US Intervention: Between Acceptance and Rejection

During the final days of last April, angry Jordanian demonstrators took to the streets in protest of the U.S. military presence in Jordan. Demonstrations took place across Amman, Zarqa and Irbid, with the American flag burned and trampled. The demonstrators repeated chants calling for the expulsion of the Americans and their supporters from the country. This was a reaction to Washington’s dispatch of 200 U.S. soldiers to train the Jordanian Army as a precaution against Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

These demonstrations merit a rereading of recent history in order to try to understand the behavior of the Arab street and its position toward the Americans, who, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have come to have a worse reputation than the English and French colonialists. Since the Syrian revolution ignited two years ago, most of the Arab peoples and governments, whatever their persuasion, have not stopped demanding that the U.S. intervene militarily in Syria and shove a stick into the wheel of the hellish machine that Assad is using to kill on a daily basis.

Those peoples and governments reacted in the same way to the Libyan issue, calling on NATO to intervene and save the Libyans from the massacres that Moammar Gadhafi’s forces would have perpetrated if NATO planes had not rescued Benghazi from a humanitarian disaster in the final moments. Afterward, the planes completed their assignment by liberating Libya, handing the country over to its people and beginning to leave.

The Arabs scold Washington and accuse it of avoiding military intervention in Syria because the opposition in that country cannot foot the bill of intervention, unlike the opposition in oil-rich Libya. The Arab street, in all its strata — at the forefront of which are the conservatives and those who hate and curse the U.S. and the West day and night — has called upon the U.S. to intervene in Syria and Libya to protect the people of those countries. This is an understandable, acceptable and natural position, because the U.S. is a superpower that possesses sufficient defense capacities and is capable of altering the balance of power and resolving the battle in just days, as it did with Saddam Hussein.

But the question is, why are they protesting in Jordan against the intervention of 200 U.S. soldiers, who came not as combatants but rather as experts in dealing with internationally banned chemical weapons, while they plead for thousands of U.S. soldiers to intervene in Syria?

An observer can only recall the position that those conservatives took on the second Gulf War at the beginning of the 1990s, when they rejected intervention by the U.S. to prevent Saddam Hussein from controlling the Gulf.*

“Leave a Muslim issue to the Muslims. Let the Muslims resolve their own differences,” they said, clinging to their view that calling on the Christian West for help in fighting a Muslim — in this case the Baathist Saddam Hussein — was unacceptable. It is clear that their view is inconsistent, depending not on the identity of the intervener, i.e. the Western armies, specifically the U.S., or the presence or absence of oil resources but rather on the state being targeted. What is forbidden in Jordan and the Gulf states is permissible in Syria and Libya!

Assad is a Baathist, just like Saddam Hussein was, and the danger that he poses to his people and neighbors is real, present and imminent. In terms of security, the Jordanians are vulnerable, just as the Libyans were two years ago. So what is different?

As we flick through the pages of history again, we notice that the ideas, recordings and lectures that rejected a U.S. intervention in the Gulf in the 1990s belonged to the same people that called for a U.S. intervention in Libya and call for it today in Syria. Their discourse has changed, and their principles have flipped upside down. They describe Washington as inconsistent, only considering its own interests and contradicting its own principle of protecting human rights around the world. The truth is that they are the inconsistent ones, whose positions contradict their principles. It is now apparent that their principles are optional — not immutable — not only in relation to Western military presence but even in relation to the Russians, who support the Syrian regime and supply it with the equipment it needs to commit daily massacres. Yesterday, they were criticizing Russia, an ally of the Syrian regime, but today they are shaking Russia’s hand and toasting with the blood of the Syrian people!

What if the governments of the Gulf states had yielded to those bidders when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait, instead of calling upon Western powers to defend them? What if the Jordanian government had announced that it did not need those experts in chemical weapons, giving in to the will of the street? What differentiates Muslims in Jordan or the Gulf from the Muslims of Syria and Libya? What distinguishes the cruelty, hostility and barbarity of Saddam Hussein from that of Bashar Assad?

It is truly strange that those people, with their changes of heart, will strive to defend any country except for their own, whose safety they disregard and for whose future they have no fear.

The Arab citizen who sits in front of the television screen — now more than ever — to follow the events of the region, which are not about to calm down — not even for a few minutes — needs to be wary of the fluctuations in the discourse that he listens to or reads about on Twitter and other websites, regardless of how eloquent and humanitarian the language may seem. The unfortunate thing is that, behind these inconsistent agitators, walk softhearted Arab peoples with delicate emotions, who are easily influenced by the rhythms of national and religious identity.

But, unfortunately, these peoples have holes in their memory and are ashamed of the truth!

*Translator’s note: The first Gulf War was the war between Iraq and Iran.