Thursday, 28 April 2011

European intervention in Libya sounds like a re-emergence of the 19th-century colonial mentality, scholar says.
Source:
Al Jazeera









Among ulterior agendas in the Middle East, European powers are trying to secure contracts in Libya and set a precedent for a possible intervention in Iran and Syria, Yucesoy says [GALLO/GETTY]


As was announced recently by UK prime minister David Cameron, Britain, Germany, France and the US have begun talks to support Libya's transition away from a violent dictatorship and to help create the conditions where the people of Libya can choose their own future.

It seems that after being caught off guard by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, American and European powers decided to be proactive.

The reasoning behind the military intervention in Libya reminds me of a statement at the Berlin Conference of 1885, where the colonial powers of the time agreed to:

"bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being… instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilisation."

When it comes to Middle East policies, nothing seems to have changed that much!

At a moment of frustration, I was tempted to read back Kipling's "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" in search of solace and to explain why American and European powers so passionately and hastily launched military operations.

But Occidentalism, that is "Kipling read-back", is a generalisation as false as its sister "East is East" and a gross misrepresentation of the part of the world conventionally called the West.

So the root cause of the problem is not the "West"; rather it is a particular political-economic-military machine, an empire, that seeks sovereignty rather than legitimacy around the globe by all means necessary despite its people's will, who are almost as vulnerable to and victimised by the policies of it as any other people in the world.

Legitimacy questions

Watching American and European policies unfold in numerous forms in the region with the spontaneous, self-invited, and unwelcome intervention in Libya, I have some questions about political morality.

What is it that makes the military intervention, for the American and European actors, desirable, palatable, and familiar despite its crude, insanely pragmatic and selfish, patronising, and disrespectful nature?

Why do the governments arrogate to themselves the power prerogative to launch military attacks despite the fact that their action lacks legitimate popular support domestically and obvious demand from the Libyan people?

Is there anything in recent history that would shed some light on the mode of thinking of the policy makers in the corridors of the American and European powers?

We know the immediate answer. I am going to rule out humanitarian and altruistic justifications. They just do not add up.

American and European powers have some mundane, concrete, and pragmatic national interests in the region. They consider the region simply too important to be left alone.

This is apparent in how the wielders of power at NATO strive to secure an honourable share in the removal of Gaddafi, embed themselves in Libya for the eventual distribution of contracts, set a precedent for a possible intervention in Syria and Iran, design and channel the waves of change in the Middle East, and inject Europe into world politics with a big bang.

It can only help that the language of international politics values nation-state interests as the currency of the international space where ultimately brute force and/or balance of power rules. But I leave this subject to more able analysts than I to elaborate on it.

'White Man's burden'

Here is a more subtle but ubiquitous and therefore dangerous undercurrent, a particular attitude and a mindset visible in the coalition's intervention in Libya: the mentality of the Berlin Conference participants.

I am specifically referring to the discourse of mission civilisatrice, which I think is deep-seated in the European statecraft's culture since the nineteenth century.

This discourse has helped to justify colonial policies, and also alleviate the moral and cognitive dissonance caused by the brutality of the colonial enterprise.

Either articulated openly or implied, mission civilisatrice has always come handy as a modality to write the history and reshape the identity, culture, and socio-economic and political structure of the colonised in such a way that it becomes understandable and useful to the coloniser.

What is being attempted in Libya right now (and has been in Iraq and Afghanistan) is a similar colonial procedure.

Through the modality of guardianship, American and European powers announce to protect the Libyan people from the dictator (I note, but am not going to discuss, the double standard here when it comes to other dictators) and set up a friendly government that will not pose a risk to their interests in the region.

Thus, the military intervention in Libya signals a return to the discourse of the "half-devil, half-child" mentality, which infantilises the colonised: Arabs cannot represent themselves, they need to be represented; they cannot solve their problems, the civilised nations need to do it for them.

It is with this fatherly care, patronage, and therefore coercion and punishment when necessary, they aim at nurturing the Arabs (and Muslims) step-by-step so that they could overcome the burden of their culture (in the singular) and underdevelopment.

Updating the intervention discourse

As Roland Paris analyses the relationship between international peace building and the mission civilisatrice, revolution by design too seems to represent an updated version of the mission civilisatrice, or the colonial-era notion that the 'advanced' states of Europe had a moral responsibility to 'civilise' the indigenous societies that they were colonising.

This is a mentality that must be confronted. It promises an unhealthy prospect in American- and European-Middle Eastern relations precisely because it is simply offencive, selfish, and arrogant.

In the short run, it has deprived the revolutionaries their moral high ground, weakened the credibility of their cause, and emboldened the dictator to fall back on national, tribal, and xenophobic narratives to rally support around himself.

In the long run, it opens the door to new forms of colonialism and dependency and propagates a false sense of innocence even pride among the citizens of the American and European powers by misrepresenting the intervention and its outcome.

There are therefore several possible readings of the intervention. One can read it altruistically that it is genuinely intended to help the revolutionaries. One can also read it pragmatically that the intervention aimed at protecting the vital interests of the American and European powers in Libya and in the region.

While both of these readings are plausible, they nevertheless allude to and echo another long-standing narrative.

I thus tend to read the intervention dialogically. One cannot understand the military intervention and the discourse being formed around it outside its corresponding history, which is the colonial civilising mission the White Man's burden.

I do not see another viable alternative reading of the military intervention that is analytically aware of this context.

Whether humanitarian or pragmatic, the policies in Libya and the region are going to take shape within the discourse of mission civilisatrice until and unless, the policy-makers make a plausible case that they have gone through, dealt with, and left behind this colonial legacy.

Seeing wolf in sheep's clothing, one almost misses the good old crusade mentality, which despite its irksome savagery, had enough chivalric courage and honesty to call its enemy, enemy.

Dr. Hayrettin Yücesoy is an Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University and author of Messianic Beliefs and Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2009) and Tatawwur al-Fikr al-Siyasi inda Ahl al-Sunna (Amman: Dar al-Bashir, 1993).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Sunday, 17 April 2011

The Amazing Camel
and

It's Creator


If you ever doubted that God exists, Meet the Very Technical, Highly Engineered
Dromedary Camel.

When I'm hungry, I'll eat almost anything-
A leather bridle, a piece of rope, my master's tent,
Or a pair of shoes. My mouth is so tough a thorny cactus doesn't bother it.
I love to chow down grass and other plants
That grow here on the Arabian desert I'm a dromedary camel, the one-hump kind
That lives on hot deserts in the Middle East.
My hump, all eighty pounds of it, Is filled with fat-my body fuel-not water as some people believe. My Mighty Maker gave it to me because
He knew I wouldn't always be able to find food
As I travel across the hot sands. When I don't find any chow, my body automatically
Takes fat from the hump, feeds my system,
And keeps me going strong. This is my emergency food supply.

If I can't find any plants to munch, my body uses up my hump.
When the hump gets smaller, it starts to tip to one side. But when I get to a nice oasis and begin to eat again,
My hump soon builds back to normal. I've been known to drink twenty-seven gallons of water in ten minutes. My Master Designer made me in such a fantastic way that
In a matter of minutes all the water I've swallowed
Travels to the billions of microscopic cells that make up my flesh.

Naturally, the water I swallow first goes into my stomach.
There thirsty blood vessels absorb and carry it to every part of my body. Scientists have tested my stomach and found it empty
Ten minutes after I've drunk twenty gallons.
In an eight hour day I can carry a four hundred pound load
A hundred miles across a hot, dry desert And not stop once for a drink or something to eat.
In fact, I've been known to go eight days without a drink,
But then I look a wreck. I lose 227 pounds, my ribs show through my skin,
And I look terribly skinny. But I feel great! I look thin because the billions of cells lose their water.
They're no longer fat. They're flat.
Normally my blood contains 94 percent water, just like yours.
But when I can't find any water to drink,
The heat of the sun gradually robs a little water out of my blood.
Scientists have found that my blood can lose up to
40 percent of its water, and I'm still healthy.
Doctor's say human blood has to stay very close to 94 percent water.
If you lose 5 percent of it, you can't see anymore; 10 percent, you can't
Hear and you go insane; 12 percent, your blood is as thick as molasses
And your heart can't pump the thick stuff. It stops, and you're dead.
But that's not true with me. Why?
Scientists say my blood is different. My red cells are elongated. Yours are round.
Maybe that's what makes the difference This proves I'm designed for the desert,
Or the desert is designed for me. Did you ever hear of a design without a Designer?
After I find a water hole, I'll drink for about ten minutes
And my skinny body starts to change almost immediately.
In that short time my body fills out nicely, I don't look skinny anymore,
And I gain back the 227 pounds I lost.
Even though I lose a lot of water on the desert,
My body conserves it too.
Way in the beginning when my intelligent Engineer made me,
He gave me a specially designed nose that saves water.
When I exhale, I don't lose much. My nose traps that warm, moist air from my lungs
And absorbs it in my nasal membranes.
Tiny blood vessels in those membranes take that back into my blood.
How's that for a recycling system? Pretty cool, isn't it.
It works because my nose is cool. My cool nose changes that warm moisture in the air
from my lungs into water. But how does my nose get cool?
I breath in hot dry desert air, And it goes through my wet nasal passages.
This produces a cooling effect, and my nose stays as much as
18 degrees cooler than the rest of my body.
I love to travel the beautiful sand dunes.
It's really quite easy, because My Creator gave me specially engineered sand shoes for feet.
My hooves are wide, and they get even wider when I step on them.
Each foot has two long, bony toes with tough, leathery skin
between my soles, are a little like webbed feet.

They won't let me sink into the soft, drifting sand.
This is good, because often my master wants me to carry him
one hundred miles across the desert in just one day.
(I troop about ten miles per hour.) Sometimes a big windstorm comes out of nowhere,
bringing flying sand with it. My Master Designer put special muscles in my nostrils
that close the openings, keeping sand out of my nose
but still allowing me enough air to breathe.
My eyelashes arch down over my eyes like screens,
keeping the sand and sun out but still letting me see clearly.
If a grain of sand slips through and gets in my eye,
the Creator took care of that too. He gave me an inner eyelid that automatically
wipes the sand off my eyeball just like a windshield wiper.
Some people think I'm conceited because I always walk around
with my head held high and my nose in the air.
But that's just because of the way I'm made.
My eyebrows are so thick and bushy I have to hold my head high to peek out from underneath them.
I'm glad I have them though. They shade my eyes from the bright sun.

Desert people depend on me for many things.
Not only am I their best form of transportation,
but I'm also their grocery store. Mrs. Camel gives very rich milk
that people make into butter and cheese. I shed my thick fur coat once a year,
and that can be woven into cloth. A few young camels are used for beef,
but I don't like to talk about that. For a long time we camels have been called
the "ships of the desert" because of the way
we sway from side to side when we trot. Some of our riders get seasick.
I sway from side to side because of the way my legs work.
Both legs on one side move forward at the same time,
elevating that side. My "left, right left, right" motion makes my rider feel like
he is in a rocking chair going sideways.
When I was six months old,

special knee pads started to grow on my front legs.
The intelligent Creator knew I had to have them.
They help me lower my 1000 pounds to the ground.

If I didn't have them,
my knees would soon become sore and infected,

and I could never lie down. I'd die of exhaustion. By the way,
I don't get thick knee pads because I fall on my knees.
I fall on my knees because I already have these tough pads.
Someone very great thought of me and knew I needed them
He designed them into my genes.

It's real difficult for me to understand
how some people say I evolved into what I now am.
I'm very technical, highly engineered dromedary camel.
Things like me don't just happen.

They're planned on a drawing board

by Someone very brilliant,
Someone very logical.
Do you know HIM?