Guardian: Bush* has thrown open Pandora's Box…

[kskiska]

in a paradise for international terrorists

David Hirst


This was the year the Middle East became the undisputed, tumultuous centre of global politics. When, at dawn on March 20 the US and its British ally went to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they were intervening in the region on such a scale that Arabs everywhere compared the invasion, in its potential geopolitical significance, to that seminal upheaval of the last century: the collapse of the Ottoman empire. That led to the arbitrary carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European colonial powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine, to the Israeli settler-state.

In Arab eyes, it was a final mortal blow to the so-called "Arab system" through which the component parts of the greater Arab "nation" collectively strove to protect the territorial integrity and basic security of the whole. To the disgust and shame of the Arab peoples, it was not merely incapable of preventing the conquest and occupation of what, properly governed, would have been one of the most powerful and prosperous Arab lands, it was largely complicit in it.

It simply stood and watched as the world's only superpower embarked on its hugely ambitious, neo-colonial enterprise: to make Iraq the fulcrum for reshaping the entire region and, with regime change and "democratisation", cure it of those sicknesses - political and social oppression, religious extremism, corruption, tribalism and economic stagnation - that had turned it into the main threat to the existing world order. It did not formally envisage a full-scale redrawing of state frontiers, but it looked as though by an inexorable momentum that might come to pass.

(snip)

This grandiose enterprise began well enough. The rottenest regime of a rotten Arab order collapsed swiftly as expected. Within three weeks the Americans were in Baghdad and an American tank teamed up with a jubilant crowd in the symbolic act of toppling Saddam's statue in Firdaous Square. On May 1 a triumphant, flight-suited George Bush strutted aboard an aircraft carrier to declare major combat operations at an end.

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1112026,00.html

[nosmokes]

1. good article

thanks for passing it along.

[bemildred]

2. Indeed.

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

[lebkuchen]

3. A bird's eye synopsis of where we stand today

It's difficult for most Americans to see that what they did to Iraq is the same as what the Israelis did to Palestine. In that perspective, the US is in for one hell of a mess, for decades to come.

[T_i_B]

4. Great article

:kick: