Xinhua News Agency
December 22, 2014
Commentary: West responsible for turmoil, surge of terrorism in Mideast
By Liu Chang
CAIRO: For a century, the Middle East has been a deeply troubled region, and it has never been truer than it is this year when a group of extremely ferocious terrorists formally established their caliphate of Islamic State (IS) in parts of Iraq and Syria, showing the world how brutal and uncivilized it can be.
Reviewing the incubation of the IS, the West is held accountable for renewed surge of terrorism in the area.
It is noted that one of the goals of the IS is to reverse the effects of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a deal the European powers secretly reached in 1916 during World War I. It allowed them to freely set state borders within their respective spheres of influence and control in the Middle East. These arbitrary borders, designed to keep the Arab nations divided and weak, have caused numerous conflicts over the last few decades.
However, the Western powers seem to have barely cared about the pains and sufferings they have brought to the people in the region. They have continued their interventionist policies in the regional affairs whenever possible.
Over the years, for their own economic and security interests in the Middle East, the Western nations have either chosen to promote regime changes from the sidelines in countries whose governments they deemed not cooperative enough, or simply resorted to military means directly.
Across the Middle East, the grounds are burning and peace has been torn to tatters. Libya is quickly descending into to a civil war since Western powers launched airstrikes against Libya and toppled its leader Muammar Gaddafi; Iraq is still in a turf war with the Islamic State militants; and over 1 million Syrians have fled their homeland amid a bloody war that has raged for years with no end in sight.
Despite all the massive bloodshed and lasting turmoils of their making, the Western powers are trying to make the world believe that they have done all this to promote freedom and democracy for the greater good.
That is exactly what the world heard when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government was toppled in 2003 by the United States, when French and British fighter jets bombarded Libya in 2011, and particularly when the Western bloc is still trying to get rid of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by supporting rebels in the country.
Yet the interventionist policies that backfired verified that the Western powers act merely out of self-interests, not the values they advocate.
Worse, their pure pursuit of self-interests and outright negligence of being responsible world powers contributed to breeding, to a great extent, the rise of the IS today.
In Iraq, Washington failed to foster an Iraqi government inclusive enough to achieve national reconciliation among all different sects. That mismanagement has not only left the nation’s most deep-rooted problems unfixed, but also bred waves of terrorist activities and sectarian violence that have claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.
When U.S. President Barack Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq to honor his campaign promise, he left behind a mess. And It is the poor conditions of Iraq that played a role in incubating the Islamic State.
It is also thought-provoking that the militants of the group drew much of their fighting experience from another West-involved war — the one in Syria aimed at toppling Assad.
Therefore, it is high time for the international community to say loudly and clearly “No more” to the West’s military interventionism.
On the other hand, those intervening powers should work out comprehensive and effective measures to help clear up the mess of their own making and heal the wounds of the nations traumatized by their intervention, for the good of all parties involved.
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