INVOLUNTARY CONSEQUENCES: U.S. POLICY PROMOTING ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM

Arshad M. Khan

As we survey our involvement in the Middle East over the past half century, a common thread weaves a distinct pattern.  Wherever we go, we alienate the people from secular government and drive them to religious fundamentalism.

In Iran we organized a coup (Operation Ajax) against the elected parliamentary government of Dr. Mossadegh at the behest of the British.  The subsequent dictatorial regime of the Shah shutdown all civil society dissent.  No opprobrium for the Shah’s notorious secret police – he was our golden boy.  As a result, dissent was forced into the mosques and the clerics became the leaders.

In Lebanon our ally and sometimes proxy, Israel, invaded in 1982 with the object of driving out the PLO.  At the cost of more than 20,000 lives and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, they were successful.  But then they stayed in the South.  Some claimed they wanted the water of the Litani river; the Israelis said they wanted a buffer zone.  Whatever the reason, they stayed, and the Shia fought a guerrilla war eventually driving them out.  In the process, Amal the party representing the Shia lost out to the overtly religious Hezbollah.

One consequence of the weakened PLO was the rise of Hamas.  Palestinians in the occupied territories eventually tired of the "peace process", where the operative word was process not peace, and it was soon apparent the Israelis would simply keep negotiating while seizing more and more land and building ever more illegal settlements.  When this "process" died of natural causes, the Israelis had inserted a quarter of a million settlers in settlements dotted all across the Palestinian territories.  The Palestinians themselves, fed up with the secular PLO’s inability to rein in Israeli expansion and secure a peace settlement, voted in Hamas, a radical religious party known and respected for its social services which eased the misery of Palestinian daily existence.

In Iraq we have managed to replace the secular Ba’ath party with Sunni and Shia groups in the south, and the Kurds in the north running a de facto autonomous state.  The voting in this ‘democracy’ is entirely along religious/ethnic lines.  During Ba’ath party rule, the Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a Christian; now the Christians are leaving in droves.  Power in the current Shia-majority government is held mostly by religious exiles who sought refuge in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule.  The status of women, much vaunted by our hypocritical media in Afghanistan, is given nary a mention as it declines precipitously.

In Afghanistan, the Taleban became the natural heirs of our policy of funding and supporting the religion-stoked Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation.  This of course included a certain as-yet-unknown Osama bin Laden.  We are now back in Afghanistan, where it is clear to any observer not soaked in bankrupt military strategy that any final settlement will have to include the Taleban-led Pashtun majority.  Worse still our Af-Pak policy is de-legitimizing a secular government in Pakistan by forcing it to act against its own people.  The religious parties, a previously nominal force, are eagerly awaiting the next election.

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