Arab League blasts puppet government officials

[Castro]

CAIRO, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- The Arab League has criticized Somali government officials for defending U.S. air strikes against their country, saying this violates their own sovereignty.

 

Arab League Deputy Secretary-General Ahmad Ben Heli said in a statement Wednesday it was "very unfortunate and surprising for some Somali officials to react in this manner."

 

He added it was hoped the leaders would be keen on defending their sovereignty and interests instead of inviting foreign intervention in Somalia, a member in the 22-state Arab organization.

 

The statement came the day the London-based ash-Sharq al-Awsat daily quoted interim Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf as defending the U.S. air strikes in southern Somalia, the latest of which included four raids Wednesday against suspected Islamic Courts Union targets, which the United States says belong to al-Qaida.

 

Yusuf told the Saudi-owned paper the Americans were "hunting down al-Qaida terrorists ... and Monday's raids are part of that" campaign. He also claimed those who carried out the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were based in southern Somalia, insisting "this was the appropriate time to have carried out those (U.S.) raids."

 

Ben Heli urged the U.S. administration to stop its air strikes, saying they were killing many innocent civilians in the process.

 

The U.S. forces launched air strikes Monday and Wednesday after provisional government forces and allied Ethiopian troops managed to capture cities and towns that had been controlled by the Islamic Courts Union, which Ethiopia and the United States -- and now the Somali government -- say are affiliated with the al-Qaida network.

 

UPI

[Castro]

Even the incompetent Arab League is stunned at the myopic vision of this puppet regime.

[Che -Guevara]

Useless organization. I don't even know why it exists.

[Taako Man]

The pot calling the kettle black OH MY.

 

Where was the Arab League when South Lebanon was getting lighten up?

[Taliban]

Arab nationalism's last gasp

 

Saddam Hussein's execution likely means the end of the foolish secular Arab nationalism movement

 

JUST AS THE demise of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia closed the lid on national communist parties in Eastern Europe, the demise of Saddam Hussein in Iraq appears likely to do the same for secular Arab nationalism across the Middle East.

 

And just as communism exited the European stage exposed for what it always truly was — fascism without fascism's ability to make the trains run on time — secular Arab nationalism will exit the stage revealed for what it always was: a despotic perversion of the western nation-state that lasted as long as it did mainly because of secret-police techniques imported from the former Soviet Union.

 

Arab nationalism's roots go back to the revolt against European colonialism in the early decades of the 20th century. But as it developed, it faced a serious problem: Because it was organized around the artificial national borders that these same colonialists had drawn — which generally ignored ethnic and sectarian lines — the result, in too many cases, was multiethnic rivalry and the subjugation of one part of the population by another.

 

In Iraq, for instance, the national borders created a state in which the majority Shiites were subjugated by the minority Sunnis (as we all now know). In Syria, the majority Sunnis came to be subjugated by the minority Alawites, who constitute a branch of Shiism (and who had been favored in the armed forces by the French). In Lebanon, it was the Shiites who ended up subjugated by both Christians and Sunnis.

 

No sooner were these independent new states created than the ties of faith and tribe were undermining them. A fragile unity of sorts could only be achieved by recourse to secular nationalism, which, on paper at least, aimed to transcend those bitter rivalries.

 

Indeed, the more artificial the state, the more extreme the secular ideology had to be to hold it together. To secure unwieldy tribal assemblages, for instance, an austere state socialism was required in Algeria, and a form of "Dear Leader Absolutism" in Libya. Because Syria and Iraq were also artificial constructs, these two states resorted to Baathism — another b.astardized form of state socialism.

 

Contrast all this with places such as Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, which were age-old civilization clusters whose identities, rather than artificial, harked back to antiquity. It should be no surprise that these places produced more benign forms of secular government.

 

The two extremes in the Arab world became Tunisia and Iraq. Tunisia, a small country of Sunni Arabs with no internal divisions, which traced its borders back to ancient Carthage, produced Habib Bourguiba, the Arab version of the enlightened Turkish modernizer Kemal Ataturk. Iraq, a Frankenstein monster of a country assembled from warring ethnic and sectarian groups by the British, produced Saddam Hussein, the Arab Stalin.

 

The defining fact of the Cold War years in the Middle East was competition among these insecure new states for the right to inherit the mantle of the deceased Ottoman Turkish empire, which had held sway over most of their territories for centuries. Because Israel served as a symbolic replacement for European colonialism, each new state tried to outdo the other to prove its anti-Zionist bona fides.

 

Egypt, the Arab world's demographic hub, had the advantage, especially as its leader, Gamal Abdel Nassar, psychologically mobilized the Arab masses by standing up to an invasion by Britain, France and Israel in October 1956, leading to a withdrawal of these "colonial" powers from the Suez Canal. Thus began the high-water mark of secular Arabism, which lasted until Nasser's humiliation by the Israelis in the 1967 war.

 

The Palestine Liberation Organization emerged in the waning years of Nasserism. It was modeled after the other secular nationalist movements — so much so that its foundational text, the 1938 book "The Arab Awakening," was written not by a Muslim but by a Greek Orthodox Christian, George Antonius. Another Christian, George Habash, became one of the PLO's most radical guiding lights.

 

The defining organizational attribute of secular Arab nationalism was the military emergency regime — witness Egypt, Syria and Iraq — that justified its existence by the continued state of war with Israel. Also working against liberal change in the Middle East was the influence of the Soviet Union. With Soviet military and economic aid for the secular nationalists came the techniques of East Bloc security services.

 

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the two Baathist countries, Syria and Iraq. The result of made-in-Moscow surveillance techniques was the emergence in the early 1970s of a new class of dictator — Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq — who, unlike their predecessors, were not overthrown by yet another general or colonel after a short time in office.

 

These new men stayed in power for decades because anyone who opposed them, no matter how furtively, was soon identified and destroyed.

 

Thus it was that the Nasserites, the Baathists from Syria and Iraq and the austere pseudo-Marxists from Algeria vied with each other for influence. The PLO, as the supreme symbol of the anti-Zionist struggle, was the beneficiary of the competition. But when the Berlin Wall collapsed and aid from the East Bloc began to dry up, Palestine had still not been liberated, even as creaky, authoritarian bureaucracies across the Arab world were decaying.

 

Beneath the carapace of secularism, a disturbing brew of religious and sectarian tensions had always simmered. Islamism emerged from an upwardly mobile peasantry that had drifted into Arab cities from the countryside. In the countryside, Islam was an integral part of a traditional existence and generally nonpolitical, but in these pseudo-Westernized cities, filled with the worst sorts of temptations, religion required a severity and ideological component in order to keep families together and teenage boys from slipping into crime.

 

Alas, what really killed secular Arab nationalism — much more so than the dark influence of the Soviet police state or the mobilizing distraction of the Zionist threat — was the combination of a bad form of urbanization and what Middle East expert Michael Hudson in the 1970s labeled the "primordial identifications" of tribe and sect and religion.

 

As the secularized Arab state withered, these sub-state loyalties reemerged full bore, making even further mockery of the borders of the Arab world — because tribe- and faith-based communities have little use for national borders.

 

Those who proclaim today that the only real solution to the Arab dilemma is political freedom are correct. The problem is that they are describing a process that could encompass several bloody decades. After all, it took centuries for stable democracy as we know it to evolve in Europe. In this Darwinian shaking-out process, the new forms of political legitimacy may more closely resemble militarized social welfare organizations such as Hezbollah and the Al Mahdi army than the ramshackle contrivances of the European model that we saw in the post-colonial era.

 

Right before the trap door was opened, Hussein's executioners chanted "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada," referring to Shiite militia leader Muqtada Sadr — because what was supposed to have been retribution for crimes against humanity had, despite all of our efforts, turned into another sectarian killing. Such is the abyss that follows secular Arab nationalism.

 

L A Times

[ElPunto]

^Are we to believe that the Arab League cares one wit about Somali soveriegnty - just more politics. Politics is understandable - but what is intolerable is wrapping one's politics in convenient concern. :eek:

[Castro]

^ When the worthless look at you and call you worthless, and they're right, you've hit rock bottom yaa LePoint.

 

And that's the point.

[Fabregas]

Somali sovereignity is there such a thing?The t.f.g appear clueless as to who is crying out the airstrikes and whatnot. Tolow ma bbc somalia bay arinta kala socdan?

[ElPunto]

Originally posted by Castro:

^ When the worthless look at you and call you worthless, and they're right, you've hit rock bottom yaa LePoint.

 

And that's the point.

It seems to me you're alreadly worthless if you care what the worthless think or give any credence to it. However, if you have any worth - you dismiss it a la moi.

 

It doesn't matter what anyone says though - you appear to be on a crusade. Carry on!

[Castro]

^ Not even bums like to be called bums by other bums.

 

Crusade? No atheer. Just trying to counter this tide of irrational exuberance.

[Baashi]

AL is the only friend Somalia has now. Too bad they don't have the muscle to stand up to Uncle Sam.

 

Somalis don't just get it. Work with Egyptians people! they got few swings left in them, I dare say. But then again Inna Yussuf got what he wanted and I doubt he will heed the Arab leagues advise now.

 

Too bad just too bad.

[Castro]

^ Who needs the Arab League when you've got Uncle Sam on your side. Just mentioning "Uncle" makes the Arabs run for cover.

 

Too bad so sad, indeed.

[Jacpher]

Has the alarm clock went off just now?

[Wisdom_Seeker]

Originally posted by Taako Man:

The pot calling the kettle black OH MY.

 

Where was the Arab League when South Lebanon was getting lighten up?

Unlike Aisha Yeey, they were condemning it, and didn’t support the attacks against Lebanon.

 

But Aisha Yeey can’t condemn the actions of America nor can he lift a finger, he is physically and vocally a puppet.

 

LOL, even the Arabs see the liver-missing senile as the true incompetent puppet he is.

[NASSIR]

Originally posted by Taako Man:

The pot calling the kettle black OH MY.

 

Where was the Arab League when South Lebanon was getting lighten up?

Good Question!