US foreign relations approach targets human beings, spurns acceptance, camaraderie — Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti

United States deadly obstructionism in Arab Spring World

From Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti’s “America’s interference in the fate of the Arab nations”

Excerpt, editing by 

Carolyn Bennett

There is a “huge gap between the fruits of the American wars in the Arab region and the fruits of its wars in Germany and Japan,” Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti wrote in an article late last year. “America’s wars on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were wars against the rulers and political elites, not wars against the people.…

“…Despite the atrocities committed by America during the war [World War II]—the ugliest of which was the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—America did not seek to control the German and Japanese people after the military defeat. Nor did the Americans want to keep them under tyranny or occupation or put them in a state of desperation that was charged with the spirit of revenge. Instead, the Americans helped both nations economically in order to reconstruct their countries and quickly recover from the plight of war, and helped them politically in order to establish a democratic system. The invading armies gave the two nations the freedom to choose their leaders and determine their own political fate.”

 

H

owever, US “wars in the Arab region … are wars on the people, not their leaders; and the results are the exact opposite of the results of US wars on Germany and Japan.

“Saddam Hussein ended up being hanged.… The Americans hanged the man who persecuted the Shias and replaced him with a man who has permitted the bloodshed of the Sunnis. They killed the man who used chemical weapons against the Kurds but he was replaced with a man who bombed the Sunnis with explosive barrels.  …” Imagine for the sake of comparison that America, after defeating Germany, appoints “a ruler who works for the CIA” as the “new chauvinistic dictator, like Hitler”; or that the US appoints a Japanese military dictator—as is today Al-Sisi (Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi, sixth and current President of Egypt, 2014- )—who reports to the US Secretary of State. What would be the reactions of the Germans and Japanese? Would WWII have really ended?”

 

The negative consequences of US actions in the Arab World are as interminable as US wars in the region. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hanged, Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti recalls, but

…the Iraqi people are the ones who paid the price for the two American wars on Iraq. They [the Iraqi people] endured a suffocating economic blockade that killed half a million innocent Iraqi children while the dictator remained in power after the first invasion.

Then the Iraqi army was dissolved and chaos spread across the country after the second invasion.

This was followed by the fragmentation of the Iraqi community and authority was put in the hands of sectarian forces driven by historical hatred that was more concerned with revenge and settling scores than reconciliation and reconstruction.

“W

hen the Arab Spring started, which was a popular revolution with purely internal demands and fair political aspirations, the people in these countries never antagonized anyone other than the dictators oppressing the people.”

However, “America immediately enforced the strategy of obstruction and hindering, supporting the revolutions in words but fighting them in actions. In its war on the freedom of the Arab people, the United States also mobilized all the forces it is associated with in the region—including the military officer who is a pawn in the hands of the United States, the loyal dictator, the cozy scholar, the cowardly dervish and hypocritical media.”

US in Libya

When “the revolution was against a military official,” such as Libyan president Muammar al-Qaddafi, “who opposed American policies, America sought to replace him with Major General Khalifa Haftar, a man who openly admits he worked for the CIA for over two decades, as if Libyan bloodshed were merely a red carpet laid out for spies and those with no conscience.”

In a Wikipedia article the sorted career of Khalifa Belqasim Haftar, native of eastern Libya, includes its highest point of being Libyan general and principal commander of one side in Libya’s “ongoing Civil War” (2014). Haftar spent nearly two decades in the United States, gained US citizenship in 1993. While living in the United States, Haftar was convicted in absentia of crimes against the Jamahiriya (or the People’s Libyan Arab Republic) and sentenced to death. In his earlier years, he served in the Libyan army under Muammar Qaddafi, participated in a coup that brought Qaddafi to power (1960s). While a prisoner of war in Chad in the 1980s, Haftar and his fellow officers plotted an overthrow of Qaddafi. In the 1990s, a deal with the United States released Hafta from prison and granted him entry into the United States.   

US in Egypt

In this Arab state, the United States “turned Egypt’s revolution into a mere transfer of power from an old dictatorship loyal to America to a younger murderer who is even more loyal to the United States,” Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti’ wrote. This was done, he said, “at the expense of the Egyptian people’s blood, money, hopes, dreams, dignity and the status of their state among the nations.

“America then sought to change the course of all the Arab revolutions in the region in which they have no replacement, such as Syria, into a hell and eternal war where there are no winners or losers.”

US in Yemen

Another Arab Spring that was growing in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, “has fallen under America’s allies.” These forces “pulled the plug on the Yemeni revolution before it completed its natural growth.…”

O

verall, the United States can and is doing a great deal, directly and indirectly, in the Arab World; but, he says, the United States “chooses the morally and strategically wrong choice.

“It chooses to continue toying with the fate of Arab and Islamic peoples, hitting the Arab and Muslims’ points of physical and moral strength, and depriving them of the two most important shields for sovereignty in modern nations: liberty and arms.”

A Better approach, attitude in

US foreign relations

“The Arab peoples rebelling against injustice and tyranny are facing an obvious enemy in Russia and a disguised enemy in America,” he says; “and it is the disguised enemy that is the most dangerous because of its influence, its ability to maneuver, and its use of internal tools.”

Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti concludes that the United States “can continue to tamper with the fate of our people through its military intervention every decade or so.” It can “hinder the Arab Spring for a few years and force our people to pay a heavy price for it in the form of their blood and money“; and in the process  “achieve some situational and deceptive tactical gains”—through the use of “selective policies lacking any sense of morality or humanity.”

But the better course, he says, would be  “to lift its (America's) hands from the region.” Stop “toying with the fate of its people.” Stop “interfering to control the region’s strategic decisions.…”

At heart, what the United States should do, he says, is “accept a relationship of camaraderie with the Arabs” rather than insisting on “a relationship of dependency.” 

With this better approach and attitude in US foreign relations, “Arab societies bursting with hope and vitality can rid themselves of tyranny. Overcome the chronic structural contradictions and achieve dignity and prestige for themselves among nations of the world.”

These ideas are worthy of serious attention, especially but not only by Americans.

Sources and notes

“America’s interference in the fate of the Arab nations,” Mohammad Al-Shinqeeti, September 26, 2014, https://altahrir.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/americas-interference-in-the-fate-of-the-arab-nations

Arab World

An area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast (a combined population of around 422 million people), the Arab World or Arab Nation is composed of the 22 Arabic-speaking countries of the Arab League. The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 countries and territories of the Arab League. Wikipedia

Arab World Countries by Area

 1.      Algeria 2,381,741 919,595 18.1% Largest country in Africa and in the Arab world and also ranked 10th largest country in the world
2.      Saudi Arabia 2,149,690 830,000 16.4% Largest country in the Middle East
3.      Sudan 1,861,484 718,723 14.2% Formerly the largest country in Africa, before South Sudan's independence
4.      Libya 1,759,540 679,360 11.4%
5.      Mauritania 1,025,520 395,960 7.8%
6.      Egypt 1,002,000 387,000 7.6%, excluding the Hala'ib Triangle (20,580 km2/7,950 sq mi).
7.      Somalia 637,657 246,201 4.9%
8.      Yemen 527,968 203,850 4.0%
9.      Morocco 446,550 172,410 3.4% Does not include Western Sahara (266,000 km2/103,000 sq mi)
10.  Iraq 435,244 168,049 3.3%
11.  Oman 309,500 119,500 2.4%
12.  Syria 185,180 71,500 1.4%, including the part of the Golan Heights (1,200 km2/460 sq mi) currently occupied by Israel
13.  Tunisia 163,610 63,170 1.2%
14.  Jordan 89,342 34,495 0.7%
15.  United Arab Emirates 83,600 32,300 0.6%
16.  Djibouti 23,200 9,000 0.1%
17.  Kuwait 17,818 6,880 0.1%
18.  Qatar 11,586 4,473 0.08%
19.  Lebanon 10,452 4,036 0.08%
20.  State of Palestine 6,020 2,320 0.05%
21.  Comoros 2,235 863 0.01%
22.  Bahrain 758 293 0.005% 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalifa_Haftar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Libya_under_Muammar_Gaddafi#Etymology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdel_Fattah_el-Sisi

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora
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