By Mahboob Khawaja, PhD

“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in position of power the vulgar and base.”  (C.E.M Joad. Guide to Modern Wickedness, 1936)

The Leaders Who Could Not Lead to Political Change and Peace

The Arabian landscape portrays continuous wars, insurgency against authoritarianism, insecurity, and a lack of moral and intellectual leadership for political change for the good of the people. For more than a decade, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Afghanistan have not emerged as stable entities after the conflicts.  This week, the Laws of Nature signaled staunch reminders to all mankind via flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, and raging wildfires across the globe. Would any serious thinkers take notice of these natural acts for change, reformation, and security? Please view:  “Global Peace and Security:  World Leaders Betray the Canons of Truth, Wisdom and Humanity”, “Peace and War The Russia-Ukraine Conflict Urgently Needs a Dialogue for Peace”, Uncommon Thought Journal: 8/26/2023, and “Arab Triangle: How the prosperity bubble destroyed the Arab Moral and Intellectual culture” Uncommon Thought Journal: 6/12/2013.

Militarization of the Arabian Peninsula appears high on the agenda for policies and practices. The European and American policymakers view the oil-exporting Arab leaders as “camel jockeys”  and draw hollow laughter.  According to John  Perkins (Confession of an Economic Hitman, 2006), Arab States are like ‘cows to be milked as long as necessary.’ Most of the Arab leadership families are former colonial agents hired by the British, French, and US Empires to control and manage the oil export business. They pay to the Masters for protection of their palaces, but not of the people. Even a common person cannot think outside the capsule of the secret police apparatus.

There are no objective moral, spiritual, or intellectual values in the imperial philosophy of global economic development where the gulf of greed, militarization, and hegemonic control over the oil-rich Arab Middle East immeasurably separates power and wisdom. The puppet rulers and the imperial Masters demonstrate sadistic policy behaviors and cruelty to safeguard their vested interests and strategic priorities for hegemonic economic development across the Arab world.

Evil is the deprivation of good. The coming of Islam raised the Arab moral and intellectual cultures from an age of ignorance to an age of human development, change, and progress to the peak of the Golden Age of scientific and human progress lasting 800 years in Al-Andulcia- Spain. Maria Rosa Menocal (A Golden Reign of Tolerance: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, 2003), highlighted the contributions of Islamic civilization in Spain. The Islamic civilization identified the Arabs as “’Ummah of Khair’ – people of goodness and peace.”  The message of the Qur’an is clear:  “We have revealed for you (O men!)  a book in which is a message for you: Will ye not then understand?” (21: 10). And it warns: “Then the Apostle will say: O My Lord! My people took this Qur’an for just foolish nonsense.”(25:30), “Does Man not see; It is God Who created him from sperm. Yet Behold! he (stands forth) as an open Adversary.” (36:77).

Today, the Arab world exemplifies a decadent moral and intellectual landscape. What a human tragedy for those knowledgeable people, who defied the logic of truth. The superficial prosperity of the oil-exporting economy betrayed the heritage of Arab nations and changed them into interdependent and subservient puppets to the West and stooges living to compete in erecting high-rise buildings and palaces without any purpose, importing luxury cars, organizing and enjoying football matches and striving for exclusive consumerism and nothing else. They lost sense of humanity, consequential futuristic calamities, and accountability to God.

The Arab Spring (2011), raised hopes for systematic rethinking and socioeconomic and political change but the authoritarian Arab leaders crushed the spirit of people’s movement for political change. Islam professed a movement for human development and change but the neocolonial opted for a short-lived economic prosperity. The Arab people have become victims of their own rulers and their complacency to remain in power, fair or foul.

After the 9/11 tragedies, the US-led bogus “War on Terrorism”, and its War-Industrial  Complex fetched the Arab rulers with a sense of insecurity for their survival.  John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman, 2006), outlines how the economic and industrial development scenarios were linked to ‘Saudi Arabian money laundering affairs’ to modernize the Kingdom by an unusual coercive and secretive agreement worked out by Henry Kissinger. Under the conspicuous scheme of things:

“Saudi Arabia would use its petrodollars to purchase US Government securities; in turn the interest earned by these securities would be spent by the US Department of the Treasury in ways that enabled Saudi Arabia to emerge from a medieval society into a modern, industrialized world….Our own US Department of the Treasury would hire us at Saudi expense to build infrastructure projects and even entire cities throughout the Arabian Peninsula.” Perkins adds that “Washington used its advantage to impose one other critical condition…. and I sometime find it difficult to understand how Saudi Arabia could have accepted this condition.”

John Perkins views the grand scheme of Arab economic development as a blueprint for the US ambitions of empire-building across the globe: “It was part of a sinister system aimed not at outfoxing an unsuspecting customer, but rather at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever known…….most puzzling was that final entry under the list of my clients: US Treasury Department, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The Arab World Lives Under Western Imperialism and War Racketeering

“War is a racket Then and Now” (Free Thought Manifesto: 05/29/2011) describes Mark Sheffield. Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler (WAR IS A RACKET) of the US Marines served 33 years but “had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until [he] retired to civil life did [he] fully realize it.” The wars sustained capitalist governance and made millionaires into billionaires. “WAR is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, and surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”  Butler asks many rational questions: “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?  How many of them dug a trench?  How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout?  How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets?  How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy?  How many of them were wounded and killed in battle?”

War is a crime in a civilizational context. What is the cure to raging cruelty and indifference to the interests of the whole of mankind?  The 21st century’s new-age complex political, economic, social, and strategic challenges and the encompassing opportunities warrant new thinking, new leaders, and new visions for change, conflict management, and participatory peaceful future-making. The Divine knowledge offers logical substance of reality to be reckoned with:

Verily in the creation of the Heavens and of the Earth and in the succession of the night and of the day, are signs for men of understanding;
Who standing and sitting and reclining, bear God in mind and reflect on the creation of the Heavens and of Erath and say: Oh, our Lord- Thou has not created this in vain.  (3: 190: The Qur’an).

The imperial networks export militarization and wars to destabilize the Arab Middle East. The Arab world has one focal issue – Palestine and the two-state solution. The contemporary Arab world has no honest leaders to protect the Masjid Al-Aqsa and its sanctity from Israel’s Ultra Nationalist provocations and to reason with Palestine and Israel and what future options could be imagined for peace and security (please see the following article by this author: “Al-Aqsa Mosque Waiting for the Arab Leaders.” (Information Clearinghouse)).

Wars, deaths, and destruction are at the top of the agenda in terms of relations between the West and the Arab world.  Was the discovery of “oil” a conspiracy (“Fitna”) to forfeit the Arab culture and Islamic civilization? The ongoing bloodbaths across the streets of Yemen, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere provide a staunch reminder of something terribly wrong with human thinking and ensuing military actions. How do such crimes portray the nature of Arab societies in which bloodbaths are taking place under the aegis of economic development and militarization? Do the paranoid Arab authoritarian rulers envisage an advanced culture of “modernity?” The whole of the Arab world is a quagmire of conflicts, sectarian warfare, and foreign interventions. Wars kill people and destroy the planet and those who possess power show no wisdom to dream of triumph and glory over the human mind and soul. The ongoing war between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO,  and the war-torn Middle East overshadow the common citizens of the world who feel incapacitated and dehumanized to share a terrible sense of helplessness and wonder how to save humanity from the scourge of imperial-led war racketeering and the consequences of man’s intransigence, triviality and viciousness against his own existence and future on Earth.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace, and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and is the author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Germany, 12/2019.