Ah, Islam is in crisis; its radicals have declared war on America, on Christianity, on civilization? What about the crisis of Capitalism or Christianity? When even fools would know it's all about oil.
Nineteen men board four aircrafts, turn them
into missiles and kill about seven thousand people. We are told, within
hours, that this is the work of Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Queda network.
Within a day we are told the names of some of the nineteen, all with Arabic
names, all from the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A week or so later, some of
the men who the FBI said had piloted the plane turned up alive in their
homelands, but that did not detract from the main story.
The main story
is this: Islam is in crisis; its radicals have declared war on America, on
Christianity, on civilization.
When the police arrested Timothy McVeigh
for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, no one talked of Christianity in crisis,
even as McVeigh's white supremacists are guided by a Biblical fundamentalism
and Aryanist racial theories.
| | | | When the police arrested Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, no one talked of Christianity in crisis. Crises of capitalism, too, do not get put in these general terms. | | | | |
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What about those headlines: Christianity in
Crisis, Christianity Against Civilization.
Crises of capitalism, too,
do not get put in these general terms. We only hear about the depredations
of this or that stockbroker (Harshad Mehta in India, the boy of Barings in
Singapore, Jonathan Lebed in the US), or of this or that business collapse.
Several large corporations (Boeing, the airlines, Sisco Systems) fired over
a lakh of workers and blamed this catastrophe on terrorism, but even this
did not bring forth the headlines of my imagination: Capitalism Against
Civilisation, Profits Against People, the Crisis of Capitalism.
So,
if capitalism or Christianity do not bear this especial weight, why should
Islam? Why is Islam a problem, and why should it come under investigation,
when we all know that the events of 9/11 are not really about Islam, but
about oil and natural gas?
When the US went to liberate Kuwait in
1990-91, it conducted a massive assault on Iraq to free 2.2 million people,
of which only 28% are citizens.
| | | | Why should Isalm come under investigation, when we all know that the events of 9/11 are not really about Islam, but about oil and natural gas? | | | | |
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Even though justice should not be measured
in numbers, one would not be callous to ask why the US went to all this
trouble for the al-Sabah family? A fairly straightforward answer was offered
by then Vice President George H. Bush (the father of the current
president) in 1986. Bush, a Texas oil man like his son, went to Saudi
Arabia as oil prices collapsed to tell the oil sheiks about US "domestic
interests and thus the interest of national security." Oil is a question of
US national security, not just because of its vast appetite or addiction to
oil (more than fifty percent of the world's consumption), but also on behalf
of the US-based multinationals. Consider that around this time Exxon, Texaco
and SoCal (now Unocal) owned a third each of the shares in Saudi oil
production, while Gulf and British Petroleum shared the totality of Kuwait's
production. US interest in Iraq, today, is about stability of Gulf oil
fields, even as the US talks about democracy, rule of law and the need to
overthrow their former ally, Saddam Hussein.
In Central Asia, the
game is similar. Two weeks after 9/11, Chevron's subsidiary Tengizchevroil
finished an oil pipeline from Tengiz oil field in western Kazakhstan to the
Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. This pipeline will feed
western Europe with oil from what might end up as the fifth largest oil
state in the world (and, crucially, outside OPEC's ambit). The Tengiz
pipeline is only one of many that sully the geopolitics of the region.
| | | | The impoverishment of other languages of social protest leads many young people to adopt the garb of Islam to articulate their alienation. The crisis they face is not of Islam, but of a collapse of alternative frameworks. | | | | |
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Another one, pressing for the Afghan problem, is the 890-mile pipeline from
Dauletabad gas fields in eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into
Pakistan. This multi-billion dollar project has two multinationals on the
warpath, Unocal from the US, and Bridas from Argentina. Both hired
Saudis and Americans to negotiate with the Taliban, who have
continuously played one off against the other to increase their own
percentage of the margins. Unocal, recently denied Myanmar's oil market,
is eager for the project and a US-friendly regime in Afghanistan may help it
clinch the deal. Zahir Shah, former King of Afghanistan, has lived in Rome
since 1973 as a pensioner of a gulf state whose name he will not reveal;
perhaps the investment made in him by the unnamed state will eventually come
to fruition if he comes to power alongside the notorious Northern Alliance
(whose terror in Kabul in the mid-1990s and assassination of Najibulla offer
a harbinger of what is to come).
The oil and natural gas lands are
currently governed by regimes more invested in commissions and other such
forms of corruption, while the populations in these lands are more and more
frustrated with their social and economic conditions. The impoverishment of
other languages of social protest leads many young people to adopt the garb
of Islam to articulate their alienation. The crisis they face is not of
Islam, but of a collapse of alternative frameworks, such as pan-Arabism (now
perverted by the Ba'ath in Iraq and by the neoliberalism of the Mubarak
regime in Egypt) or of socialism (many of whose members earned the gallows
from US-backed regimes, such as in Iraq and Egypt, both once home to vibrant
communist parties).
As the US bombs fall, then, they are not, despite
Bush's rhetoric, on a mission against Islam; theirs is a fuel's errand.
After rubble has been shifted from one valley of Afghanistan to another, the
problem will remain - an addiction to oil and natural gas, and the profits
it provides the children of the Seven Sisters as opposed to the
cultivation of dignity and social well being in the states that are oil
rich. This is the crisis we need to address.
(Vijay Prashad is
Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA. His
book, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community is just
out in paperback from Oxford University Press)