The Twin Towers and Tower of Babel

[Dover]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI11Ak02.html

The Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel

Part 1: Sleeping with the enemy


PARIS - "I wonder whether there can be a future for the UN in Iraq," asks an European diplomat. Some Iraqis recognize that the United Nations' humanitarian aid, in the shape of the oil for food program, may have saved lives during the embargo. But many hate the UN exactly because of the embargo: for them, the UN just enforces what Washington decides. The undisputable fact is that the UN supervised the harsh sanctions that, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, were directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and an explosion in the mortality rate. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, two senior, respected UN officials, resigned in disgust against the way in which the oil for food worked (or not) - for them, the UN had betrayed the people of Iraq.

...snip..

European diplomats are keen to point out that if there is a choice in the Middle East, it is not a choice between secular dictatorship and secular democracy - but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy. The difference between what people living in the Middle East want and what the Bush administration says they want is abysmal. A solution will come only when America - and regional autocratic regimes - allow those people to decide by themselves. Obviously, this will only happen when Middle Eastern oil runs out.

Washington neo-cons fear that if left to their own devices, Iraqis would probably choose a Shi'ite-led, perhaps moderate, Islamic republic.This would be intolerable for the neo-cons and the oil lobby's "masters of the universe". Washington is already finding out why Saddam Hussein was such a ghastly dictator. Iraq is a mirage in the desert, a colonial, artificial creation put together by the British from three former Ottoman provinces. As Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds have very little in common, this surrealist construction could only be sustained by brute force. That's exactly how Saddam behaved.

...snip...

Two years after September 11, the neo-cons' mix of geopolitical calculation and messianic fervor has dragged the world into a bloody mess from which we might not emerge for years to come. John Gray of the London School of Economics points out that "Americans see their country as embodying universal values. Other countries see the American way of life as one among many; they do not believe it ever will - or should - be universal ... They resist the division of the world into 'good' and 'evil' regimes ... in any realistic scenario, the US will have to learn to live with states that have no wish to share its values. After all, they include nearly all the states in the world. Strategically allied in the Cold War and - already less convincingly - during the post-Cold War period, Europe and America are reverting to being the alien civilizations they were before the First World War. In Asia, the claim that the US embodies the only sustainable model of human development is viewed with incredulity, if not contempt." ..>>