http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13007826/site/newsweek/Exporting Chaos
America talks about building democracy in the Middle East. In fact, it fosters mainly violence and failed states.June 5, 2006 issue - Many of us in the Middle East instinctively hold our breath in fear when American and British leaders get together to discuss our region and its evolving politics and nations, as U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair did last week in Washington. They heaped accolades on the new Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and proclaimed yet another beacon of hope and change for the entire Arab world. Bush applauded the "watershed event." Blair, during a fleeting visit to Baghdad, called it "a new beginning" that will let Iraqis take charge of their own destiny.
Say what?
The view from the Arab world is rather different, based on our own history rather than imagined futures. Since Napoleon's conquest of Egypt two centuries ago, most of us have doubted the sincerity, legitimacy and efficacy of the Western armies that regularly march into our lands to deliver modernity through the muzzle of a French musket or the barrel of an M-1 tank. While Anglo-American politicians proclaim historic strides to replace Arab despotism and darkness with freedom and democracy, people who actually live here and know something about the Middle East shudder. For they witness Iraq and other Arab countries descending into an ever more fractious maelstrom of ethnic, religious and tribal violence. The link with U.S. and British policies is as clear and consistent as it is dangerous and destructive.
Three years after the assault on Iraq, the country is delicately balanced between a reconfigured democratic polity and an endless slide into hell. More troubling, though, is that events in Iraq are not a freak sideshow. The evidence suggests that Iraq mirrors a wider and troubling trend throughout this region that is being fostered by Bush, Blair and their freedom-loving friends, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Once stable Arab countries are slowly polarizing and fragmenting into smaller units of ethnic, religious and tribal identities, each with its own militia and contacts with Washington, London, Paris and other global power centers. Like it or not, failed states are an increasingly common outcome of Western meddling in the Middle East. snip
Along with more than 2,300 American dead and more than 4,150 Iraqi police and army personnel, the best independent estimates say that somewhere around 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the country's many confrontations among U.S. and British troops, Iraqi state military forces, the indigenous resistance and terrorists drawn to Iraq from elsewhere. Every new governing body installed in Baghdad since April 2003 enjoys increasingly less impact outside the fortifications of the Green Zone in Baghdad. A once unified national state has fragmented into an essentially independent Kurdish statelet in the north and strongly decentralized regions in the rest of the country. Once mixed ethnic neighborhoods are unraveling at a brisk pace. Petty crime and organized kidnappings haunt much of the land. Many of the best professional minds in the country are emigrating to neighboring lands at every available opportunity. The most important government posts at the Defense, Foreign and Interior ministries remain unfilled due to political discord among the main factions. The key aspects of the much-ballyhooed national Constitution—unity, federalism, provincial powers, control of oil resources, the role of militias, relations with neighbors, the role of Islam—remain vague and unresolved. Even the single most powerful group, the majority Shiites who dominate the Parliament and the government, disagree about crucial issues related to their own powers and alliances, let alone issues of national unity, and they all have well-armed militias to back up their political leaders.
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