For a long time I had the desire to travel around the interior, to say in our parlance, the Anatolia of the United States of America. During five days between two conferences we are attending this week, we tried to form an opinion about the lives of ordinary Americans by visiting a series of American cities one by one. While we were trying to understand the lives of ordinary Americans who live in a country on a massive continent and governed by the most wealthy and powerful state with the greatest military and banks of the world, I realized as I was listening to the latest news from the American media that half of the news reports broadcast on internationally famous U.S. channels were related to the Middle East and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). It was as if the Middle East constituted more than half of the human planet as U.S. news reports began with Iraq and Syria and ended with Palestine and Afghanistan.
Ordinary U.S. citizens are down to earth and respectful people who mind their own business. Against all polite racism, it is a community of citizens who have internalized their coexistence with African-Americans, who seem to not be that interested in events occurring outside their country, yet ready to be informed of knowledge about the rest of the world, just like the residents of an island country.
Apart from the ordinary American citizens, capitalists in New York, along with media bosses, arms dealers and lobbyists all deeply influencing American politics seem to seize the fate of the massive country. Thus, no matter how polite, respectful and humane American citizens are, the state, acting on their behalf can, on the contrary, be cruelly colonialist because day-to-day U.S. politics are governed not by their choices but by the complexities of lobbying activities and by the calculations and designs of wealthy capitalist families around the world. The kind of politics made by such predators can easily become all the more rude and ambitious.
Our childhood was accompanied with news reporting the vicious circle between occupation and resistance, always concluding with bloodshed in Palestine, which was gradually turned into an open-air prison by Israel. The following Lebanese Civil War violently froze Lebanese daily life for a decade and remained one of the principle topics of the international media for a decade. The war between Iraq and Iran, initiated by the Iranian Revolution in 1979, took over the following decade of human tragedy from Lebanon. While that lose-lose war was about to end, it was repeatedly claimed that the Iraqi army, strengthened by financial and military support from the West, had become one of the best-equipped armies in the world. Thus, new scenarios for annihilating the Baathist regime in Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, considered as an imminent threat to Israel's national interests, came to the forefront for the Western ruling elite.
As the first Iraqi war ended, the oil-rich Saudi state could barely cover the wages of its public servants due to war expenditures taken from Saudi Arabia by the U.S., as the Americans frightened the Saudis with a possible Iraqi occupation after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. In the meantime, great social and political tensions were occurring in neighboring developing countries including Turkey and Palestine. Using the power vacuum in the region, the PKK made Turkey go through bitter experiences and difficult times while Palestinians were struggling against yet another Israeli occupation.
It was as if the region was not pulled into chaos enough for Western powers – that Iraq has become, like Palestine, a country of occupations and civil and holy wars by the second Iraqi war. While the winds of the Arab Spring are still blowing over the region, a much more ferocious actor – ISIS – has emerged from the Syrian civil war now threatening the fragility in Iraq.
For an ordinary Turkish or American citizen, the time has finally arrived to ask for the reasons behind the constant human tragedy in the Middle East. All these political developments, all that bloodshed cannot solely derive from mere Western ambitions and a lack of plural unity in the region at hand. I believe that the current colonialist forces target and challenge something much more comprehensive and meaningful in the Middle East.
About the author
İhsan Aktaş is Chairman of the Board of GENAR Research Company. He is an academic at the Department of Communication at Istanbul Medipol University.
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