Sponsoring Terrorism

By Robert Thompson
May 6, 2007, 11:13
AxisOfLogic

How many people ask themselves the question of who sponsors terrorism? Very few, or so it seems from what one can read in the press or hear on radio or television, especially in the English language media.

I hear Mr George W. Bush and Mr Anthony Blair, his Scottish side-kick, trying to make us believe that, if they had not invaded Iraq to make it into a perfect training ground and recruitment centre for Islamist terrorists (conveniently grouped under the name of "al-Qaeda"), the said terrorists would have invaded the United States and the United Kingdom.

Only those who can believe any form of nonsense coming from such sources will follow them into this totally illogical proposition.

Being somewhat older, and almost certainly more experienced in facing reality, than these two criminals, I go back further in history, including examining stupid mistakes, grounded in mindless greed, made by the "West" when dealing with peoples, such as the Arabs, who were considered to be lesser beings.

Two years into the First World War, in 1916, the British and French governments agreed, by the notorious Sykes-Picot Pact, on how they would carve up the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire, and, showing supreme disdain for the views of the inhabitants, they never consulted the latter.

Any person who knows anything of Thomas Edward Lawrence, a serving officer in the British Army, knows that he was encouraged to incite these same Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. He succeeded, and as part of this encouragement, the Arabs were given to understand that they would be free after they had thrown out the Ottoman Armies.

At the subsequent negotiations held in France, the Arab delegates were sidelined, and Prince Faisal, from the Hedjaz, was palmed off with the "kingdom" of Iraq and his brother Abdallah was given the "kingdom" of Transjordan (now Jordan). Both were subject to a form of tutelage by the United Kingdom, as if they were unruly children.

The fact that Faisal's forces had taken the great Arab capital, Damascus, from the Ottoman Armies was ignored and a greatly truncated Syria (out of which had been carved a semi-independent Lebanon, based on sectarian divisions) was, together with this same puppet state of the Lebanon, controlled by France.

The Arabs, particularly those who had fought the Ottomans, had expected that they would at least have a single powerful Arab state to include what were split into five states after the First World War, which we knew as Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

This plan however did not suit the United Kingdom and France, which insisted on their colonialist partition as agreed between them in 1916.

Further to complicate the situation, and further to harm the interests of the Arabs, the British Empire War Cabinet issued in 1917 what has come to be known, from the name of its principal proponent, as the Balfour Declaration, which, again totally ignoring the wishes of the inhabitants, gave support for the establishment of a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine (due to be under British control under the Sykes-Picot Pact).

This started a festering disaffection which grew into support for anti-western feeling throughout the Arab world.

This finally gave rise to the foundation in Damascus in 1943 by Michel Aflaq and Salah-ud-Din Bitar of the pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, whose aim was a united Arab nation, and which very rapidly gained support among Arabs from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west.

Branches of this party later took over the governments of both Syria and Iraq, and both the present Syrian government and that until 2003 in Iraq respectively claim and claimed to be successors of this party aiming to unite the Arab world.

Most Arab rulers since the First World War have been puppets of various "western" powers, and currently several of them would be ousted if they did not receive massive "tied" financial and military aid from the United States.

We currently see distinctly undemocratic régimes entirely or very largely dependent on such support ruling Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf States, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. I

n addition the United States maintain in existence the imported colonialist régime which has occupied Palestine and parts of adjoining countries since the Second World War.

The ordinary Arab people in both Syria and the Lebanon have political systems which are edging towards full democracy, and those Palestinians still living in the lands which the Zionists finally invaded in 1967 were even allowed to elect their own representatives.

However, this last experiment with democracy immediately came under attack from the United States and other "western" nations which meekly followed the Neocon lead.

Although there are substantial and influential Christian minorities in several Arab states, the majority of the population claims to follow Islam, in its many different forms.

All these refusals to allow the people to have any say in their own future have brought about an almost complete disenchantment with what is put forward as being "western style" democracy, and they have provided fertile ground for the growth of radical Islamist groups who saw terrorism as their only way to force the "West" to allow them to have any say in deciding on their own fate.

In other words, to be blunt, the repressive policies of colonialist and/or imperialist régimes in the "West" have been and still are the principal cause of these groups coming into existence.

To put it another way, evil begets evil, and the sins of these "western" régimes have brought about similar reactions from those who have every good reason to consider themselves to be and to have been victims of oppression.

The ridiculous "War on Terra" so loudly proclaimed by Mr George W. Bush is bound to fail, since it does nothing to answer the problems arising from the continuing clearly perceived oppression, which problems are bound to provoke resistance, using both justifiable and unjustifiable means.

The only solution would be that the "West", principally the United States, should do what it can to right the wrongs which, although they started in the past, still continue, particularly in the vacuous rhetoric coming from Washington D.C., Crawford, Texas and London.

This should begin with showing a willingness to force the colonialist "state of Israel" to comply forthwith with every single United Nations Resolution aimed at this entity.

A second useful move would be to apologise to the people of Iraq for the illegal invasion in 2003, and to compensate them for all the damage done to the infrastructure and institutions of this formerly modern state.

This could be followed by giving practical support to the people of Palestine, Syria and the Lebanon to enable them to recover from the damage done to each of them by the Zionist armed forces.

Such moves would cut the grass from beneath the feet of those who can persuade disillusioned people to turn to extremism, and they are the only clearly obvious means by which terrorism can be defeated.

They would cost a lot of money, but the "War on Terra" is also very expensive (as the United States Congress seems slowly to be beginning to understand) and it will, by its endlessness, for ever weaken the financial stability desired by all states including those which are "western".

© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com