13 May 2013 By Mahboob A.
Khawaja, PhD. "Lies of the Iraq War" the
10th anniversary of the Iraq's genocide approximately
3 million human beings massacred and human habitats
destroyed under the false pretext of WMD. This week,
the global news media hurriedly doing the damage
control of its complacent image and showing the
belated facts of the bogus "War on Terror." The facts
were facts in March 2003, when George Bush, the
Congress and Tony Blair planned aggression against the
innocent people of Iraq, the Western news media served
as a weapon to launch the cruel war. Now it wants to
distance itself and perhaps repair the self-inflicted
and well sponsored atrocities carried out against the
mankind.
____________________________________ The Western warriors with small
wisdom and big thinking are looking for an escape
route from the facts of life. "Lies of the Iraq War"
would simply reaffirm, not change human perceptions
and forcefully depict on screen how cruel they are
like the Russian Ivan the Terrible who roasted
innocent people and burnt alive citizens to entertain
the psycho pathetic mindset. Likewise, George Bush and
his neo-conservative accomplice and Tony Blair - the
leaders who claim to lead some of the top most Western
democracies. Leaders and their public institutions
failed miserably to offer fiction instead of facts.
They lied and deceived the people and perpetuated
heinous crimes against the mankind. The then German
Foreign Minister and Chair of the UN Security Council
session made it clear, he knew the facts that Colin
Powell was lying to the world. No one is remorseful
for the loss of millions and destructions of the life
and habitats in Iraq. They simply attribute all
reasoning to the "intelligence failure" without any
accountability of those who were in power and
architect of the Iraq war. The Western nations under
NATO waging the bogus "War on Terrorism" used the mass
media as a weapon to misinform and deceive the public
of a possible threat to their life and security. There
exists a wide gulf between the aspirations of the
masses in the Western nations and thinking of the few
warmongering leaders they have in the ruling elite.
People want peace not celebration of bogus wars on the
innocent humanity. Tom Engelhardt ("The 12th
Anniversary of American Cowardice What You Don't Know
Can Hurt You." Information Clearing House: 3.28.2013),
co-founder of the American Empire Project and author
of many publications including The United States of
Fear offers a penetrating insight to the US war
culture: Still, in our post-9/11 world,
there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose
silver linings don't get noticed. Take this April.
It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread
release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse,
and humiliation from Abu Ghraib. In case you've
forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein's old prison where
the U.S. military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a
trick or two about the destruction of human beings.
Shouldn't there be an anniversary of some note there?
I mean, how many cultures have turned dog
collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up
signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified
Christ into screensavers? Wars and aggressions kill people
and do not produce peace and harmony but resentment
and degeneration. History illustrates when a nation or
its leaders challenge the limits of the Laws of God
and approach near the end of their lifespan, insanity
takes-over common sense and they tend to ignore
warnings and reject all voices of reason. Most of the
conscientiously responsible Western scholars and
political intellectuals are getting increasingly
concerned, not to identify their interests with the
minority ruling elite of the United States and Britain
as these war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Blair and their role in large scale massacres of the
civilians and using uranium powered missile for
destruction of human habitats in Fulljah, Iraq, and
killings of civilians by drone attacks in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Professor John Esposito of Georgetown
University - a distinguish scholar of Western-Islamic
civilizations (author of Unholy War and What Everyone
Needs to Know about Islam), makes a candid
observation: "in many parts of the Muslim world the
war against global terrorism has come to be viewed as
a war against Islam and Muslims. The image of America
has become that of a neo-imperial power that has
sought to redraw the map of the Middle East and the
Muslim world, influenced by an unholy alliance of
neoconservatives and the militant Christian right."
Once again, humanity appears to
have been pushed back to the shameful annals of the
European Dark Ages. In search of new animosity, few
utopian scholars wanted to distract the humanity after
the end of the Cold War to keep the liberal democracy
working and ensure electoral voters active
participation. In early 90's, Samuel Huntington
reinvented and re-ignited the old cliché - "a clash of
civilizations" between the West and Islam - a new age
of confrontation between the predominantly
technologically advanced culture of the West and the
subdued interdependent societal religious culture of
the Muslim world. The powerful mass media and the
official policy makers throughout the West, fuel the
insane imagery that the Arabs and Muslims are
"fundamentalists" and "terrorists." Every day, the
corporate run media outlets organize massive
propaganda campaign alleging Al-Qaeda involvement
virtually in all conflict situations across the Middle
East, West Africa and Asia and elsewhere. The facts
remain unchallenged that al-Qaeda was planned and
created by the CIA and they know well it does not
exist anymore as an active body of political activists
pursuing any strategic goals against the Western
highly sophisticated war machines, be it in
Afghanistan, Pakistan or other locations. Analyzing the contemporary global
affairs, the image of a single most World Power is
fixed and unquestionable, be it fair or foul. The net
outcome shows the manufactured imagery of Muslims as
the alleged terrorists and the sole inheritor of the
21st century political ideology. With
massive corporate sponsorships and the Western mass
media collaborative alliances, Islamic civilization is
the only targeted client of this emerging business.
What about the Arabs and Muslims, have they done
anything to challenge the absurdity of the so called
"war on terrorism" and to safeguard their political
interests and human survivability? There are no educated,
conscientious or publicly chosen leaders in the Arab-
Muslim world except the recent President Morsi of
Egypt and political leaders in Tunisia. The
authoritarian ruling elite are the outcome of
neo-colonialism. There are no Muslim institutions to
provide honest analyses on the global political
affairs or reflect on the possible remedies.
Throughout the Arab-Muslim world, there is not a
single established university teaching global peace,
security and conflict management - the institutions
dealing with the present and envisioning the future
that the Western nations are built upon for change and
development. Leaderless Muslim masses appear desperate
to look for a visionary and intelligent leader to
offer some consolence and intellectual security. Not
so, in the Arabs or Muslim countries, leaders live in
palaces, not with people. All the leaders are
pre-screened by the CIA and the World Bank before
taking a shape and form to move into a palace.
Accordingly, Saddam Hussein, Shah of Iran, General
Musharaf, Zardari and Karzai fit into that facilitated
image and governance. The neo-colonial rulers have
helped the Colonial Masters to make the Muslim masses
helpless victim of their warmongering and inhuman
atrocities being carried out at Gutanamo Bay, Abu
Ghraib Prison, and Massacre at Fullajah, Haditah,
Bughdad, Kandhar, South-North Waziristan-Pakistan and
elsewhere. There is no Sultan Salahuddin Ayoubi that
the European would fear for centuries to come, there
are no Sultan Babyar and Sheikh Izzuddin to give
blowing defeats to Halaqu Khan - the Mongol warlord,
and no Allama Iqbal or Ali Shariati to awake the
sleeping folks and guide the believers to success. If there were educated and
intelligent leaders in the Muslim world, one could
reason the unreason. But the oil exporting Arab
leaders operate from a position of political weakness,
not strength to play any useful role in international
politics. They have built palaces over moving sand,
not institutions to educate and protect the interest
of the Muslim Ummah. Imagine the dichotomy of the
living history, the Christian Crusaders came,
ransacked and killed 170, 000 Muslims just in one day
to occupy Jerusalem. Despite assurances of peace and
religious sanctity, the Crusaders moved horses in
blood-flown streets to capture Jerusalem. When Sultan
Salahuddin Ayoubi reconquered Jerusalem, the visionary
leader allowed and escorted all the Christian
Crusaders to safety with human dignity, honor and
material wealth. History shall describe a corporate
world run by greed and animalistic savagery,
preoccupied to influence and control the destinies of
the living human beings under the guise of economic
feasibility and market interests. Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand
Chessboard, 1997), former Security Advisor to
President Carter, makes an historical reference:
"American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives
describe American priorities as the economic
subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of
Central Asia and the Middle East." With the continued
wars of aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,
the international institutions overwhelmingly
controlled and managed by the Western Powers have
become irrelevant to the 21st century needs
of the global humanity. Across the Western world,
masses vigorously oppose the on-going deadly wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In wars people are
killed, leaders are not. None of the Western leaders
have ever fought a war on the real front. Simply put,
there are politicians lacking reason and honesty of
purpose, and are engaged in time killing discussions.
The continued wars serve the interest of the corporate
establishments and the Western economies. The image of
deliberately dismantled system of global governance is
meant to appease the economically influential and
politically smart Western elite. Hitler and Mussolini
were Europeans, not Arabs or Muslims, and they did not
rule alone on their own, as there were millions to
cheer them up and support their leadership egos with
galvanized news media alignment of the time, and their
personal ideologies as law and order of the day. At
the initial stages of the 21st century, the
replica is exactly the same from the pages of history,
only the names and titles have been changed and
adjusted – a small minority of ‘sick puppies' are
determined to occupy the oil and gas resources and to
wipe out the Arabs and Islamic civilization under the
guise of terrorism. Changing the names of Hitler and
Mussolini, now historian and prosecutors responsible
for conducting the war crimes will mention Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair and many more. Britain
knows what it lost, cannot regain in colonial history,
but the American empire has yet to learn the hard
lessons. It is more fearful that soon it could be
replaced by China in combination of another
economically viable power or group of nations from the
emerging rival economies of Asia. Professor John
Esposito (Unholy War and What Everyone Needs to
Know about Islam). provides us the History Lessons in
a rational context: "An important lesson of history
is that rulers and nations do rise and fall.
Unforeseen circumstances can bring up unanticipated
change. Few expected the breakup of the Soviet Union
and the liberation of Eastern Europe to occur when
they did ……now is the time for those in all walks of
life (political, economic, military, media and
academic) who wish to see a new order not to be
silenced but to speak out, organize, vote and be
willing when necessary to make sacrifices in promoting
a new global order." On the 10th
anniversary of the Iraqi genocide, there were no
statements issued by the Obama administration or
apologies by British politicians. Even the BBC
broadcast simply offered visual facts and commentaries
but no remorse for the dreadful crimes against the
living mankind. Tom Ingelhardt ("The 12th Anniversary
of American Cowardice What You Don't Know Can Hurt
You." Information Clearing House: 3.28.2013),
sums up the paradox of contemporary global affairs -
how the history will judge the warmongers by their
actions or claims: "We should already know more
than enough to be horrified by the state of our
American world. It should disturb us deeply that a
government of, by, and for the war-makers,
intelligence operatives, bureaucrats, privatizing
mercenary corporations, surveillers, torturers, and
assassins is thriving in Washington. As for the
people -- that's us -- in these last years, we largely
weren't there, even as the very idea of a government
of, by, and for us bit the dust, and our leaders felt
increasingly unconstrained when committing acts of
shame in our name. So perhaps the last overlooked
anniversary of these years might be the 12th
anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the
exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At
that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a
time when, for our "safety," and in a state of anger
and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost." "Among the many truths in that
still-to-be-written secret history of our American
world would be this: we the people have no idea just
how, in these years, we've hurt ourselves." (Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja
specializes in global security, peace and conflict
resolution, and comparative Western-Islamic cultures
and civilizations, and author of several publications
including the latest one: Global Peace and Conflict
Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New
Thinking. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, May
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