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With this understanding it becomes a lot easier to interpret the recent wave of uprisings that swept across the Arab world, making many people falsely believe there has been a reawakening of Arab nationalism and unification.

The way the uprisings developed can only be fully understood within the context of an understanding of the dynamics of each wave, inasmuch as it is equally important to place each uprising in the context of the location of the Arab world in the international order of world affairs.
Many people have been brainwashed by Western propaganda to believe the Arab world is solely about religion, culture and the Arabic language. It takes an independent inquiry to appreciate that the region is home to Berbers, Tuaregs, Numidians, Persians, Kurds and many other ethnicities.

The Middle East has also been shaped significantly by a series of Western interventions that have been more pronounced than anywhere else in the world. One can look at Anglo-French colonisation which partitioned the region into 22 states and statelets from the Ottoman Empire between 1830 and 1945, plundering the resources of the region for the benefit of the colonial masters.
After World War II, the United States took over the persecution of the people of the Arab world from the British and the French, and what followed was a Cold War-inspired US hegemony, underwritten by the Zionist obsession that established the new settler-colonial state of Israel. The resolve was exacerbated by the imperial necessity of asserting control over access to Gulf oil, as a “vital national security interest,” in President Eisenhower’s words.

As Cold War politics were practised, it was virtually impossible for the US to completely assert its imperial power over the Middle East, not with the countervailing force from the Soviet Union – a force that provided some space for genuine independence in the region and across the world.
Abdel Nasser of Egypt capitalised on the Soviet influence and he led a legendary spate of nationalism that was popularly admired across the African continent, inspiring sub-Saharan Africa into a wave of socialist governance that was countered by US sponsored “anti-Communism” civil wars, killing millions of Africans in Angola, Namibia, Congo, Uganda, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Middle East has been subjected to brazen military interventions by the US – from countless military bases to direct military occupation mostly effected without UN approval. Over a million people have been ruthlessly killed in the Middle East by the US-led Western alliance since 1990.
The EU has been an active junior partner taking it upon itself to restructure the Maghreb States, with Britain resuscitating its colonial interest over Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. London wants to relive the good old days when it used to run the Arab states through treacherous monarchs it created after what it called “granting of independence”.

In the Gulf, Britain either coerced or duped local families to sign away their birthrights in exchange for protectorate status. These included the notorious Khalifas of Bahrain, the lapdog Thanis of Qatar, the pliant Sabahs of Kuwait, and the puppet Qaboos of Oman – all owing their treacherous and undeserved existence to the Royal Navy.
France took over the persecution of the people of the Western Maghreb, carrying out a genocide that wiped out half of Algerians, and retaining as pliant clients the local rulers of Morocco and Tunisia.
Libya was left to the brutality of Italy under Badoglio and Mussolini. After 1918, France and Britain declared themselves awarders of Arab independence and they unilaterally carved out the states of modern day

Middle East. Britain simply transplanted pliant monarchs across the region, facilitated the House of Saudi’s conquest of Arabia, carved out the tiny Kingdom of Kuwait from Iraq, funded and supported Zionist immigration into Palestine, and brutally crushed the 1936-1939 Arab revolt.
France was playing divide and rule games in Lebanon and Syria. At independence the Arab word was made up of a French-controlled Syria, a French-installed Christian-led Lebanon, and weak collaborationist monarchs in Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, and Libya. The British had just installed King Idris I in Libya after grabbing the Italian colony during the Desert War. King Idris I was toppled by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 1969 after he successfully led the country to become the poorest on the planet.
Gaddafi developed Libya to become the richest country in Africa, with over US$70 billion in reserves for a population of 5,8 million.

The money was first grabbed and frozen by the United States and its Western allies, before Gaddafi himself was callously murdered in cold blood by US special forces supported by Libyan rebels, who carried out the actual murdering act after US drones blasted Gaddafi’s escaping convoy to smithereens, exposing the fleeing occupants to the brutality of US-led Libyan rag tag rebels, or “revolutionaries,” as Western media shamelessly called them.
All Conventions governing the handling of prisoners of war were blatantly breached with full approval from Washington.

Washington rhapsodises about the war on terror and successive US presidents have fluently lied about an enemy that does not even exist. Obama has been outstanding in the creation of the image of this monster called “terrorism”. Terrorism has been nothing but a pretext upon which Middle East oil can be accessed by the West, and of course an impressive excuse for the furtherance of Zionist pursuits by Israel.
Michael Sheuer is a former CIA head of the Osama bin Laden Unit. He was recently quoted by the Russian Television saying, “Washington’s number one enemy is an enemy that doesn’t exist.”
He went on: “It didn’t exist when bin Laden was alive and it does not exist now.” He argued that the US would need the image of a monstrous enemy in the Middle East if the Empire is to safely safeguard its support for the police state of Saudi Arabia, and that for the apartheid state of the murderous Israel.

Sending a message to US citizens, Sheuer said, “Whether you support Israel or not, our relationship with Israel is causing these (Arab world) wars.”
The problem is not precisely the existence of a state of Israel, as propagandist from the West will always portray. The real problem is the Jewish American leadership influencing and manipulating US Congress to pursue a sabre-rattling foreign policy in the Arab world.
There are two important issues determining US foreign policy in the Middle East. Of course the US wants Middle East oil and it is also pro-Israel, but more importantly there is this US-led Western obsession that is almost Marxist in approach, judging by the proclaimed universality of democratisation.

As Sheuer puts it, the West wrongly believes that “democracy and the spread of democracy is inevitable in all places, to all people at all times.”
It does not matter how hysterical the support for the toppling of Gaddafi may become, there is not going to be a democracy in Libya that resembles democracy in the West. There will never be a democracy in Syria that resembles Western democracy; there will not be one such democracy in Zimbabwe, not in Iraq, or anywhere else.

It simply will never happen because it cannot happen, must not happen, and should not happen. The simple reason is that all these people are not Westerners, cannot be Westerners, should not be Westerners, and must not be Westerners. The US ambassador to Syria was recently deservingly kicked out of Damascus after he reduced himself to a street political activist the way Christopher Dell and James McGee did in Zimbabwe a few years ago. It is this “mindless pursuit of circular democracy” that endangers the world evermore, to borrow once again the words of Sheuer.

Ambassador Charles Ray must be reminded that his mindless pursuit for circular democracy in Zimbabwe will be met with one result – failure. This is not because his personal intentions are evil, but simply because they are misplaced. We all know that the official intentions of Washington in Zimbabwe are inherently untoward and insensitive, and that is by the definition of the imperial doctrine that breeds those intentions.
After Libya, the word is endangered all the more. Africa in particular will be decimated on Obama’s instructions – yes; that celebrated “America’s first black president”. Somalia, Nigeria and North Africa are likely to be attacked by the US and her allies in 2012 or in the near future.

Nigerian leaders were quite foolish in supporting the bombing of Libya for whatever they believed were the reasons. The country is likely to have its own Western-backed and inflicted civil war if the course of events keeps taking the route they are taking right now. This is a matter for another day.

It is now 50 years and the US-led Western policy on the Arab world has entirely depended on tyranny. It is tyranny that gave the West access to Middle East oil, it is tyranny that protected Israel since 1967 to date, and it is tyranny that created the facade of the monster called terrorism, and it is tyranny that has for the last 20 years persecuted Islamists in the name of protecting of Westerners.

Despite claiming supreme civility and modernity, the West is populated by people who are among those with the least amount of common sense in the world of today. How Westerners fail to see that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group will not abandon its anti-West doctrine even after assisting them to topple Gaddafi beats logic. The LIFG deployed heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to be allies of the Western coalition,

but to kill and boot out “the infidels”. It is hard to imagine that the infidels can become friends simply because they helped topple Gaddafi. We did not have to wait long to hear the NTC declaring a Sharia Law Libya as soon as the West installed them.
How the US misses the simple logic that reinforcing the presence of US troops in the Gulf will cause more wars instead of preventing them is another example of how US politicians remarkably struggle in

understanding common sense. Obama does not get it that by drone-bombing Pakistanis the US is creating another enemy, just like starving Iranians and Zimbabweans through illegal sanctions will not create darlings for the Americans, but devout enemies. The US is in fact very efficient in creating unnecessary enemies.

Libya opened floodgates for a new wave of problems for Africa and the AU is better advised to be vigilant or perish. Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death.

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.