As we struggle to come to terms with the latest terrorist attacks in Brussels, it is important that we understand the causes of such extremism.
After all, extremism was virtually unknown fifty years ago and suicide bombings were inconceivable. And yet today it seems that we are confronted with both on a daily basis. So what happened to bring fundamentalism to the forefront of global politics? While there are many factors involved, undoubtedly one of the primary causes is Western imperialism. Garry Leech is an independent journalist and author of numerous books including Capitalism: A Structural Genocide He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada and Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. Garry Leech has informative issues, excerpts of which follows:
Western intervention in the Middle East over the past century to secure access to the region’s oil reserves established a perfect environment in which fundamentalists could exploit growing anti-Western sentiment throughout the world with some establishing violent extremist groups. The most recent consequence of this process is the terrorist group known as the Daesh, which emerged out of the chaos caused by the US invasion of Iraq.
In order to understand the rise of the Daesh we must first briefly review the history of Western intervention in not only the Middle East but throughout the world to reveal that extremism in not a unique phenomenon. For the past 500 years, peoples throughout the world have resorted to acts of violence that today would be classified as terrorism in efforts allegedly to resist Western imperialism. Indigenous peoples in the Americas often used violent tactics to defend themselves against the brutal European colonizers. There were also many violent slave revolts by Blacks who had been shipped from Africa to the Americas in the service of Western imperialism.
In Southeast Asia, the Filipino people first violently resisted the Spanish and then rose up again when the United States became the new colonial ruler of the Philippines in 1898. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Zulu people were resorting to violence in an effort to resist British attempts to allegedly “civilize” them in the late 1800s. Back then, those who violently resisted Western imperialism weren’t labelled “terrorists,” the Westerners just called them “savages.” These are just a few examples of the countless attempts throughout the global South to resist the violent and often brutal expansion of Western imperialism.
One of the reasons that extremism has only come to the fore in recent decades is the fact that Western imperialism in the Middle East is a relatively recent occurrence. Western imperialism didn’t begin to make serious headway in the Middle East until the early 20th century. Consequently, they haven’t yet succeeded in their quest to violently subjugate the peoples of that region to the degree that some peoples have become throughout most of the rest of the world. In some Middle Eastern nations, Western imperialism initially took the form of traditional colonialism, which involved direct rule. In other countries, it has constituted a neo-colonial approach utilizing international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as direct US and European intervention in the forms of military coups and outright war.
While European nations, particularly Britain, had made some inroads into the Middle East in the late 1800s, it was the discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 that marked the arrival of Western imperialism. The London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) gained the rights to Iran’s oil and, because its major shareholder was the British government, Britain controlled Iran’s oil sector. During the ensuing decades there were major protests by the Iranian people who were unhappy with foreign ownership of the country’s oil and the fact that Iran was receiving only 16 percent of its own oil wealth. In 1950, the Iranian parliament finally responded to popular demands and voted to nationalize the country’s oil sector. The following year, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh established the National Iranian Oil Company.
Unhappy with Iran’s decision to claim ownership of its own oil resources and to use them for the benefit of the Iranian people, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to oust the democratically-elected Mosaddegh government. Shah Reza Pahlavi was installed in power and the new pro-Western dictator immediately re-opened the door for Western companies to return to Iran. And to ensure that the Shah maintained iron-clad control over the population, the United States provided him with military aid as well as training for his secret police force, which would brutalize the Iranian people for the next 26 years.
Under the Shah, Western oil workers flooded into Iran and the country’s capital Tehran became a decadent playground for high-paid foreign oil workers who engaged openly in un-Islamic activities including alcohol consumption, casino gambling and so on. And while the country’s oil wealth was flowing into the pockets of foreigners and the Shah and his cronies, most Iranians were struggling to survive in poverty. Not surprisingly, the people began pointing to Western imperialism and Western decadence as an affront both to Islam and to the Iranian people. In 1979, under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a popular revolution overthrew the Shah’s repressive regime and established an Islamic state.
The first significant success for anti-imperialism directly resulted from the United States and Britain overthrowing a democratically-elected government and their subsequent support for a brutal dictatorship, all in the name of securing access to oil. Today, we are not only still dealing with the consequences of this Western imperialism in relations with Iran, but also with Iran’s support for other freedom-lovers in the region.
Following that events, from the perspective of Washington, Osama bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he was fighting against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan but was a “terrorist” when he fought against the presence of US military forces. From the perspective of bin Laden and his followers, however, nothing had really changed. Whether it was Soviet soldiers or US troops, both constituted Western military forces that had to be removed. Ultimately, Western intervention in the Islamic world gave birth to al-Qaeda. As a consequence of these imperialist actions, extremists in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged, coupled with the growing disenchantment among Muslims angry at Western militarism, Western backing for corrupt governments in the Middle East, and US support for the usurper regime of Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.
Following the highly suspicious terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, the United States launched its so-called war on terror. However, the Bush administration also sought to exploit the 9/11 attacks to begin assault on Iraq. Top Bush administration officials launched a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign to convince the American people that Saddam was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and linked to al-Qaeda, both of which were untrue. They also put forth lies that the Iraqi dictator, who once enjoyed direct support from the US, possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was another lie.
Furthermore, the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign conveniently ignored the fact that the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had possessed and used during the 1980s against Iraqi and also Iranian people and were supplied to it by the United States when the Iraqi dictator was an ally.
In March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Iraq without authorization from the UN Security Council and in direct violation of international law, as a result of which some 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation. The US military occupation gave rise to an uprising that sought to oust the foreign occupying troops. However, the post-invasion chaos opened the door for al-Qaeda to enter Iraq, as a result of which the fundamentalist, terrorist group of Daesh emerged in 2006.
Following the invasion, the United States dismantled Saddam’s military and many of the unemployed former officers ended up joining the insurgency. Some of these military officers conspired with a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq to form the Daesh. The new terrorist group sought allegedly to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. The West's instigated Syrian civil war in 2011 allowed the Daesh to cross into Syria where it grew dramatically stronger and began to consolidate control over territory, all backed by certain regional states and the Westerners.
Meanwhile, the West’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a failed state and opened the door for the terrorist group of Daesh to establish a foothold in that part of North Africa. The Deashe has had significant success recruiting from around the world to join its ranks and to carry out terrorist attacks in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere including Western nations such as France and Belgium.
Once again, Western imperialist actions in the Middle East had given rise to extremism. But the rise of the Daesh should not have come as a surprise to anyone. That the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq laid the foundation for the emergence of the terrorist group was entirely predictable.
Meanwhile, Western imperialism in other parts of the Middle East over the past century has also contributed to the rise of anti-imperialist movements. Following World War Two, the United States and Britain essentially handed over most of Palestine to European Jews, better to say Zionists, so they could create the Zionist regime of Israel. And, ever since, Israel has received unconditional US support to brutally repress the Palestinian people and to repeatedly violate international law, which has generated widespread anti-Western sentiment throughout the Middle East.
Over the past one hundred years, the Middle East has been targeted by Western imperialism in the violent manner that the rest of the world has endured for centuries.
Nowadays the Westerners use terms such as “democracy promotion” and “human rights” but they essentially mean the same thing as imperialism and colonialism because they are simply the latest justifications for stealing resources and imposing Western values on other cultures. Not surprisingly, as has been the case throughout the rest of the world over the past 500 years, there is widespread resentment and anger towards the West for its imperialist policies in the Middle East.
Finally, a question comes to mind: What new and even more extremist monstrosity are the Westerners currently creating with their ongoing military interventions and imperialist policies?
