by Selvam Canagaratna
"Tyrants never perish from tyranny, but always from folly –when their fantasies have built up a palace for which the earth has no foundation."
– Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, 1824.
Robert Fisk, author of the 2005 blockbuster classic The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East, and now a regular contributor to the Independent, London, noted in his piece on December 4: "Trump, like his dangerous Middle Eastern allies, doesn’t want to live in heaven. He craves the pleasures of leadership. He enjoys risk. He believes not in history or morality. He believes in himself. That is why a lot of Arab despots rather like Trump. They have much in common."
The problem, as Fisk saw it, was that Arab dictators, "delusional though they may be, have got us taped. They see through our lies and our arms sales and our lust for oil and our fraudulent desire that Jeffersonian democracy embrace the Muslim world. But we simply do not comprehend the Middle East. We do not spot even the most obvious clues to the behaviour of these Arab gauleiters. We roar with laughter at their sword dances and fake elections and talk of equality and liberalism, when we should be terrified.
"Let me give you a particularly grizzly example of this: Take what appeared to us to be the weird behaviour of the Saudi consul in Istanbul in the days following the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. We all watched the extraordinary footage of Mohammad al-Otaibi as he took Reuters on a tour of his six-storey building. During this apparently bizarre performance, the consul opened up cupboards, filing cabinets and panels covering air-conditioning units to show Jamal was not there. But how on earth, we asked ourselves, could they have conceivably hidden the journalist in a cupboard, as the consul seemed to suggest? What a nincompoop the poor chap must be! What a charade.
"But I don’t think it was a charade at all. We allowed our natural racism towards the Arabs to overcome any serious line of enquiry. By wrongly assuming that the consular official was a fool, we missed the significance of his actions – which is exactly what we do when we frame our foreign policy in the Middle East."
The Arabs comprehend our world rather well, stressed Fisk. "They are not stupid. They watch CNN and Fox with the same irreverence, ironically, as a western liberal or leftist, and they know that the simplest Hollywood themes will appeal to the Americans: fear of Islamist ʽterrorʼ, political stability and low oil prices, and fortunes in cash that may be bestowed upon western nations in return for political support and military power.
"It is we who do not understand them but we who choose to paint the backcloth to their politics. They may lock up and torture the innocent but they are also ʽmoderatesʼ fighting ʽIslamist extremismʼ – this of the Saudis, who gave us 15 of the 19 killers involved in 9/11, for heaven’s sake!
Writing in the same sarcastic vein, Fisk asked: ʽWho is responsible for the Syrian civil war?ʼ and answered ʽIranʼ; ʽWho is responsible for sectarianism in the Middle East?ʼ ʽIranʼ; ʽWho is responsible for the Yemen war?ʼ ʽIranʼ; ʽWho threatens Israel?ʼ ʽIranʼ.
"Only three and a half years ago, the Saudis launched their bombing campaign and military adventure against the Houthis – ʽIranian-backedʼ, as we like to say – in Yemen. This was the creation of Mohammad bin Salman, who was then Saudi defence minister. It had two codenames: Operation Decisive Storm and Operation Restoring Hope. It proved neither decisive not did it give hope to anyone. It merely killed tens of thousands – let’s not get involved in the wretched statistics scorecard yet once more – yet the western powers which gave its military and logistics support to the Saudis in this awful conflict shrugged their shoulders: Iran was to blame.
Fisk noted that even when Mohammad bin Salman jailed many of his fellow princes and business colleagues in a luxury Riyadh hotel and kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minister, we smiled. Good chap, our MbS. Opening up the Saudi oil market, letting women drive. Our kind of guy. "Then came the demise of Jamal Khashoggi – of whom more has been written than of all the dead of Yemen – but even then, we’re still behind the Saudis in their Sunni war. We couldn’t blame Iran for this murder, so the world itself must be to blame. Isn’t that what Trump said? The world might be "accountable" for the chopping up of Jamal, he said, because "it is a very vicious place".
Added Fisk: "Vain are our leaders in their failure to remember the entanglement of their fates with Middle Eastern history. Suez destroyed Anthony Eden. The Iranian hostage crisis destroyed President Jimmy Carter. Irangate almost did for Ronald Reagan. George Bush Sr’s ʽnew orderʼ in the Middle East may have doomed his subsequent election. George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq has besmirched his political reputation forever.
"The same goes for Tony Blair – although it is instructive to remember that it was Lebanon and Israel which caused Blair’s downfall. His refusal to accept an early ceasefire during Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon after more than 1,000 civilians had been killed – in support of George W’s plan to give the Israelis more time to destroy Hezbollah (Iran again, of course!) – finally destroyed the Blair premiership.
"The Syrian war provoked the ocean of Muslim immigrants who fled to Europe and probably – and very sadly – ultimately finished off the political career of Angela Merkel. And how much did her version of the murder of the US Ambassador in Libya lead to Hilary Clinton’s downfall?
"So I have a prediction: If the Trump regime collapses – for regime it is – I suspect it will not be his frolics with the Russians which destroy it. Nor his corruption, nor his domestic lies. Nor his misogyny. Nor his anti-immigrant racism. Nor his obvious mental instability, though this clearly connects him to his friends in the Arab world.
"The Middle East has already got its coils into the White House. Trump is a friend of a highly dangerous state called Saudi Arabia. He has adopted Israeli foreign policy as his own, including the ownership of Jerusalem and wholehearted support for Israel’s illegal colonisation of Palestinian Arab land. He has torn up a solemn treaty with Iran. He has joined the Sunni side in its sectarian war with the Shias of the Middle East, in Iran, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Bahrain and, of course, in Saudi Arabia itself.
"Many countries have gone to war on behalf of other nations. Britain drew the sword for Poland in 1939, albeit a little late in the day. But to actively seek participation in someone else’s sectarian war for no other reason than to continue to sell weapons to a wealthy and unstable autocracy, to amalgamate your own country’s foreign policy with that of the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East – to the point of depriving an entire people of a share in its capital city – and to wilfully ignore the long and lucrative support that our Gulf "allies" have given to the most frightful of our cult enemies – those who have indeed struck in the streets of London and New York – is beyond the usual lexicon. It is beyond shameful. Beyond wicked. Were it not for the insanity of the man responsible, the word "depravity" comes to mind.
"Crystal balls are dangerous objects in the Middle East. Mine have been broken several times. But there’s no reason why Donald Trump should be immune from the fate of so many of his predecessors. It’s no longer good enough to say merely: "Watch out." We all do that by nature these days. But the Arabs and Muslims who live in territory which many of the American supporters call the holy land may well decide his future; after all, he thinks he can decide theirs.
"The world is indeed a vicious place – but the Middle East is its most treacherous."
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