Impact of US policy by Kanwal Sibal: Current developments in Iraq expose further the failure of US policies in West Asia. With all the resources at its command, of information, analysis and technical expertise, and the sense of responsibility that must accompany the overwhelming power it possesses, the US should not be committing egregious mistakes in dealing with an unstable region like West Asia, riven with historical enmities, issues of nationhood, religious extremism, sectarian conflict and terrorism. Instead of stabilising the region and releasing forces that would bring about real improvements in governance, participatory politics, institution building and social modernisation, US policies have largely done the opposite. This becomes glaring as the declared reasons for interventions are the promotion of democracy, pluralism, human rights and western values. Terrorism:The Arab Spring, supposedly the harbinger of democracy in West Asia and evidence that Islam and democracy are not antithetical, has degenerated into an ouster by the military of a democratically elected regime in Egypt that seemed determined to Islamise the polity, contrary to majority opinion. After endorsing the toppled Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate force, the US now backs a military regime that is determined to decimate it In the name of democracy and human rights Libyas Gaddafi was eliminated in a brutal manner to general glee and now lawlessness and political anarchy reigns in the country. The killing of the US Ambassador in Benghazi illustrated the folly of assuming self-imposed burdens to end tyranny in third countries and gift western freedoms to their peoples. Pursuing ill-thought out regime change policies, a peaceful street protest in Syria suppressed by force by the Syrian government became the peg for the West to hound President Assad, peremptorily summoning him to step down, threatening military reprisals, supporting a motley of violent opposition groups to force his eviction, all unmindful of the religious and ethnic diversity of the country and the danger of sectarian forces destroying its secular fabric. With the country torn by a raging civil war worsened by external meddling, the cause of democracy and human freedoms in Syria has been buried under the debris of destruction there. If military interventions in the region were intended to eliminate international terrorism, that objective has not been achieved either. The US had wrongly accused Saddam Hussain of Al Qaida links. Afghanistan was attacked and the Taliban regime evicted for harbouring Al Qaida. Although remnants of the Osama-led Al Qaida leadership remain in Pakistan, the overall success in vanquishing Al Qaida was cited as reason for US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today, Al Qaida-linked forces are active across a much wider geography than before- in Mali, Yemen, Libya and Syria- not to mention the emergence of various extremist jihadi groups, some even more radical than Al Qaida like the salafists linked to Saudi Arabia, a US ally. Oddly, even as the US fights the Al Qaida, its Gulf allies finance death-dealing jihadi groups promoting an ideology diametrically opposed to USs value-based policies for the region.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 07:11:08 +0000
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