«Arab Spring» is Arab Socialism’s Fall
| Wayne MADSEN | 07.03.2012 | 00:00 |
The fall of autocratic regimes in
the Arab Middle East and North Africa, which had more to do with
skyrocketing unemployment and inflation than in a desire to
«democratize,» gave the circling vultures of Western «pro-democracy»
think tanks and foundations the opportunity to put stakes in the hearts
of governing pan-Arab socialist political parties long seen as a threat
to the goals of «uber-capitalist» globalization. The Ba’ath socialist
party of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was the first victim of a desire by the
global forces of extreme capitalism to re-make the Middle East’s
financial, demographic, political, and social construct.
Because the invasion and occupation of Iraq was such an unmitigated
disaster, the neo-conservative and neo-liberal forces of corporatism
decided that other traditional Arab socialist regimes would fall as a
result of «soft power.» Soft power involves the use of foreign-funded
domestic pressure groups, financed and organized by Western
non-governmental organization (NGO) interests, to foment insurrections
and «popular revolutions» by using street demonstrations, propagandized
media – including social media – and false flag human rights violations
intended to generate worldwide sympathy for the manufactured
revolutions.
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq the first action of L.
Paul «Jerry» Bremer, the de facto U.S. viceroy of occupied Iraq and
close associate of Henry Kissinger, was to abolish the Arab Socialist
Ba’ath Party. In fact, Bremer’s first order, Coalition Provisional
Authority Order Number 1, totally banned the Ba’ath Party and all of its
affiliated structures. Bremer ensured that pan-Arab socialism was dead
in Iraq. Bremer’s propaganda against Ba’athism was supported by his
press spokesman, Dan Senor, a longtime supporter of Israel and a former
investment portfolio manager for the Carlyle Group.
The Ba’ath Party of Iraq was the principal mechanism through which the
Iraqi bureaucracy, which ensured payments of salaries to government
workers, operated. Without the Ba’ath Party – public sector
infrastructure, Iraqis in all walks of life saw and end to their
paychecks. Popular discontent and rebellion against the Western
occupiers ensued. An army of U.S. contractors arrived in Iraq to ensure
the «de-Ba’athification» of the country, with right-wing Republicans at
the forefront of trying to create a capitalist and privatized wonderland
in Iraq that would not even sell to the public in the most conservative
U.S. state.
Naomi Klein summed up the West’s desire to turn Iraq into a
neo-conservative capitalist theme park in her September 2004 article in
Harper’s Magazine. Titled «Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit
of a neocon utopia,» Klein wrote, «A country of 25 million would not be
rebuilt as it was before the war; it would erased, disappeared . . .
Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their
quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible
workforce, open borders. Minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership
restrictions . . . Two months after the war began, USAID (U.S. Agency
for International Development) began drafting a work order, to be handed
to a private company, to oversee Iraq’s «transition to a sustainable
market-driven economic system.» The company that received the contract
was Bearing Point, the follow-on firm of the accountancy firm KPMG. KPMG
and USAID are also linked closely to U.S. intelligence operations.
In her article, Klein detailed the planned future for Iraq:
distribution rights for Proctor & Gamble products was seen as a
potential gold mine in Iraq, a single 7-Eleven was forecasted to «knock
out» thirty Iraqi stores, and «Wal-Mart could take over the country.»
Plans were in place for McDonald’s to open in downtown Baghdad and HSBC
branches to open all over the country.
Ba’ath Socialist Iraq, which guaranteed a social safety net and public
services, including water, electricity, education, and health care to
every Iraqi citizen, was dead. The capitalist utopia in Iraq never
materialized. Iraq became a country split into Sh’ia, Sunni, and Kurdish
zones, wracked by religious strife and almost daily terrorist attacks.
The standard of living enjoyed by Iraqis before the Western invasion and
occupation plummeted. Only Western military, security, and oil
companies benefitted from the deposing of the Ba’ath Party. But for the
greedy global «alchemists» huddled over their conference room tables in
Washington, New York, and London, Iraq was merely the first of the old
pan-Arab socialist countries to fall. Others would follow but without
the full-scale military invasion and occupation strategy that had failed
so miserably in Iraq. A new strategy would be needed, along with a new
administration in Washington to implement it.
After Barack Obama became president and lulled the Arabs of the Middle
East into a fairy tale that suggested that Obama was a different kind of
American president, one more interested in reaching out a hand of
friendship rather than a clenched fist, the Obama team of «democracy
engineers» set out to implement policies that would eliminate the Middle
East’s remaining pan-Arab socialist regimes.
Now, history is repeating itself in Syria where another faction of the
Ba’ath Party has been in power for decades. Syria is the birthplace of
Ba’athist socialism. The chief founder of Ba’athism was Michel Aflaq,
the Syrian who founded the ideology that combined elements of communism
with strictly Arab principals of «Ba’ath» or «rebirth» with pan-Arab
socialism under the motto of «Unity, Liberty, and Socialism.»
Eventually, the Syrian and Iraqi factions of the Ba’ath Party broke with
one another and the two Ba’ath-governed nations became bitter enemies.
Today, in rejecting any negotiated settlement with the Bashar al-Assad
regime the West is copying some of the same elements of
«de-Ba’athification» carried out by the Kissinger/Carlyle Group cabal
that took over Iraq temporarily from Saddam Hussein.
The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt and its replacement by
a hybrid Salafist/Muslim Brotherhood reactionary parliament governed by
a military junta also saw the eclipse of what remained of the pan-Arab
socialist influence of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Mubarak,
who succeeded Anwar Sadat, was a political heir of Nasser and his brand
of socialism. The new regime in Egypt has made it clear that the secular
socialist policies of Nasser, Sadat, and, to a much lesser extent,
Mubarak, have come to an end, with Salafist Islamist sharia law
replacing secular governance and equal rights for minority religions
throughout the country.
One of Nasser’s political disciples was Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
Qaddafi transformed Libya from a feudal backwater kingdom into a
Socialist People’s Jamahiriyah, a country where all Libyans, regardless
of race and skin color, were guaranteed a safety net of social services,
not least of which was the benefit of popular revenue sharing from
Libya’s royalties paid by Western oil firms. The new Salafist-linked
regime imposed by the West in Tripoli has carried out revenge murders of
Qaddafi supporters, totally dismantled any vestige of the Socialist
Jamahiriyah, committed human rights abuses, including the killing of
black African guest workers and black Libyans considered «kafirs»
(unwashed disbelievers) by Libyan Salafist Berbers of a more European,
rather than African, origin. Even the cemeteries of British and
Commonwealth troops who died in World War II have been smashed and
desecrated by the Western-imposed Salafists in Libya.
Tunisia’s Socialist Destourian Party, founded by Tunisian nationalist
leader and later president Habib Bourguiba in the 1930s, saw its legacy
in Tunisia obliterated with the ouster in 2011 of the corrupt oligarch
and Bourguiba successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the first victim of
the so-called «Arab Spring.»
The Palestinian socialism advocated by Yasir Arafat, George Habash, and
Nayef Hawatmeh has been replaced by a kleptocracy shared by corrupt
officials of Fatah and Hamas who are often more interested in enriching
themselves than in breaking free from the Israeli yoke of occupation.
Lebanon’s Arab socialist standard bearer, Kamal Jumblatt, was
assassinated in 1977. Although it was the West that benefitted by the
murder of the Arab socialist leader, Syria’s Ba’ath Party was blamed, as
it would be later for various assassinations of Lebanese political
figures. However, over the years, Israel and Western intelligence
agencies have been discovered to have colluded in the assassinations of a
number of Lebanese officials.
The West has always sought to stamp out Arab socialism, beginning with
the 1965 «disappearance» in Paris of Morocco’s Mehdi Ben Barka, called
the North African «Che Guevara,» allegedly at the hands of the French
intelligence service. The 1994 civil war between North Yemen and
socialist-Nasserite South Yemen resulted in the defeat of South Yemen
and its total absorption into a Western-supported Yemen led by Ali
Abdullah Saleh, an anti-socialist reactionary. Only in Algeria does some
semblance of the Arab socialist doctrine of the former president Ahmed
Ben Bella continue to exist to some degree under the administration of
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. But with more and more weapons being
intercepted at the Algerian border with Libya, it is a matter of time
before the anti-socialist juggernaut sweeps across the Sahara for
Algiers.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment