Disoriented America loses control in the Middle East – Part I

By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

In a recent article published in the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland described America’s attitude to global issues as a result of "fearful, at times almost panicky, reactions to the migration of power away from national leaders and its fragmentation at national levels". The "Global power plays" was the title. The article presented a dreadful image of power evasion, since "President Bush and Vice President Cheney fight an inexorable tide that pushes their goal of restoring presidential and national power farther away even as they accelerate their efforts to reach it". It does not take much for anyone to make the link between this interpretation and the breaking news from Iraq, where peace seems to be out of reach.

While it makes sense to assess several recent positive developments (elections, a Kurd President for Iraq, a Shia majority in the new government, Iraqi national police forces initiative, etc), it is urgent to make clear that there is no magic, inexorable tide that pushes the American administration’s goal in Iraq farther away. There are mistakes. Serious, grave and lethal mistakes! The present series of articles is an alarming warning for Apprentice Magicians.

America has crossed the point of no return in Iraq. Either the present administration will change its overall approach to the "Iraq" affair now or soon the Middle East and the entire World will be engulfed in an unprecedented disaster.

This article will not focus on the successive stages of Middle Eastern deterioration that will cause a greater, global upheaval. It will rather offer an enumeration and brief analysis of the basic mistakes made by the American administration.

America’s mistake no 1: over-reliance on high-tech

America does not face today the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. There is not much at stake with regard to an arms race that was a key issue in the 40s and in the 80s. Certainly there is a competition between the States, Japan, and the top European countries, and to lesser extent with Russia and China. But the enemies America faces in Iraq are not involved in this competition, and the outcome of the war on terrorism does not hinge necessarily on high tech, but on human brain, faith, historical and socio=psychological knowledge and understanding. America’s undisputed high tech advantage did not prevent September 11th, and it will not help much against several bogus-Muslim sheikhs who want to destroy this world. Terrorists can certainly get necessary insight and come up with petty nuclear devices that they will use, not necessarily to destroy Chicago but to generate a seismic – volcanic shock. The fact that the Egyptian newspaper Al Osboa attempted to attribute the 26/12/2004 Sumatra tsunami to Indian – Israeli nuclear experiment shows very well where the mind of terrorists can be driven to. How can one prevent this?

America’s mistake no 2: erroneous perception of its enemies

This is the epicenter of the problem. America failed to identify its enemies, to locate them and to successfully reprimand (let alone exterminate) them. In the aftermath of the terrible events of September 11th, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the famous Western Islamologist, led the Search for the Answer to the questions "why do they hate us?" or "what went wrong?". If a real connoisseur goes through the accumulated bibliography, he will find it meager, unclear and absolutely deriding.

The West, or to put it very clearly America, failed to know
1. why the extremists and terrorists hate the West
2. what differentiates the terrorists from the rest
3. what is historical Islam, and what differentiates it from the terrorists
4. what is historical Islam, and what makes it different from criminal, hypocritical politicians and bogus-kings who pretend they are different than the terrorists (but they are not)
5. how they have been deceived by numerous pretentiously peaceful politicians who are the best in preparing the ground for the terrorists
6. what the man of the street of Algiers, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and Karachi (not the hypocritical diplomat of the Arab League) knows and believes about Islam, the West and the forthcoming war between Islam and the West (the majority believe that such a war will definitely occur)
7. why the aforementioned man of the street is driven to believe all this trashy, bogus Islam (and by whom) and the inhuman concepts that are related to it
8. what is the real public political discourse in the countries of fanaticism and hatred (Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia) – and here we have to identify this discourse with the really un-Islamic and purely terrorist ‘khutbas’ – the Friday prayer’s sermons that are devoid of any religious and metaphysical contents, having turned out to be burning political – ideological speeches of anti-Western and antihuman hatred and hysteria
9. what brainwash takes place throughout these countries where ‘khutbas’ are registered in cassettes that average people are obliged to listen to whenever in taxis and minibuses
10. what false things the fanaticized and ignorant masses of these countries believe about the West
11. how ignorant these fanaticized and ignorant masses are with regard to historical Islam
12. what were the historical developments that created this situation, and the role of the European Colonial powers in this regard.

If America perceives correctly its enemies, the US administration will be shocked because of its past erroneous assessments of tyrants and bogus-kings as ‘friends’. And the total number of terrorists exceeds some hundreds of millions, which is also unknown to America. Terrorist is anyone sharing the terrorists’ vision of the world, an absolutely inhuman vision indeed.

It would be a good starting point for the US to send 1000 American sociologists to learn Arabic, Urdu and Bahasa, to live for a year or two in the favelhas of Algiers, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh, Karachi and Jakarta, and to compile a huge multilingual encyclopedia "The world according to the fanatic Muslims" for the use of average Western public. Only then the West will finally realize what the real tsunami is and from where it comes.

(to be continued)