adminpower buttressed by the same military, secret police and judicial power who sustained the previous rulers.
Death and destruction is rampant, poverty and misery has multiplied, law and order has broken down, retrograde thugs have seized political power, where previously they were a marginal force. Living standards have plunged, cities are devastated and commerce is paralysed. And presiding over this “Arab Winter” are the Western powers, the US and EU, — with the aid of the despotic Gulf absolutist monarchies, their Turkish ally and a motley army of mercenary Islamic terrorists and their would-be exile spokespeople.
The legacy of imperial intervention in the Muslim world during the first decade of the 21st century, in terms of lives lost, in people displaced, in economies destroyed, in perpetual warfare, exceeds any previous decade, including 19th and 20th century colonial conquests. Much of the latest Western mayhem and violence has been compressed in the period dubbed the “Arab Spring” between 2011-2012.
Moreover, the worst is to come. The Western overseers have gained strategic positions of power in some countries (Egypt), are engaged in prolonged ruinous wars in others (Syria) and are preparing for even bigger and more destructive military intervention in still others (Iran). The “Winter of Muslim Discontent” covers an entire arc from Pakistan, Afghanistan in South Asia, through the Gulf region and the Middle East to North Africa. In the throes of the worst economic crises to hit the West since the 1930s, the Western imperialist regimes have squeezed their people, mobilised personnel, arms and money to engage in simultaneous wars in five regions and two continents — in pursuit of overthrowing political adversaries and installing clients, even if it results in the destruction of the economy and uprooting of millions.
Let us begin with Egypt, where the Arab Spring has become a case study in the making of the New Imperial Order in the Muslim world. To attribute the mass violent rebellions across two continents and two dozen Muslim countries to a US made film which desecrates the Prophet Mohammed is the height of superficiality.
At most the film was the trigger that set off deeply rooted hostilities resulting from two decades of US led ravaging and destruction of the Muslim world and more particularly, rage flows from Washington’s crude intervention against the promise of the Arab Spring.
Egypt: The Making of a Client State
From day one, in February 2011, Washington sought in every way to prop up the Mubarak regime as thousands of protestors fighting for freedom were killed, wounded or jailed in the major plazas and streets of Egypt. When Mubarak was forced out of power, Washington sought to retain its influence by turning to his Generals, and backed the military junta which seized power.
As the military dictatorship became the target of huge pro-democracy demonstrations, Washington backed a political power sharing agreement between the dominant pro-Western, neo-liberal sector of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, excluding any but the most superficial democratic and socio-economic reforms demanded by the poor and the working and middle classes.
With the election of President Mohamed Mursi, Washington secured the most fervent advocate of savage “free market” capitalism and the second best (after Mubarak) advocate of retaining Egypt’s status as a US client state in the Middle East. Mursi, following in the footsteps of Mubarak and in accordance with the Washington and Tel Aviv, closed the trade routes between Gaza and Sinai, travelled to the Non-Aligned Movement in Teheran to deliver the Saudi-Gulf message calling for support of the Western backed armed mercenaries ravaging Syria. Egyptian Muslim and secular populace are profoundly disenchanted with the Brotherhoods betrayal of their promises of welfare, jobs, prosperity and nationalist foreign policy.
Libya
The Obama regime led the aerial and maritime war that devastated Libya’s economy, destroyed its national integrity and allowed a plethora of foreign and domestic terrorist fundamentalist groups to seize control over vast regions of the country. Washington and the EU parachuted a motley group of client ex-pats into government — without any supporting state institutions.
The Islamic fundamentalists, the clans, the gangs, the tribalists, monarchists and dozens of other local warlords who the EU and Washington funded, armed and imported to overthrow Gaddafi did much more — they destroyed the entire fabric of organised civil society, the state and public authority. In the face of a Hobbesian chaotic world of warring fiefdoms, many people turned to their primary groups — family, clan, religious authorities, which could offer some minimum protection in the home, street and workplace.
The assault on the US consulate was only one of thousands of violent assaults against property and national, regional and local authorities. The very police, military and ministries are infiltrated by competing armed religious and secular factions seeking to secure scarce oil revenues for their particular group.
Instead Washington and the EU have alienated all sections of Libyan society: the millions of beneficiaries of stable secure, secular and prosperous Gaddafi ruled Libya; the mass of armed Muslim fanatics who demand a fundamentalist state and feel their sacrifices have been pushed aside; the warlords and contrabandists of arms, who demand respect for their territorial acquisitions.
Yemen
The seizure of the US Embassy in Yemen follows 33 years of US arming and financial backing of the brutal Ali Abdullah Saleh dictatorship, months of drone warfare and the repression of mass peaceful protests. The on-going pro-democracy movement in Yemen, which attained massive proportions, has been blocked by US-Saudi intervention and has left in its wake thousands of dead, wounded and jailed Yemenese citizens. The seizure of the US Embassy, ostensibly over “the film”, had far deeper and more comprehensive causes: popular discontent with the decades long US-Yemen alliance and a phony US promoted “democratic transition”.
Tunisia
In the case of Tunisia, the Washington-EU leveraged the Islamic Ennahda party in power in order to abort the pro-democracy transformation. They subsequently heavily subsidised the “free-market” Moncef Marzouki regime which has totally ignored the basic demands which led to the uprising: mass unemployment, the concentration of wealth and subservience to EU-US foreign policy especially with regard to Palestine, Libya and Syria. The Islamic regime and party played the usual double game of condemning “the film” and smashing the protest, knowing full well that the street protest could ignite a much more significant demonstration against the regime’s total neglect of the original democratic socio-economic agenda.
Faced with a sharp and militant backlash to its on-going counter-revolutionary offensive in the Muslim world, Washington is demanding that its “new” Muslim clients increase “security” — strengthen the police state and crack down on mass protest movements. Washington is once again on the defensive.
The shifting relations of power, between popular movements and the US-EU, have once again become more acute. In the first phase, Washington and its EU allies were caught by surprise and severely challenged by the mass pro-democracy movements which overthrew or threatened their client rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere — what was dubbed the “Arab Spring”.
The second phase was the Western reaction to countermand, to halt and reverse the popular pro-democracy movement, via alliances with malleable Islamic leaders (Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen) and by launching and escalating armed struggles via Islamic extremists in Libya and Syria. They also buttressed the despotic royal regimes in the Gulf.
Barely a few months later, US and EU the restoration of neo-colonial clients revealed its fragile foundations: the fraudulent “transitions” produced servile, rulers incapable and unwilling to address the socio-economic demands of the pro-democracy movements.
The third phase of the struggle now pits a more complex scenario than the earlier “binary conflict” of dictatorship versus democracy. Today we witness conflicts between neo-liberal Islamists in power against secular and Islamic trade unionists and the poor fundamentalist Islamists fighting for the US (Syria) and against the US (Libya); secular (Syria) and Islamic (Iran) regimes joining forces facing Western backed Islamic mercenaries and nuclear Jewish threats.
Whether it is Pakistan, Somalia or the Sudan — wherever the US has gained client states it has imposed war policies that impoverish the masses.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina.
Online Reporter