We all remember during the US campaign when Governor Mitt Romney rightly accused President Obama of failing to protect American interests and Democrats of being very soft on national security. However, in discussing his foreign policy, President Obama was so proud and declared success in having eliminated the Jihadists or Al-Qaida. The President claimed victory for killing Osama bin Laden and his top 22 out of 30 Al-Qaeda leaders. Having killed Osama Bin Laden, President Obama and his peace loving liberals think our world is safe and that Al-Qaida no longer is Al- Qaida because the head has been eliminated.
Did President Obama really eliminate Al-Qaida? What happened last week in Algeria? The Algerian hostage crisis shows us that the Al-Qaida organization has not been eliminated but instead is functioning well. What is going in Mali is the same as what is going on Syria, Somali, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Al- Qaida is very active. Also, it is rather ironic that the United States claims that it is fighting with extremist groups, but it continues to give arms and weapons to Jihadists in Syria. The US is backing a Jihadist in Syria to topple the Assad regime yet turns a blind eye on the Turkish regime’s treatment of minorities in Turkey, supporting Turkey in order to topple Kurdish rebels and calling the Kurdish rebels in Turkey terrorists. At the same time, the Kurdish rebels in Iran call themselves freedom fighters.
This kind of double standard policy in the region is harming American interests there. So if today Al-Qaida, or any other Jihadist group in that area, does not like America or even hates America, it is because they all know that its survival relates to American foreign policy in the region. The goal or aim of Al- Qaida and other Jihadist groups is to destroy the existing secular institutions and replace them with the Jihadist institutions and to have Islamic states with their own version of Islam, because they all function like an anarchy group with no central power. So if the Obama administration is very excited about winning the war on terror and thinks their policy to eliminate Al-Qaida is working very well, then I would say, that the Obama administration has failed to understand the nature of the groups like Al- Qaida. Such organizations operate by anarchy and have no central power, so that killing Bin laden will not eliminate the threat. I know many are Bush haters and did not like the Bush offense and defense theory against Al-Qaida. If, however, there were any achievement, it was that it was hard for Al- Qaida to kill or attack America, but that was because of the Bush Administration not because of Obama administration. We all know what happened to the American ambassador in Libya, and now we know what happened to two Americans in Algeria?
The US policy on terrorism is not consistent. To a great extent neither America nor the West can eliminate the Jihadists in Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey. Iraq, Afhganistan, Pakistan, India, or elsewhere in Asia or Europe, but what they can eliminate is their double standard policy. They can stop calling one group of Muslims moderates and the other terrorists; they can stop calling one group terrorists and the other freedom fighters; and they need to let Muslims solve this problem themselves. No matter what the West and America do, they are still going to be the number one enemy and are going to be the number one target. So why should they waste resources and energy?
It is true that Assad is a bad guy; granted, he rules in a non-democratic way, and he has oppressed many people especially the Kurds. He should not go free, but sad to say, our world is full of Assads. Will they get rid of all of them? Turkey has requested the deployment of Patriot missile batteries and foreign troops to the countries that border Syria. The civil war in Syria has become in some ways Turkey’s war. Turkey has played a leading role in funneling arms money, training foreigners, and providing logistical assistance to the so-called Syrian Freedom Army or rebels to replace the Assad regime. To justify its request, it claims that Syria threatened it with the use of chemical weapons. That is why Turkey is requesting missiles from NATO. A Dutch Patriot Anti–Missile System was sent to Turkey pursuant to Turkey’s request to NATO. The missiles were delivered last Friday to the southern part of Turkey in the city of Adana.
When the Bush administration was trying to find a reason to justify an attack on Iraq, they came up a story of WMDs, and later it was proved that this was a hoax and that Iraq did not have any WMDs. Therefore, the world has gone crazy and called Bush a war monger, but the Obama administration with his good friend Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, are using the same excuses and have generated the same kind of hoax stories to attack Assad and to replace him with a Sunni group who would listen to Erdogan, not Tehran.
Not long ago Francis J. Ricciardone, the US ambassador to Turkey, explained that the US government offered the Turkish government what was in effect, a bin Laden style assassination of the leadership of the PKK Kurdistan Workers Party, the rebels who have been fighting not the US but the Turkish Army. The PKK is not affiliated with Al-Qaida nor is it determined to kill Americans or Westerners. The only thing they want is to have justice, to end the Turkish government’s oppression, and to be treated equally as Turkish citizens. So why would the US ambassador offer to assassinate someone who has nothing to do with them? And why would the Turkish government reject such an offer since Turkey wants to kill or capture the head of the PKK? Maybe the Turkish government publically rejected the offer because the deal was leaked to the media, but then they secretly accepted the ambassador’s offer. As we saw the last couple of weeks, three more PKK activists were killed in France, and in the media the Turkish government accused the PKK of an inside job. Why would the PKK kill its own people? They have already said they do not know the guy who killed the three Kurdish women activists and that one of the women was a member of the PJAK, the Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who share territory with the PKK in the mountains. The PJAK would like a regime change in Iran, which the US government wants as well, but the group does not see the PKK as a terrorist group but rather as freedom fighters. So why does America consider the PJAK as freedom fighters and the PKK as terrorists but is very silent about Turkey’s oppression against the Kurds? If we took an opinion poll, we would probably see that only the Kurds would have a positive attitude about America and Americans.
We also have to remember that a few times Turkey resisted American interests in the Middle East, and when America needed Turkey during the Iraq War, Turkey did not let America use its bases to attack Iraq nor did it let it move US troops over its border. In spite of this, Obama’s administration hailed Turkey as a model of democracy for the Muslim world to follow and to expedite Turkey’s soft power internationally, as well as to support Gulen’s new brand of Islam. But still the Turkish public is negative about America and Americans.
It will be interesting to watch after Assad’s regime is gone, to see if in the West’s military confrontation between Tehran and the US and its Western allies it will use Iranian Kurds against Iran? The West and the US should recognize that democracy cannot come to the Middle East without the Kurds getting their complete rights and having self determination. Therefore, the US’s policy on terrorists and democracy should be consistent otherwise we will have so many hostage crisis like Algeria
Dr. Aland Mizell is with the University of Mindanao School of Social Science, President of the MCI and a regular contributor to The Kurdistan Tribune, Kurdishaspect.com, Mindanao Times and Kurdish Media.You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
