http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17505

Online Opinion, 14 July 2015

 

Once upon a time, there was the Arab Spring … and they lived unhappily ever after. On 18 March 2011, Syrian youth ignited a revolution with graffiti in Dar’aa – the regime must fall. The inferno has now killed over 200,000 people and displaced nearly four million.

It is easy to blame IS militants for the problem, but they are the symptom of foreign policies that resemble BBQ knobs. Power brokers are upgraded and degraded to achieve the desired temperature and power balance.

Three years ago, Mother Agnes Miriam visited Australia from Syria and warned about the emptying of Christians in the Middle East. She predicted that Christians would be the casualty of the Arab Spring. Enough beheading videos have been posted online to bring home this tragic truth.

She also warned that the “Arab Spring” had been “hijacked by foreign Islamist mercenaries, with strong support from Western countries.”

Indeed, the Syrian youth who started the revolution were hijacked by the Free Syrian Army who were in turn hijacked by the non-Syrian Salafists who were in turn hijacked by the foreign fighters of al Qaeda and their offshoot the ‘Islamic State.’ There is nothing civil about the war in Syria.

Arab strongmen and ‘flames’ are treated like burners of a BBQ, to be ignited then extinguished, armed then disarmed, elevated then bombed, allies then enemies.

The US backed coalition, including Australia, will keep adjusting the BBQ knobs to ensure their two main allies remain protected: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The same two countries that the US dares not criticise for their human rights violations.

So long as the Arabs are fighting each other, and their flames become weaker, they should not pose any threat to Israel’s military supremacy in the neighbourhood.

Why have al Qaeda and all its offshoots, jihadists and mercenaries flocked to fight alongside their Sunni brothers in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, and in the Levant, but they have never rushed to rescue their Sunni brothers in Palestine, especially in Gaza?

On the eve of Sept 11 last year, US President Barack Obama condemned ISIS and its “acts of barbarism”, referring to it as a “terrorist organisation, pure and simple.” So why vow to gradually degrade and ultimately destroy rather than immediately destroy?

The black box of the BBQ reveals the history of those playing with the temperature control knobs.

On 20 December 1983, when Iraq fought Iran after the Islamic revolution, US special envoy Donald Rumsfeld did a handshake deal with Saddam Hussein. Iraq was upgraded.

But on 2 August 1990 when Hussein flexed his muscles into Kuwait, he had to be degraded then ultimately extinguished.

Between 1986 and 1989, the CIA funneled $500 million in weapons into Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden fought with his Mujaheddin militants to expel the Communist Russian invasion during the Cold War. Let’s upgrade Afghanistan.

But on 11 September 2001 when Bin Laden’s militants morphed into al-Qaeda and flexed their muscles into the USA with terrorist attacks, they had to be degraded and this public enemy number was ultimately extinguished.

Since 2011, the US-Saudi-Qatar donors have aided and abetted the anti-Assad mercenaries. In 2014, the ISIS monster flaunted its US equipment that it has seized “in our pockets” and now needs to be degraded.

The control of the BBQ knobs was highlighted when Sunni Salafists took up arms in Iraq against the US-backed Malaki government and they were condemned as insurgents.

But if those same Salafists stepped across the border into Syria, they were suddenly praised as rebels fighting a dictator, fighting on the same side as the US.

Too often, the US and its allies speak of peace, diplomacy and democracy above the table, but they funnel aid and arms under the table. Then they wash their hands and call it civil war and sectarian war.

The US-Saudi-Qatar alliance intended their pipelines of weapons and funds to reach the Free Syrian Army in order to degrade Iran’s greatest ally in the region. But their ‘intelligence’ must have known what local Arabs already knew: these pipelines were leaking.

These dangerous toys would land in the hands of Al Nusra boys, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, and ultimately be confiscated by ISIS.

We fan their flames if we give them oxygen, and our media is their oxygen, inadvertently paying for their global recruitment and fear campaign.

Within Arab conversations, cynicism prevails about the cyclical and sickening pretext to war: “We in the West will save you from the monster (that we created)”.

Enough of the BBQ of Arab lands, enough of the incineration of Arab people. It is time to learn the lessons from the BBQ’s black box. Otherwise innocent Arab people will be condemned to live and die unhappily ever after as BBQ knobs turn around them.