A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Confrontation With the ‘Islamic Danger’ |
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| jaihoon |
| 03/31/03 at 02:11:35 |
| Confrontation With the ‘Islamic Danger’ Hassan Tahsin I disagree with those who deny that the aim of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is the “liberation” of that country. The Americans and their British followers truly want to “liberate” Iraq in order to set it up as an example for the entire region. Therefore, the primary aim of the invasion, bristling with the strength of American arms and dominated by American technology, is not simply Iraq but all Islamic and Arab nations. It is a war of aggression aimed at terrorizing the countries of the region on the one hand and imposing an American model on the other. The Americans and the British are not seeking to destroy the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and don’t care about bringing down Saddam and his corrupt dictatorial regime. Their concern is finding a foothold in the region, forestalling certain events and halting the growth of a new Arab regime. They realize that a new system is beginning to crystallize that will take the place of the current outdated and out-of-touch Arab system. The primary motivator for that pre-emptive invasion of Iraq is the fear of the diffusion of Islam once again and its transformation into a power competing with the West or at the very least becoming a pesky problem. We must not be taken in by appearances or forget that what is happening now is the fruit of strategic thinking that was developed more than a decade ago by a group of think tanks and decision-making centers in a number of intelligence, military and political circles in the US. It is naïve to think that this idea is a result of the events of Sept. 11 or that it is a natural reaction to those events. Sept. 11 was merely a justification that provided the extremist American strategists with a golden opportunity to declare their plans and to gather political and media support for their course under the umbrella of the “war on terrorism”. They succeeded to a great extent in using this opportunity and setting the scene for this outrageous invasion of Iraq. The idea of a pre-emptive confrontation with a rising Islam was circulated a long time a go. But it did not receive serious attention until after the Second Gulf War. The clash of civilization theory of Samuel Huntington is the theoretical foundation on which the American strategists and politicians built their plan for just such a confrontation. However, there were others who sounded the alarm bell even before Huntington. Perry Bosine, professor of international studies at Warwick University, wrote an article in 1991 entitled: “Political Reality in the New World: New Forms of World Peace in the Twenty-First Century”. In it he considered the immigration from the South (the Arab and Islamic world) into the North (the US and Europe) and what he called the “the collision between the competing modern identities” the two most important issues in the struggle between the moderates and extremists in the 21st century. Bosine warned the West that the immigration posed a danger to the safety of moderate nations because it would threaten their modern ideologies by creating a fifth column within them. As for the clash of identity, it will be manifested between the West and Islam, first, due to the gap between widespread secular principles on the one hand and Islamic principles on the other and, second, due to the long history of struggle between Christianity and Islam. Bosine ends by warning: “If the two combine, the dangers of emigration and the dangers of a clash of cultures, it becomes easy to imagine it as a kind of social cold war between the West and Islam.” This ideology is what guides the elite politicians and military leadership in the American administration today and drives them to anticipate a confrontation with what they consider to be the encroaching danger on the West — Islam, which they nominated as the “new enemy” after the Soviet threat abated. Arab News Opinion 31 March 2003 |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |