The US and Israel are to blame for Arab misery: let me count the ways

It is the season of the revival of the “Arab Mind”: propagandists for Saudi princes around the world are peddling the same message contained in the racist book, The Arab Mind. Propagandists of Saudi princes who write in English have another task: they are competing to inherit the role of Fouad Ajami in Zionist US media. They know how much American mainstream media and Israel appreciate the schtick that Arabs are responsible for their misery, or that, as Ajami put it over and over again in his cliché, Arab wounds are self-inflicted. Saudi Arabia decided on orders of the US to take on ISIS and the Saudi regime may also have its own fears from ISIS. But the propaganda outlets of Saudi regime act and sound in unison, claiming that the Saudi regime is blameless, and that the US and Israel are humanitarian warriors in the Arab world, and that Arabs are backward by their very nature. To blame the US or Israel for Arab wars and divisions is tantamount to blasphemy in the Wahhabi doctrine.

Nevertheless, it is not an arduous task to enumerate the various ways in which the US and Israel are directly or indirectly responsible for Arab misery and the state of wars. Let me count the ways:

1.) Civil wars: there has not been one Arab civil war since the WWII which was not instigated or at least prolonged by the US and or Israel, from Lebanon, to Sudan, to Iraq, to Syria, to Somalia, to Jordan, and Algeria.

2.) Divisions, partitions, and secessions: the US and Israel have supported or armed every single Arab secessionist movement from the split of the United Arab Republic (UAR), to the Kurdish revolt in Iraq, to the partitionists in Lebanon, to the Southern Sudanese rebels, to the attempt to tear apart the Iraqi state after 2003.

3.) The US has prevented heavy, and even light, industrialization of the region. In all cases where the US sponsored the imposition of market economy, the markets were flooded with imported products, and the US – through the World Bank and the IMF – insisted on the dismantling of the public sector. Compare the state of military and civilian industrialization of Egypt under Nasser with its current affairs since the formation of the Camp David regime. Egypt was on par with the South Korean economy and, without the Camp David regime, Egypt would have surpassed India in economic development.

4.) The US (acting often on behalf of Israel but also on its own volition) worked to undermine the military power of all Arab states. The US clearly destroyed the Iraqi army, and it has been working hard to destroy the Syrian army, and it turned the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies into police forces capable only of internal repression. It also forced the Libyan regime of Qadhdhafi to surrender his most advanced WMD potential. To be sure, Gulf regimes were allowed to import advanced but restricted weapons whose main purpose is cash transfers from the Gulf to the West, and for possible future use by the US to protect these regimes and Israel.

5.) US and Israel have sponsored the overwhelming majority of Arab repressive regimes. The repressive regimes of Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria (after Houari Boumediene), Sudan (under Gaafar Numayri), Somalia (under Siad Barre who drove the country to ruin), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s), UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon in its most repressive eras. The people of the region suffered a great deal in their attempts to overthrow their regimes but the US insisted on the preservation of those regimes.

6.) The US and Israel helped train and equip the torture and repression apparatuses in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon (under certain regimes of Sham`un, and Gemayyel), Iraq (in the 1980s), Kuwait, and Somali (under Siad Barre).

7.) The US sponsored and supported the most conservative and most reactionary brands of Islam during the Cold War and worked with the Saudi, UAE and Jordanian regimes to unleash a militant internationalist Jihadi Islam to pit against Nasser and against world communism.

8.) The US has always been on the side of the regimes against the side of those who champion feminism, enlightenment, progress, and secularism.

9.) The US and Israel fought all attempts of Arab unity and integration, and during the Cold War conflated Arab nationalism with communism, by the admission of Archie Roosevelt in his “For Lust of Knowing.”

10.) The US funded and/or armed the worst militias and reactionary political parties in the region.

11.) The US funded and sponsored the worst samples of the Arab press: the most sectarian and the most sleazy all in return for parroting American propaganda.

12.) The US deliberately prevented the Arabs from liberating Palestine and thus allowed Israel to remain a major factor in the destabilization and fragmentation of the region. The US violently prevented peace (real peace with the restoration of Palestinian rights over all of historic Palestine) from prevailing in the region.

13.) The US, while preventing the Arabs from obtaining the arms that are necessary to defend lands and people from Israeli aggression, flooded the region with arms that are only used for sedition, civil wars, and chaos.

14.) Through the peace process and through other means, the US sponsored the Israeli occupation and aggression which resulted in so much deaths and destruction since 1948.

15.) The US has pushed Arab regimes to enact more restrictions on the press in order to ban voices critical of the US and Israel.

16.) In the name of “the war on terrorism,” the US has in fact pushed Arab regimes toward more repression.

This is only a partial list and leaves one with no doubt that Arab problems are largely inflicted by the US and Israel (and the chorus in the EU).

Dr. As’ad AbuKhalil is a Professor of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus, a lecturer and the author of The Angry Arab News Service. He tweets @asadabukhalil.