acknowledge that Iraq has, instead, a tragic civil war?
``Tyrants respond to toughness," Rice declared ahead of the US invasion .
In Iraq, the brutal tyrant is gone. But, under US sponsorship, the
Iraqi people now brutalize one another, tribally. The tyrant was
replaced by the tyranny of toughness.
That tyranny lives in
Israel's brutal -- and increasingly inexcusable -- air war against
Lebanon. Israel is wrong, but unlike Washington, it faces a threat that
is real. Hezbollah, with support from Iran and Syria, signals the return
of an open Arab determination to eliminate the Jewish state. The
extremes of Israel's visceral defensiveness are properly denounced as
unjustified, given the Jewish state's overwhelming military
superiority. But the fresh intensification of hatred of ``Zionists"
among vast populations of Arabs poses an existential danger to Israel
that transcends any military resolution. The Israeli government and
those who condemn it both overestimate the value of Israel's arsenal.
Hezbollah's successes show that. Meanwhile, bombs killing innocents do
not weaken Israel's enemies, but empower them. Now hatred of the Jewish
state has reached critical mass, a threat that would not go away even
if Israel were to ``moderate" its responses.
Here is the real
meaning of the catastrophe that the Bush administration is bringing
about. The prewar naïveté of US planners, enshrined in the much-noted
Bernard Lewis/Samuel Huntington alarms, assumed that the defining
``other" of the civilizational clash was a univocal enemy -- ``Islam."
Washington had no idea that Islam, in its Middle East manifestation, was
an atom waiting to be split. A sectarian argument had divided followers
of Mohammed not long after his death, and that conflict defined the
Muslim tradition. Shi'ites (implying ``faction") and Sunnis (implying
``lawful") had savaged each other in the 16th and 17th centuries, a
violent intolerance that scholars compare to the religious wars between
Catholics and Protestants in the same period. Who knew this? In the
colonial and post-colonial periods, with the coming of secularism and
the rule of Western-sponsored tyrants, Sunni and Shi'ite tensions had
been held, whether through accident or despotic control, in fragile
balance. How fragile, no one in Washington knew.
Shi'ites are the
Islamic minority, but their political ambition made its powerful
comeback with the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, launching a search for
polity that would be modern as well as Islamic. Surprising many,
democracy then took root in Iran, with even some pro-Western leaders
elected, but Washington saw only one pole of an ``axis of evil." That
Bush pronouncement in 2002 was the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy, as
Iran next fell to its own fringe. The other evil pole, of course, was
the Sunni regime of Saddam, and wasn't the axis sent spinning then? The
civil war in Iraq -- Sunnis, Shi'ites, 17th-century savagery,
21st-century explosives -- is one result. Israel's war against newly
en flamed forces of the Bush-created ``Shi'ite crescent" is the other.
The innovative character of what Bush has wrought is laid bare, of
course, by the fact that some Sunni-led Arab states with their own
restive Shi'ites are as threatened by this new level of chaos as Israel
is. Now that's trans formative.
