Source: Global ResearchFinian Cunningham
It’s an intrigue befitting the machinations of
classical colonialism in past centuries, such as the Sykes-Picot
carve-up of the Middle Eastern Levant territories, or the betrayal of
the Arabs after World War I, or the theft of Mesopotamia’s oil by
British capitalists.
Only this time, it is Arabs who are helping the neocolonial powers to deceive and subjugate other Arabs. Enter the Arab League.
Over the past year, the 22-member organization has
emerged as a useful deceptive cover for Western powers as they seek to
redraw the political contours of the Arab World, and beyond, for their
own strategic interests.
The momentous popular upheavals that began in early
2011 across the Arab World have in many ways been co-opted or
manipulated by Western imperialist powers to minimize democratic gains
and to refashion the political map to their continuing advantage. A feat
of achievement considering that these same powers have for decades
supported the repressive regimes that have inflicted so much misery and
suffering.
The leitmotif for Western intervention is
“responsibility to protect” (R2P) – the notion that these powers are
motivated by concern for human rights and the protection of civilian
lives. But given that the United States, Britain, France and other NATO
states have been conducting criminal wars of aggression over the past
decade in mainly Muslim lands, with a death toll exceeding one million
and casualties amounting to many more millions, these powers found
themselves with a huge credibility problem when it came to contriving a
pretext to intervene in the Arab upheavals.
What better than to shroud the Western agenda for
intervention in Arab affairs with an appearance of Arab support? The
League of Arab States has fulfilled this role. Since its inception in
1945, it has only ever suspended two member states. The first of these
was Libya in March 2011; the second is Syria, suspended eight months
later in November.
Ostensibly, the Arab League has been motivated to
take such measures because it purportedly shares the concern of
Washington, London, Paris, for the safety of civilians being violently
repressed by their rulers. Without the League’s sanction, the
intervention of Western powers would ring decidedly hollow and smack of
old-fashioned colonialism. This is in fact what it is, but the addition
of Arab voices to the Western sanctimonious chorus lends a crucial
veneer of international solidarity.
The arrangement works like this: foment violence and
instability within the country of choice, arm dissident groups, and
direct these same groups with covert special forces; when government
forces move to quell the insurrection, then accuse them of violating
human rights. The Arab League then suspends the country, marking it out
for international pariah status, which in turn provides a pretext for
Western powers to mount military strikes, committing atrocities in the
name of “responsibility to protect”, and engineering regime change in
the interests of the Western powers. It’s neocolonialism in Arab lands –
with the help of other Arab states.
Libya can be seen as a dress rehearsal for this
routine, which is now being played out feverishly with Syria. Recall
that it was the spurning of Libya in March by other League members that
immediately presaged the seven-month NATO aerial bombardment of that
country, resulting in possibly thousands of civilian deaths, a crime
that is not yet fully realized because of a corporate-controlled media
blackout, but a despicable crime nevertheless with bloodied Arab hands
involved.
It appears that the Arab League is now taking on an
even more pronounced role as the routine finesses. Clearly in Syria what
is happening is an insurrection that is being fomented and armed by
foreign governments, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia taking a lead role in
arming the so-called Free Syrian Army against the state forces of
President Bashar Al Assad.
And it was the Arab League that brought the motion
last week at the UN Security Council aimed at shackling the Assad
government and setting it up for Libya-style NATO military intervention.
The veto by Russia and China has for the moment derailed that plan. No
doubt, Russia and China have learnt the lesson of Libya where a similar
Security Council sanction was used by Western powers to launch a
blitzkrieg on that country – in the name of the specious R2P.
The insidious role of the Arab League as the West’s
hound-dog can be gleaned from the comment by British Foreign Secretary
William Hague following the Russian and Chinese veto at the UN.
Hague said: “Russia and China faced a simple choice
today: would they support the people of Syria and the Arab League, or
not? They decided not to, and instead sided with the Syrian regime and
its brutal suppression of the Syrian people in support of their national
interests.”
This is British spin on facts and truth at its best.
Firstly, Russia and China decided to side with the “Syrian regime”
because – despite biased Western media coverage – the government of
Assad appears to retain the support of the Syrian people, and therefore
it retains sovereign legitimacy. And the “brutal repression” that the
solemn Hague speaks of relates to violence that Western and foreign Arab
states have assiduously fomented in Syria, as they did in Libya.
Secondly, the position of Russia and China concurs
with that of the Arab League’s own observer mission to Syria. The
mission actually reported that much of the violence was being conbducted
by an "armed entity" and "armed opposition groups" involved in the
killing of civilians – flatly contradicting the Western corporate
media’s portrayal of unilateral state brutality. Indeed, the observer
mission was subsequently cancelled by the League’s secretariat because
the mission was exposing this Western disinformation [1]. So, far from
not supporting the Arab League, as Britain’s William Hague contends,
Russia and China have acted more consistently with the League’s observer
mission. It is the executive of the League that has not supported their
own people on the ground with regard to accurately reporting the
situation in Syria.
Thirdly, note the way the British Foreign Secretary
emphasizes that Russia and China “did not support the Arab League” in
its move to have Syria sanctioned. Those few words blow the cover of the
Arab League’s real purpose.
For it is the Arab League that is serving as a stamp
of moral and political legitimacy for Western military aggression in
Syria in the same way as Libya before. Washington, London and other
Western powers are disguising their neocolonial strategy under an Arab
cover of humanitarian concern and Arab League states are obliging for
their own selfish interests.
The bigger picture here is the Western ploy of
manipulating restive Arab populations to engineer regime change where
the incumbent government is considered inconvenient to Western strategic
interests. Syria is a major prize in that its support for Palestinian
rights against Western-backed Israeli aggression is but one of many
inconveniences. Its backing for the Hezbollah resistance against
American imperialism in the Middle East is another. Of most immediate
concern to Washington and allies is beyond Syria itself – its long-time
alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The US and its allies are
convulsed by the desire for regime change in Tehran. Taking out Assad’s
Syria is a long-held Western roadmap on the way to taking out Iran.
Syria’s present fate of being in Western crosshairs was probably sealed
when it rebuffed Washington’s overtures for a deal against Iran back in
February 2010 [2].
But the US and Western military roadmap goes beyond
re-carving the Middle East. As Michel Chossudovsky cogently explains in
his new book, Towards a World War III Scenario, Washington’s
military roadmap is aimed at global dominance in which hegemony over the
vast energy-producing Middle East and Central Asian regions is crucial
to marginalizing the heavyweight rivals of Russia and China. The
alliance between the latter two and both Syria and Iran only gives these
current targets added impetus for Western regime change.
Getting back to the treacherous role of the Arab
League in serving the Western powers’ agenda, it is surely a bitter
irony that one of the founding tenets of the League is to “defend the
independence and sovereignty” of its members. Syria, which was one of
the original seven founders of the League in 1945, is being stabbed in
the back by its fellow members precisely to have its independence and
sovereignty attacked. And it is the rump of Persian Gulf Arab states
within the organization that has emerged as the most treacherous. Saudi
Arabia and Qatar, along with the other Gulf Cooperation Council states
of Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, have been most
vocal in lending Arab denunciations of Libya and Syria and creating the
pretext for Western aggression.
However, deploying these Arab dupes is where Western
pretensions of supporting democracy and human rights become unstuck. The
Persian Gulf monarchs have been the most repressive towards any popular
stirrings for democracy within their own countries. Described variously
as kingdoms, shaikdoms, emirates, or sultanates, these states are
invariably ruled with iron rods by family dynasties that control their
people as little more than serfs. It is surely ridiculous when the
absolute despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular exhort
the Syrian government to enact greater political reforms when these same
countries do not brook any dissent and where it is a crime punishable
by law to publicly criticize the royal rulers.
Over the past year, Saudi Arabia has cracked down
murderously against peaceful protesters within its own borders. And it
was Saudi Arabia – where women are flogged for driving cars unchaperoned
and where public executions by beheading are carried every year – that
led the invasion force of Gulf Cooperation Council states into Bahrain
last Spring to ruthlessly crush peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations.
In Bahrain, Saudi-led Gulf forces continue with Washington and London’s
support to murder women and children in the streets and in their homes
[3].
The pay-off for these Arab despots is that they
continue to enjoy Western patronage and support in suppressing their own
people. Additionally, the Sunni monarchs share the Western agenda to
destroy the Syrian-Iranian alliance, which garners much greater regional
popular respect and influence than any of the Persian Gulf tyrants.
The illegitimacy of Western powers meddling in Syrian
affairs and elsewhere and the risible alliance with repressive Arab
states in pushing this agenda is only obscured because of the
corporate-controlled media’s deliberate blindness towards the deception.
An honest appraisal of the protagonists – the Western criminal
governments and their Arab tyrants – is, to put it bluntly, a sick joke.
Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa Correspondent
NOTES
[1] Syria: Arab League Suspends Observer Mission for Revealing Media Disinformation
[2] Syria: A Clenched US Fist Behind the Hand of Friendship
[3] ‘Responsibility to Kill’ (R2K): Washington Gives Green Light to Toxic Terror in Bahrain
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