Dissident Voice

September 6, 2003

President Bush’s bluster about the irrelevance of the UN has been replaced by an abject volte-face. Now Mr. Bush is looking to the self-same organization that he heaped derision upon to pull his political bacon out of the fire. Nevertheless humiliation is tempered with the effrontery of requesting that the UN sanction the supply of target fodder for the Iraqi resistance and help foot the bill while serving under US command. In an act of unmitigated gall, the US has come cap-in-hand to the UN while simultaneously asking them to submit to US fiat. “Old Europe” appears, however, to have nixed that idea.

There is further embarrassment for Mr. Bush after having triumphantly declared that Operation Iraqi Freedom was “one victory in the war on terrorism.” Since this ‘victory’ and its “crucial advance in the campaign against terror,” it is apparent that Iraqis have tasted very little freedom. Iraq now finds itself floundering under the chaotic dictatorship of a foreigner: the US terror expert Paul Bremer, who is unable to stem the terror on the doorsteps of his fiefdom.

This is the shameful hypocrisy of how a translucent US corporate invasion for Iraqi oil installed a regime that overrides media freedoms, Geneva Conventions, and human rights.

Yet the Iraqi resistance continues unabated. It may even be picking up. Saddam’s remnants are convenient scapegoats and more recently foreign terrorists have been identified as the perpetrators. As Paul de Rooij notes, it wouldn’t do to have Iraqis being seen as resisting the US-led occupation. The US-UK forces were supposed to have been viewed as liberators and greeted affectionately by the Iraqis, ‘freed’ through pulverization. It seems Iraqis don’t take kindly to US-UK conceptions of liberty or the methods in bringing it about.

Kurt Nimmo reports that originally the bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque was attributed to al-Qaeda but added to the mix was the “complicity of ‘foreigners,’ a few straggling Saudis, Syrians, and Palestinians.”

Besides, as both Mr. de Rooij and Mr. Nimmo point out, positing foreign terrorists as the source of trouble for the US-led occupation helps pave the way for the implementation of the US redrawing of the Middle Eastern power structure.

Having foreign administrators is nothing new in history for the Iraqis though. But to insinuate that, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, or Saudis represent the ‘foreign threat’ in Iraq is ludicrous. They are all Arabs as are most Iraqis. The division of Arabs into separate nationalities is a result of foreign interlopers’ desire to divide and conquer the Arab world.

Mr. Nimmo astutely recognizes this:

“Pan-Arab nationalism is the primary reason millions of Arabs relate to the plight of the Palestinians; they share an emotional attachment and solidarity with brother and sister Arabs under attack by foreigners and Afrikaner-style settlers -- European (Ashkenazic) Jews and their American benefactors and enablers. For Arabs crossing Iraq's porous and wholly artificial borders, the struggle is against the real foreigners -- the Americans and their British coconspirators, the Europeanized heirs to colonialists and, as many Arabs view it, Crusaders.”

Following the duplicity of the Sykes-Picot Treaty after WWI, the Ottoman Empire was carved into several geographical entities according to western imperialist design. The Arabs found themselves living within defined borders with concomitant national identities. As my learned Palestinian friend Jafar Kharouf explains, some of those nationalities located within the resource-abundant lands were more amenable to sharing the oil pie among fewer Arabs.

The great upheaval though was precipitated by a Machiavellian British deal with the Zionists. Xenophobic Europe was assuaged by the exodus of the diaspora from their midst and abetted the entrenchment of the Jews into the Arab homeland. Backed by the British, eventually the Zionists gained strength. These European Jews then terroristically bit the British hand that fed them and ferociously extricated the Palestinian population from their lands. Britain sought to extract itself from this blowback and, in a manner much akin to the US-led occupation of Iraq, put the matter on the UN plate. The UN in an act of treachery sanctified the ethnic cleansing of Arab land in 1948.

The US came to the determination that Israel would serve its regional interests well and in a Faustian pact has generously funded a state spawned from the racist Zionist ideology. The remaining non-Jewish Israelis are accorded second-class citizenship. Israel has expanded its 1948 borders through military conquest and occupation. A slow-motion genocide in Occupied Palestine is wrought to consolidate further Israeli territorial ambitions.

For its role in serving as a virtual “offshore US military base,” as the incisive US foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky puts it, the supposed geostrategic importance provided by Israel is worth $6 billion a year. Although most analysts only report the $3 billion that Israel directly receives this obscures the fact that Egypt and Jordan receive another $3 billion because of the enhanced security they have provided for Israel.

So to dispel the Orwellian mythologizing, the real foreigners in the Middle East are the US occupiers and their hyperimperialist minions who unleashed massive terror on Iraq. The Ashkenazi Jews are a foreign element injected back into the Middle East, who share regional geostrategic aims with the hyperimperion.

Kim Petersen lives in Canada and is a regular contributor to Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: kimpetersen@gyxi.dk

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