The speech US prefers to forget

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Syria portends ‘war without end,’ proclaimed a headline the other day in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Even loyal readers of this famously conservative newspaper may have baulked at this apocalyptic forecast. After all, has not the West, with its ruinous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, already gone far toward making the Telegraph’s projected nightmare an inexorable present reality?
In the western media, the culpability of the US for the woeful state of the Middle East is a taboo subject. Consider how little was said about the 25th anniversary of the historic speech that US President George H. Bush made as the Soviet Union unravelled. On Sept. 11, 1990, Bush proclaimed the end of the Cold War, the stand-off between the west and Russian Communism that had gone on since 1945. Mankind, he exulted, could now look forward to a ‘New World Order.’
How could this anniversary have been remembered without embarrassment when it is all too evident that thanks in no small degree to US foreign policy the new world order has become disorder of epic proportions? Ten years after that speech, his headstrong son, President George W. Bush, presided over a Washington administration that gloried in ‘unipolarity,’ a world where the US, now an unchallengeable hyper-power, appeared free to do as it liked.
One of his apparatchiks scornfully portrayed commentators who presumed to question the Bush regime as inhabitants of the ‘reality-based community,’ doomed to remain passive spectators while the regime made its own reality. Who cared what others might think? Democratic debate had become an irrelevance.
There was a more than a hint of fascism about the swaggering conduct of the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Britain’s subservient Prime Minister Tony Blair enrolled himself as a leading mouthpiece of a power-crazed Washington administration committed to ‘full spectrum dominance,’ with the reconfiguring of the Middle East high on its agenda.
It was the administration’s much-trumpeted belief that the toppling of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, would lead automatically to the diffusion of Western-style democracy throughout the entire region. Whether there was idealism in any of this, as distinct from sheer cynicism, is hard to determine.
What is certain is that Bush and his acolytes, not a few Zionists among them, paid no heed to the Arab world’s complex human ecology. With their blind faith in the efficacy of force, they were war-mongering zealots purporting to be visionaries.
Lamentation over the gulf between the high-minded words and destructive actions of Western policy makers rings through a rueful new collection of essays, Shifting Sands, edited by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson. Writing on Iraq, the historian Justin Marozzi records his dismay that advocates of intervention appear unabashed, despite abundant evidence that it has proved not just futile but counterproductive.
It is indeed extraordinary that many exude self-righteous certainty that the problem with the US occupation of Iraq was not that it ever took place but that it ended too soon. Is it not time, Marozzi suggests, for such people to be learn to be more altogether more humble and realistic about what the West can hope to accomplish with foreign adventures?
Contributors to Shifting Sands survey the long, dubious history of Western intervention in the Middle East, looking back to the fateful period back after the First World War when Britain and France ruled Iraq, Syria and Palestine under a mandate system designed to mask their true predatory intentions. James Barr reflects on the emergence of the Arab-Israeli conflict out of the British efforts to establish a self-interested alliance with Zionism.
Raja Shehadeh ponders the consequences of western betrayal of the Palestinians. Not, he is convinced, until there is justice for the Palestinians ‘can the deadly fuse that was ignited more than a 100 years ago and which has been slowly burning further and further afield, setting off many bombs along its route over the large region of the Middle East, be extinguished.’
Shehadeh and his fellow essayists provoke the question: What would the Middle East be like had it not been endlessly bedevilled by western meddling? Would it be the scene of cataclysmic crisis that it is today?