Bulatlat.com

Is US-led Globalization Leading to Clash of Civilizations?

Before 'Islamic terrorism' spread like a wildfire in the international press, Arab and Muslim states particularly in the Middle East were already troubled by a modern-day crusader - the strong American presence in the region. Since the 1950s as soon as it became deeply involved in Mideast conflicts in the name of oil and security interests, the United States discovered that while it has won a strong ally - Israel - it has also began to earn more and more enemies. It is by grappling with these realities, the author of this two-part series says, that the world can understand why the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States happened.

BY ROLAND G. SIMBULAN
Bulatlat.com

Part I | Part II

(Lecture on "The Geo-Politics of US Policies in the Middle East," before the Symposium of Sociology Majors and Faculty of the University of the Philippines Sociology Department, Claro M. Recto Conference Hall, Faculty Center, U.P. Diliman, Quezon City, Sept. 27, 2001)

Second of Two Parts
Strong US Military Presence Fires Islamic Nationalism

By limiting its political efforts in this strategically important and volatile region to a narrowly defined quest for stability of US interests (i.e. support for Israel and Western companies' access to Mideast oil), the US has largely evaded crucial issues of fundamental justice. By ignoring issues important to the Arabs and Muslims, such as the illegal occupation of Israel by force, and the need to prevent human rights and national rights abuses committed by its allies, the US sows the seeds of continued instability thereby reducing its own influence in the region.

As a result, the US has lost credibility among many Arab Muslims --- among religious fundamentalists and educated Arabs alike --- especially because despite US-mediated Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Israel has opted for a program of settlement expansion, closing the Palestinian territories and ending all Palestinian rights in Arab East Jerusalem. An influential Arab commentator has summed up US double standards in the Middle East: "We will punish the crimes of our enemies, and reward the crimes of our friends."

While criticizing the human rights violations of its enemies in the Middle East, many pro-US governments have routinely ignored democratic norms, including elections, free speech and freedom of religion. Corruption and rich-poor disparities are on the rise. Israeli military personnel who have been supplied with US military technology, occasionally imprison Palestinians, often torture them, and hold them without trial.

In Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, monarchies maintain absolute control, and women are especially victimized. While the US conveniently excoriates abuses in Syria, Iran, Libya and Iraq, it has refused do the same to similar abuses perpetuated by its allies in the region.

Retaliatory strikes

Many Arabs feel threatened by the US strategy of defending Israel and containing Iran and Iraq, through military responses to every challenge to US dominance such as the periodic air strikes against Iraq. The US has also antagonized Arab Muslims owing to retaliatory and indiscriminate air strikes against Libya, Sudan, and Afghanistan. The US efforts to open a region-wide market economy has not included efforts to mitigate some of the exploding gaps between the have and have-nots countries and peoples in the region.

The United States has not responded to human rights abuses committed by its allies such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel with exactly the same resolute condemnation it heaps on opponents such as Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya and recently, against the Taliban of Afghanistan. By not taking a strong stand against human rights abuses committed by its allies, the United States has lost perceived support among the local Arab populations, including the educated and intellectuals, even creating a violent opposition to a US military and economic presence in the region.

This may be the reason why Osama bin Laden who is now being branded as the world's most wanted "terrorist" by the US-led forces of globalization and westernization, is seen as the modern-day, post-modern Saladin by Arab Muslims today. Sultan Saladin was the legendary Muslim leader in the Middle East who led the holy Jihad that defeated the combined European Christian armies which invaded Jerusalem and the Middle East during the 12th century.

The US has engaged in inconsistent policies designed to undermine Iraq and to isolate Iran. The drastic economic/oil sanctions against Iraq have only punished the Iraqi people more than the Saddam Hussein regime.

Over-armed

The United States has over-armed the Middle East with its "made in the US" weapons. It has encouraged its allies, the poor countries like Egypt and Jordan, to expend their scarce resources on expensive US weapons, where military assistance has diverted US aid from developmental uses. The US has in fact allowed wealth, repressive states - such as Saudi Arabia - to have unlimited access to advanced weapons systems. It has consistently increased its military aid to Israel, though Israel is now a major arms developer and exporter itself.

The United States' special relationship with Israel in the Middle East has been questioned by most Arabs who now believe that United States foreign policy in the Middle East is controlled by the Jewish industrialists and capitalists. Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian homeland is perhaps one of the deepest sores in US policies in the Middle East, which unites all Arabs against the US despite differences among Arab Muslim states. The US in fact, is seen as underwriting Israel's robust economy. The fledgling Israel of yesteryears has become a powerful Israel - in economy and defense.

Arabs feel that Israel no longer needs or merits automatic support from the US which has supported diplomatically, militarily and economically the provocative and aggressive actions of Israel even if they are violative of international norms. For Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, Washington's continued protection of and uncritical support for Israel has only made its Mideast policy inequitable, biased and has only legitimized US-backed Israeli impunity in the region.

Cornerstone

Securing the flow of oil to the West through Western oil companies is a cornerstone of US Middle East policy. The US strategy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq, is designed to ensure that neither Iraq nor Iran is capable of threatening neighboring Gulf countries which allow the US and Western corporations access to oil resources. It is noteworthy to state that US President George Bush's 25-member cabinet today has 11 members belonging to US oil and gas interests, including Bush himself (Spectrum, Harken Oil & Gas), Vice President Cheney (Halliburton, the world's largest oil-services company), and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice(Chevron), among others.

Companies like Exxon, Mobil, British Petroleum, Texaco, Chevron, AMOCO, Shell Oil, Occidental, Atlantic Richfield and Teneco dominate oil production in the Middle East. Gulf oil was and remains important because of its impact on the global economy. While the US depends on only about 10% of its domestic needs from Mideast Oil, US competitors in Europe and Japan depend much more on Gulf oil: 30% of total European oil imports and 80% of Japan's oil imports. This is why the US exerts significant influence on these countries through control of Gulf oil through its armed fleets.

The Gulf War underscored the US commitment to the security of the Gulf states like Kuwait. The US maintains military and naval installations in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain not to defend democracy or democratic states, but to defend US and Western oil interests!

Resented

But the presence of these US military forces is resented by Arab Muslims and is seen as central in preventing the inspiration given by Libya, Iran and Iraq in nationalizing oil interests in the Middle East, and to secure the flow of oil to the West and prevent any threat by Arab nationalists to oil in the international waterways.

The public is usually focused on Iran, Iraq and Libya as the enemies of the Western-led globalization in the Middle East. The US has repeatedly branded these emergent challenges to US hegemony as "terrorist states" in the recent past. But Islamic organizations with their core cadres produced by Islamic madrassahs have sprouted everywhere among them the Hezbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, and Bin Laden's Al Qaeda - all of which have also taken center stage in the Arab Muslim reaction to US economic and military domination of the Middle East. These forces are inspired by a combination of Muslim fundamentalism and Arab nationalism.

The United States' policy towards critics and opposition in the Middle East, however, makes no distinction between terrorism and Islamism as a legitimate political movement aimed at challenging Western, colonial and sometimes cultural influences in non-Western and traditional societies. Operationally, the US views the Islamic movement as a military/security threat, and has devised strategies to deal with it militarily by gathering intelligence, by depleting its financial resources, by intimidating popular movements and by covert counter-terrorism operations.

Current US policy fails to distinguish either between Islam as a religion and Islamic political activism (violent or otherwise), or between Islamic political activities (violent or otherwise) aimed at rectifying internal situations within countries and those aimed at the US and its interests. The US identifies all political activities that use Islamic symbols as "terrorism" aimed at undermining US policies and strategy in the Middle East. And, to gain global sympathy, the US has equated such attacks as attacks against "peace- and democracy-loving" nations.

Attack against Islam

Although the US often fervently asserts that it only opposes "terrorism" and has no quarrel with Islam, it is clear that vast Muslim populations in the Middle East and elsewhere (like Indonesia's 200 million population) see no visible non-military US response to any assertion of Islamic identity, or to Arab nationalism, and thus, do not buy the US defense that this is not actually an attack against Islam as a civilization and religion.

Their perception is further confirmed by the US list of terrorist sponsors, which is dominated by Muslim states, Libya, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It appears to Muslims BASED ON THEIR PERCEPTION that the US equates Islam with terrorism.

Current US policy in the Middle East failed to consider a long-term view of Islamism or a long-range view of US interests in the region. Islam has always gone through historical cycles of ebbs and flows, rise and decline since the four major Crusades launched by European Christian states.

In the past, when Muslim identity, culture, religion and way of life was disrupted by outside forces, such as European/Ottoman colonialism, or Western Christian missionary activity, and now, US-led globalization, movements like Bin Laden's Al Qaeda arose claiming the mantle of defending Islam from its enemies.

The US should understand that the current rise of militant political Islam is in part a response to a perceived threat against Islamic values by Western popular culture and by US military, economic and political domination of the region, and that solely military responses are unlikely to suppress this widespread Islamic perception.

Yet after the attacks on the US, American policymakers continue to think in terms of state-based, archaic cold war frameworks, i.e., that Islamic terrorism has replaced "the communist menace" or the "evil empire" against which all US policy should be aimed.

But as we know, transnational economic, political and technological changes have changed the landscape of conflicts. And the US should not react to perceived Islamic violence to strictly military/security responses. Rather, the US should now consider the underlying causes of the phenomenon with its complex economic, political, religious and social roots where US policies in the Middle East have to change. Bulatlat.com

Part I | Part II

We want to know what you think of this article.