Students’ Notebook: Empire’s New Emperor

Students' Notebook: Empire's New Emperor

Umar Khalid Delhi 

It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered the
most dangerous. -- Robin Davis

Many Muslim leaders across India and the world have hailed US President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world as "historic" and "a major breakthrough". This response is not just premature but also flawed.

The speech was full of rhetoric and riddled with contradictions suited to safeguard American strategic interests. He begins his speech by asserting that "the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalisation led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam". This is quite reminiscent of the famous George Bush speech: "Why do they hate us? Because they hate our freedoms!"

No, Dear President, there are other reasons for what fuels anti-Americanism among many Arab nations and in other parts of the world. It concerns what the American State has been doing in these nations for the past 50 years (either militarily or through economic sanctions). Things like the UN sanctions in Iraq which resulted in the death of half a million Iraqi children after the Kuwait invasion by Saddam Hussain), a US-backed coup to topple the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran (incidently he accepts this in the latter part of the speech!), are just a few of the many instances.

He terms the American occupation of Afghanistan a "humanitarian intervention" and "a war of necessity". Well, the war in Afghanistan is part of the imperialist drive of the US to dominate the world's two most important sources of oil and gas, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. The American invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in the death of more than 80,000 Afghan civilians. That's quite a large number of human casualties which, rather than challenging the extremists, has further strengthened them because they represent the only section challenging the occupation. Also, the secular sections of the Afghan society have either been bought by the empire or roped into the NGO business. Besides, wasn't it the Reagan administration that really backed the same "stirred up mullahs" to fight the Soviets during the late 1980's in what was termed as a holy war? As Arundhati Roy asserts, "Justifying imperialism is like justifying something as bad as child abuse or rape."

Coming to the Iraq invasion, Obama informs us that while America seeks no basis in Iraq, Iraqi society is better off without the tyranny of  Saddam Hussain. This is once again quite similar to another famous remark made by George W. Bush that "the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussain". Obama makes no mention of the destruction caused by the American invasion-- death of 1.2 million civilians, devastation of infrastructure, and millions being brought to the brink of starvation. Ironically, when Hussain was conducting his worst atrocities, he had the full support of the US (and the CIA) both financially and politically, both overtly and covertly.

On the Palestinian issue, he justifies the creation of Israel on account of the massacre of 6 million Jews during the first few decades
of the 20th century due to the barbaric wave of anti-Semitism. But then 12 million Congolese were also killed by the Belgian occupiers and America never demanded a separate state to ensure their safety. The creation of Israel was not because America was concerned about the treatment meted out to the Jews in Europe. In fact, it had shut its doors to the Jews when they were being massacred by Hitler's troops.