Almost every day Israel bombs and kills scores of Palestinians including women and children. It is taken as a routine matter and hardly evokes any condemnatory response from any worthwhile quarter in the West. On the contrary, a Palestinian fires at and kills a few students of a Jewish seminary in Yerusalem known for developing and teaching a theology of usurping Arab lands and settling Jews thereon and a host of Western leaders including the American President condemn it as Islamic terrorism. And the English media in India readily climb on the bandwagon and accepts the version of their Western sisters. We have known for ages that our English-speaking journalists rarely question things coming from the West, especially if they are about Islam and Muslims.
Propaganda is apparently a potent weapon. But when scrutinized and examined deeply, it dawns on us that a battle won through propaganda is always temporary. Likewise hitting an enemy, mostly perceived one, does not mean that you have solved the problem. There is something seriously wrong with the western concepts of victory and defeat.
The main problem with the dominant Western thinking is that it believes in conflict management than in conflict resolution. For conflict resolution you need to reach at the root cause of a problem in order to find out a just solution. For doing so you need not only a proper methodology of investigating a problem justly but also a mind, upright and fearless, which thinks and speaks out rightly. To adopt this course of thinking and action is always a difficult enterprise to undertake. It is beyond the capacities of men given to impulsive thinking, for the minds of such people are normally governed by immediacy and vested interests. Such people are incapable of looking beyond their noses and therefore prefer conflict management through false propaganda, misguided diplomacy, even warfare and shy away from solving the problem in a lasting and enduring manner.
Let us analyse an example to further explain our point. By mid 1990s it had become clear that late Iraqi president Saddam Husain had indeed abandoned his weapon development programme. The United Nations weapons inspection team was about to submit a favourable report in this regard sensing which late Saddam Husain started awarding contracts for rebuilding his war-ravaged country. He saw to it that no major contract was awarded to American and British firms for he considered the two countries responsible for the destruction of his country. Seeing a huge business slipping out of their hands the American firms put a great deal of pressure on their government to do something in their favour.
The American government, with a view to safeguarding the business interests of its firms, decided to prolong the Iraqi plight. They used the mechanism of the UN Security Council and purchased some members of, and also planted their own men in, the weapons inspection team. Understandably these men gradually and in a sophisticated and calculated manner began to find faults with the findings and conclusions of the inspection team. They even stooped so low as to allege that late Saddam Husain was hiding weapons of mass destruction in his palaces and demanded to search them. They failed to find the WMDs, however, for Iraq had none of them to hide. And when America realised that its paid agents were at the end of their wit, it decided to invade and occupy Iraq. Today they are in occupation of that unfortunate country for about five years killing Iraqis and getting killed in thousands. They have not found any WMD nor any proof of late Saddam Husain’s complicity with terrorist groups for whose elimination they had invaded Iraq.
So, through propaganda that involved blatant lies and brazen violation of international laws America apparently won the battle against Saddam Husain. Today they control the Iraqi oil and have also succeeded in eliminating late Saddam Husain but only to confront a bigger problem of insurgency, freedom struggle, even the “menace” of what they call “Islamic terrorism”. In fact, today they are badly caught in the Iraqi quagmire and are left with no option but to choose between the devil and the deep sea. In plain words they have installed a government in Baghdad which can not survive in office without their military support. And this government will have no hesitation in embracing Iran, their avowed enemy, if they leave Iraq today. Look, what America’s conflict management has brought to it. And look at the example of Israel. Created to solve the Jewish problem, it has become a perennial source of problems in West Asia. This is what we call misery upon misery.
Propaganda is apparently a potent weapon. But when scrutinized and examined deeply, it dawns on us that a battle won through propaganda is always temporary. Likewise hitting an enemy, mostly perceived one, does not mean that you have solved the problem. There is something seriously wrong with the western concepts of victory and defeat.
The main problem with the dominant Western thinking is that it believes in conflict management than in conflict resolution. For conflict resolution you need to reach at the root cause of a problem in order to find out a just solution. For doing so you need not only a proper methodology of investigating a problem justly but also a mind, upright and fearless, which thinks and speaks out rightly. To adopt this course of thinking and action is always a difficult enterprise to undertake. It is beyond the capacities of men given to impulsive thinking, for the minds of such people are normally governed by immediacy and vested interests. Such people are incapable of looking beyond their noses and therefore prefer conflict management through false propaganda, misguided diplomacy, even warfare and shy away from solving the problem in a lasting and enduring manner.
Let us analyse an example to further explain our point. By mid 1990s it had become clear that late Iraqi president Saddam Husain had indeed abandoned his weapon development programme. The United Nations weapons inspection team was about to submit a favourable report in this regard sensing which late Saddam Husain started awarding contracts for rebuilding his war-ravaged country. He saw to it that no major contract was awarded to American and British firms for he considered the two countries responsible for the destruction of his country. Seeing a huge business slipping out of their hands the American firms put a great deal of pressure on their government to do something in their favour.
The American government, with a view to safeguarding the business interests of its firms, decided to prolong the Iraqi plight. They used the mechanism of the UN Security Council and purchased some members of, and also planted their own men in, the weapons inspection team. Understandably these men gradually and in a sophisticated and calculated manner began to find faults with the findings and conclusions of the inspection team. They even stooped so low as to allege that late Saddam Husain was hiding weapons of mass destruction in his palaces and demanded to search them. They failed to find the WMDs, however, for Iraq had none of them to hide. And when America realised that its paid agents were at the end of their wit, it decided to invade and occupy Iraq. Today they are in occupation of that unfortunate country for about five years killing Iraqis and getting killed in thousands. They have not found any WMD nor any proof of late Saddam Husain’s complicity with terrorist groups for whose elimination they had invaded Iraq.
So, through propaganda that involved blatant lies and brazen violation of international laws America apparently won the battle against Saddam Husain. Today they control the Iraqi oil and have also succeeded in eliminating late Saddam Husain but only to confront a bigger problem of insurgency, freedom struggle, even the “menace” of what they call “Islamic terrorism”. In fact, today they are badly caught in the Iraqi quagmire and are left with no option but to choose between the devil and the deep sea. In plain words they have installed a government in Baghdad which can not survive in office without their military support. And this government will have no hesitation in embracing Iran, their avowed enemy, if they leave Iraq today. Look, what America’s conflict management has brought to it. And look at the example of Israel. Created to solve the Jewish problem, it has become a perennial source of problems in West Asia. This is what we call misery upon misery.
[March 2008]
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