All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Haroon Siddiqui.
He is editorial page editor emeritus and columnist at the Toronto Star.
Earlier, he was national editor, news editor, and a foreign affairs analyst.
He has covered or supervised coverage of Canada for 40 years and reported from nearly 50 countries, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which we were just talking about here on the show, the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflict, and lately the emergence of India as an economic and regional power.
He's the author of the book, Being Muslim, and he's got a great new piece in the Star, that's thestar.com, Our Dance with Arab Dictators.
Welcome back to the show.
Haroon, how are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm very happy to have you here.
A very excellent piece here today.
I'd like to start with what you call the racism, I think correctly, in the use of the term Arab street.
When you don't hear that about any other region of the world, public opinion is only some dirty homeless thing in the Arab world, I guess.
Right.
You see, what really happens is we respect public opinion in our own countries, or at least we pretend to, but we don't even pretend that when it comes to the Arab, Arab public opinion can be dismissed, because it is always the Arab street talking.
And what does that imply?
It implies it's emotional, it's irrational, and it's dismissive.
So we don't have an American street, we don't have a Canadian street, we don't have a British street or a French street, but we do have an Arab street.
And this is just one of the many things that we unwittingly, unknowingly take for granted and make racist notions sound respectable.
You know, it's in the same thing that we keep hearing Arabs and Muslims may be hardwired to mistreat women, for example, just as sweeping generalization, just like blacks may be prone to violence and Catholics to abusing boys, and so on and so forth.
And the last example that I provided was that we have this glorious Arab spring, Arab awakening, where masses are rising up, calling for democracy, universal human rights, the very principles that we espouse and long for.
But we are constantly reminded by our politicians and the media that we should really not be too enthusiastic about it and really ponder this idea that democracy may not be part of the Arab DNA.
So what this all of this really does is it is a crude formulation, they're racist, and they put us to sleep.
And they serve the purpose of, in effect, suggesting that Arab troubles are of their own making.
It has nothing to do with us, you know, we have everything to do with it.
Now, here's the thing, though.
And believe me, we got time and we're going to talk about that.
That's why you're here.
But I wanted to still focus on this question a bit, because, you know, it really does come down to who do we believe our politicians are our own lying eyes when even American TV will show us pictures of the revolution in Egypt.
They don't have funny hats.
They're dressed like Americans.
Why, look, they they look almost like the guy down the street and they're demanding what a real Bill of Rights.
You know, I mean, it's it seems as though it should be much harder to, you know, use that kind of caricature of Arabs on people in the West after what we've just seen.
Right.
But we want we have demonized them for so long that we are thrown off by a revolution where people, as you say, look like us, talk like us.
And in fact, demanding the very things that we say they should have.
So, you know, the propaganda is done on its head and it has thrown off a lot of people and they don't know how they have to react properly.
That's what's happening here.
All right.
Now, let's get to the meat of this article, which is just what does the United States, our empire, our satellite, our major allies in the West, what do we have to do with the unfortunate position of so many Arab people?
You see, this is not to say that Arabs are not responsible for their own problems.
Of course, every people are.
But nonetheless, they are a product of the world that they live in and the geopolitics that is inflicted on them.
And it's not too onerous to just go back in history and say that most of these countries were a creation of bureaucrats, British and French and the others, on a piece of paper following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Iraq was created as an artificial state.
Jordan was drawn on a line was drawn in the sand.
The same holds true of Kuwait.
These are not real countries.
Of course, now they are accepted as real countries.
So when you draw lines on a map like that and divvy up the former Ottoman Empire between the French and the British and later on under American influence, this is the vestige of colonialism.
That's one.
You have uprooted them from their past.
And since then, we have had a geopolitical formula by which we have dealt with the Middle East, namely that we don't trust, as we said, the Arab street.
We don't want to hear what the Arab people have to say.
So we deal with them through puppet governments, through client regimes, and so on.
And I just did some counting the other day.
There are 22 members of the Arab League.
And if you leave out the marginal states, there are four of them, Comoros, Mauritania, Dibuchi, and Somalia.
Of the 18 members of the Arab League who are really sort of is what counts, as many of them as eight of them are monarchies, and all of them are in our pocket, have been our allies, and so on.
And inevitably, because they are our allies, they've been described by our pundits and politicians as moderate governments.
But I'm interested in which 10 aren't monarchies.
I mean, you don't like, for example, assuming Mubarak was still there, you know, a couple months ago, would he count as a dictator or as a...
No, let's just go through systematically.
The eight monarchies are Jordan and Morocco.
And the six members of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and one more.
So those are the monarchies.
They're all pro-American and pro-Western.
I'm not criticizing it.
I'm just simply laying out that fact.
Then on to your question.
There are eight other autocratic states, and they are simple to know.
Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, and the Palestinian Authority.
Out of those, six and a half, because Mahmoud Abbas at the PA is only half the Palestinian Authority, six and a half of them have been Western allies.
And most of them have maintained torture chambers, which the United States has rented post-911 for anti-terror interrogation.
Okay, but just to be clear, you're only differentiating there between, you know, the King of Jordan versus the so-called president of Yemen, even though really what he is is a dictator, right?
Yes.
What I'm saying is, you have eight monarchies, they're dynasties, they pass on power to their sons and so on.
There is no democracy there.
In addition to that, there are eight autocratic states.
Of them, about six and a half are our allies.
So what do we end up with?
We end up with eight plus six.
Fourteen and a half of the 18 members of the Arab League are in our camp.
Most of them are autocrats.
There is nothing moderate about them.
Many of them maintain torture chambers.
They have all been our allies.
And on top of that, they have been corrupt to the core.
When it comes to monarchies, we don't know how much money belongs to them, their families, and how much belongs to the state.
In the case of autocracies like Egypt and so on and so forth, these people have found myriad ways of turning power into money.
So we end up with stories like Mubarak, 5 billion, Gaddafi in Libya, 10 billion, Zine bin Ali in Tunisia, 8 billion, and the list is long.
And we have known this all along.
This is not a surprise.
So this is, we've been winking and nodding at this as though we let them make money for the services rendered to us.
So what does all of that mean?
It really means that we have had a big part in denying democracy to these people through these dictators who are supposedly doing our bidding.
All right.
Well, we'll have to hold it right there as we go to this break.
It's Haroon Siddiqui from the Toronto Star, thestar.com for his new piece, Our Dance with Arab Dictators.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page editor emeritus at the Toronto Star.
And we're talking about the fact that Uncle Sam is on the wrong side of virtually every one of these revolutions in the Middle East.
And now, Haroon, I have this theory, and I'm just kind of speculating here and making it up.
Go right ahead.
But I kind of think that the only reason that they intervened in Libya the way they did was simply to change the narrative from the story you're telling.
America is an evil empire.
We support tortured dictatorships by the dozens in the Middle East.
And when those people step out of line, our puppet dictators torture them to death.
And so they had to kind of change that.
Here's this entire uprising across the entire region, North Africa, from Morocco to Pakistan, really.
And they had to change that narrative from America's the bad guy in all this to America's Superman on the side of the angels and on the side of the poor downtrodden people and help the rebels.
And so they picked Gaddafi because, after all, they only brought him back into the fold eight years ago.
They'd only sold him tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons as opposed to billions and billions.
And they figured Americans still have their I hate Gaddafi T-shirts left over from the 1980s.
And so they make an example out of him simply for the public relations.
No, I don't agree with the conspiracy theory part of it, but I agree with some part of it, which is simply that it is a fact.
The question that emanates from what you just said is my conspiracies only between, you know, Obama and Clinton.
So it's not that much of a conspiracy question that emanates from what you just said is why are we intervening?
Why do we have a humanitarian intervention in Libya, which I support, which you don't?
But then the question becomes, why are there no humanitarian interventions in Yemen and in Bahrain, which are exact, almost exact parallels?
Because there, too, the dictators have turned on their own citizens using violence, using guns, tear gas, in some cases supplied by the United States and Europe.
And in the case of Bahrain, the king uses far more foreign mercenaries than Gaddafi ever has.
So the issue becomes why?
And the answer is clear.
In the case of Bahrain, that's an ally where the Fifth Fleet is based, where there's an air base that is used for the war in Afghanistan.
So under no circumstances would America, can America be practically a part of bombing Bahrain, for example, as we are bombing Libya.
In the case of Yemen, Washington and others have great reservations about President Saleh, but he is ostensibly our ally in the fight against terrorism and al-Qaeda, and we give him $250 million a year to do so.
And we don't know what the hell to do.
In fact, that's what's happening.
And then the counterargument really is that America could not possibly be militarily intervening everywhere there is trouble, which is true also.
But this particular intervention in Libya is so horribly selective and self-serving that it raises all sorts of questions, one of which you have raised yourself, you know.
So I got to say, I'm surprised to hear you say that you support it, knowing what you already just said about the rest of the region.
For the same reason that I supported the humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, for example, against Ljubodan Milosevic, who was then dragged before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, which the same thing may happen to Gaddafi.
So one need not shed any tears for Gaddafi.
But if there is such a thing as sort of the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds, which is a Canadian concept, which was approved by the United Nations, which makes it legal, the real issue is why do we have such selectivity, you know?
Yeah, well, but in the issue, why would you expect anything but for America to come in and support the next dictatorship there?
Right.
So which leads to the question, you see, is that...
I mean, if just Canada was invading Libya to support regime change there or whatever, I guess I'd probably give you all a shot at it.
But I don't see why you'd think America would do anything but put another Gaddafi in if they can.
No, you see, if we have such a cynical view, we could say the same thing that might happen in Egypt.
It could happen everywhere.
But let perfection not be an enemy of the good.
So some good, much good has been done in Egypt, much good has been done in Tunisia.
We'll see how it unfolds.
And that itself is an extraordinary achievement when you think about it.
I mean, a dictator was brought down in 18 days by nothing more than people power.
Another dictator was brought down in Tunisia within a matter of three weeks.
Those are extraordinary achievements of people power, people demanding democracy, freedom, human rights.
And the same forces have unfolded everywhere, which has posed a huge problem for the United States.
And the real moral issue is without militarily intervening everywhere, should we not, should America not be using its clout to ensure that people in the streets of Bahrain are not put down with bullets and guns and tear gas, exactly the same way that Obama intervened in the case of Egypt and did so successfully, you know, prevailing on the army not to use violence.
Well, I'm not so sure it was because he asked them not to.
No, I mean, he did play a role, you know.
And I mean, to hear the New York Times tell it, he was doing everything he could to have Mubarak replaced by Omar Suleiman.
And we will see if the people will let that happen.
So once you let loose democratic forces, then what really happens is you cannot control it.
And people like you and me should be welcoming what has happened and see where it goes and keep a keep a watch on it, you know?
Yeah, sure.
I guess, you know, some of us see the opposite of supporting the bad guys as supporting the good guys.
I see the opposite of supporting the bad guys is just stopping with the intervention altogether.
Let the people of of Libya, Afghanistan, et cetera, work out their own problems, because after all, I take Afghanistan, for example, if we could, you know, really train up the Afghan army and give a government in a box to all these countries that, you know, actually, I don't know, spend 10 trillion dollars and set up a real central government there somehow under Hamid Karzai, then we have to stay forever to keep the thing up, because Afghanistan simply doesn't have the GDP to pay for that kind of thing.
Right.
So we're basically distorting the natural levels of power between these different groups and tribes in their own countries and, you know, mostly prolonging the counter reaction to that, which is just going to take place anyway, sooner or later, you know, regardless of whether one supported the original invasion of Afghanistan or not.
The fact remains that this continued occupation of the country has made matters worse.
But a president, a candidate such as Barack Obama, who was opposed to Iraq, had to prove his security credential somewhere.
And he said Iraq was the bad war.
Afghanistan is a good war.
But Afghanistan has not been a good war for a long time.
It is one of those places where the United States and allies managed to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory, you know.
And most of the problems that are happening in Afghanistan are a direct result of continued American NATO occupation and presence, and in fact, also explain a great number of problems in Pakistan.
You know, the American media is fond of saying Afghanistan would be fine, but for Pakistan.
In fact, it's exactly the other way around.
Pakistan would be fine if there were not problems in Afghanistan.
Pakistan's problems emanate from Afghanistan principally, as they did in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan supported the Mujahideen and the CIA was funding this entire operation against the Soviet occupation.
And where were they doing it?
They were doing it through Pakistan.
So Pakistan was doing America's bidding.
At that time, we liked the guerrilla warfare.
They were called brave Mujahideen.
Now we call these people terrorists.
So we cannot go on changing the dynamics of a place in self-serving ways and not expect problems to continue to fester and go across the border into Pakistan.
Could you comment on the amount of cooperation between the Americans and the Indians in Afghanistan?
Some of the understanding that a lot of Pakistan's motivation for intervening in Afghanistan, the way they do supporting the resistance there is to protect themselves from Indian Karzai alliance there on their western flank.
Right.
The Indian government has opened several consulates there.
And if you go to Pakistan, they say there are no Indians in southern Afghanistan.
Why are they opening these consulates?
But as intelligence outposts and so on.
India's response to that is that we have genuine interest in the region.
What is wrong with opening diplomatic outposts and so on?
But you see, that is a sideshow to the main point.
The main point really is so long as there are NATO forces, so long as this warfare is going on, a lot of Afghans, be they Taliban or just guerrillas who do not belong to the Taliban, they'll find refuge where?
In Pakistan.
And some of them are supported by the Pakistani secret police, undoubtedly, but not all of them.
So we have it backwards if we sort of look at the symbols of the problem as opposed to the real issue.
The real issue is Afghanistan needs to be left alone.
These foreign forces need to leave.
You can work out some arrangement by which either Karzai or whoever is going to stay will stay.
And to justify it, we do it in the name of fighting terrorism.
In fact, this war has fed more terrorism, has increased terrorism.
It has not decreased terrorism in that part of the world.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in terrorist attacks, but because those are Afghans who are getting killed or Pakistanis, they're getting killed, we in Canada and even in the United States don't really care much about it.
So we need to resolve that issue before we get sidetracked on other tangential issues.
The real issue is the continued occupation and war that's going on in Afghanistan that needs to be brought to an end.
All right.
Well, in fact, if I can keep you a couple of minutes, I wanted to ask you also about the theory that the Bush administration pushed back during the invasion of Iraq, that they're spreading democracy.
They said then the neocons that we need to drain the swamp of that terrorism breeds and the poverty and horrible situation of the Arab street.
And yet they picked countries that America didn't already control to be regime changed, Iraq, which I guess they didn't control anymore, Syria, countries like that.
And they're still pushing for Syria.
But it seemed to me worthwhile to note that the September 11th hijackers all came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and I think Yemen.
The one guy that was from Lebanon had been raised in Kuwait with American troops on his soil there.
We go and invade Iraq, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
And they did it somewhat as revenge for occupying Saudi Arabia in order to murder a million Iraqis with the blockade in the 1990s in part.
But, you know, I kind of wonder, I'm trying to get a little optimistic spin out of you here, I guess.
I wonder if maybe all these dictators, certainly Yemen's, Saleh's days are numbered here, for example.
I wonder if these dictators being overthrown ultimately is going to be beneficial to the United States in that it'll be depriving those people of their motivation to partake in a war against us, the far enemy over here, when that was really the main reason they did so.
No, you see, I mean, this promoting of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan was an afterthought.
Once you have decided to invade, you need a rationale.
And one of the rationale was that he had weapons of mass destruction, which he never did have, that he had some connection to al-Qaeda, which he never did have.
And there was not even solid, let alone solid, there was not even semi-decent proof of that.
So you go and then you kill, what, at least 100,000 people, displace 4 million people to bring democracy.
That's one hell of a way to bring democracy.
It's the same thing in Afghanistan.
To justify the war in Afghanistan, we trot out, ah, the plight of women in Afghanistan.
We have to, white man's obligation to go and save the women.
That's what the colonial British used to say in India.
That's what the French colonials used to say in Algeria.
We are here to save women.
Of course, Arab women and Afghan women are treated very badly, but I have news for you.
The women in Africa are treated far worse.
Every United Nations study, every study by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even national governments in Europe and so on, have said consistently that the worst problems that women face in the world are in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of India, and not necessarily in the Middle East.
But here we are saving the women of Afghanistan and Iraq selectively because it serves the narrative and purpose of endless occupation.
So there's a kind of hypocrisy to all of this.
And Time magazine then goes on and says, this puts a picture of an Afghan girl, poor girl, whose nose had been hacked off.
This is what will happen if we leave.
Excuse me, this is what's happening when you're already there.
You're deciding over all of this, for God's sake, you know.
So we become blind and can't even think as to what we're being told.
This is happening.
This girl's nose was hacked off while we are there, you know, presiding over the whole mess.
And, you know, they didn't even, I remember the title that was, this is what happens when we leave or what happens when we leave.
No question mark.
Just this is what happens when we leave.
This little girl will get her nose cut off again.
Already, you know.
Yeah.
How can we forget that?
I don't know.
It is insane.
But, you know, it's nice to know that there are some people with a little bit of clarity keeping tabs and writing about these things, Haroon.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That is Haroon Siddiqui.
He is the editorial page editor emeritus and columnist at the Toronto Star.
He's the author of the book Being Muslim.
And his new piece in the Toronto Star is called Our Dance with Arab Dictators.
We'll be right back.
