American Global Manifest Destiny, A Christian Crusade Or The Return Of Anglo-American Sons Of Israel

I. Introduction :

The brute muscle flexion in recent years of the American regime under George Bush Jr. has flabbergasted the community of nations. Mr. Bush's ferociously militaristic policy struck friends and foes alike as a behavior unbecoming of the world's sole super power. Instead of leading the United Nations Organization and the world with high standards of morality and legality, as was expected of it, the current American administration has only bewildered the community of nations with its arrogance and inexplicable disdain for the UN and for the legal requirements or ethical standards of behavior that have guided the actions of all UN member states since the end of the 2 nd World War. In an attempt to explain what appeared to be inexplicable, perplexed observes of world affairs have cited several likely reasons for America 's baffling behavior. Some people put the blame for America's troubling behavior squarely on the shoulders of Western Intelligence Agencies, such as America's CIA and Great Britain's MI-6, that have been underemployed and operating with greatly reduced budgets since the breaking up of the Communist block. These spy agencies, insist the proponents of this view, have manufactured bogey enemies of the US so as to secure greater attention and to regain their formerly enhanced standing in government, hopefully with increased budgets. Another group that also subscribes to the spy agencies explanation has given rise to a slightly different version of this theory. This latter group exonerates Western Spy Agencies but faults Israel 's spy organization, MOSAD, on which the West has always depended for information about the countries of the Middle East . This school attributes the motivation for America 's involvement in the Middle Eastern crisis to manipulation of the US by the Government of Israel, which has fed President Bush's administration much disinformation, which it has channeled through MOSAD, whose reports normally command in Washington instantaneous and unquestioned receptivity. One other explanation usually given in jest, but not without an element of seriousness, stresses the singular importance of President Bush's obsession with the importance of eliminating Saddam Hussein, and to thereby avenge the humiliation his father had suffered at the hands of the Iraqi President who had emerged from the 1991 war fully in control and who, despite losing the war, has successfully flouted US and UN impositions with impunity. Explanations and speculations of this nature are aplenty, but in this essay we shall briefly go over two suggestions that merit special attention because of their popularity and general currency. One of them attributes the warlike behavior of the US regime to a religious motivation in the form of a newly found spirit of Christian crusade against Islam, while the other proffers more mundane explanations of political and economic nature. So, we shall now turn to a brief consideration of the merits of these two propositions, starting with the latter.

II. Theory of US Imperialism or Global Manifest Destiny :

This school of thought maintains that the US has been seized by a compelling desire to self-extend herself worldwide so as to realize global dominion, a feeling which is akin to the spirit of Manifest Destiny that motivated her 19 th century relentless march westwards, and conquest of vast tracts of Indian inhabited lands in the west of present day continental USA. But with the conquest of continental USA completed, America has again embarked on the warpath, with the purpose of forcefully bringing the whole globe under its secure control. America, this school alleges, has reached, following the breaking up of the Communist Block and her subsequent rise to the position of the world's sole super power, a stage in her growth and development that compulsively propels her to action as the ancient Republic of Rome, after which the US's political system and institutions were modeled, was similarly compelled to seek glory abroad following her attainment of a dominant status vis-à-vis her rivals in Italy and Europe. The intentions of the US, therefore, is to self-extend herself so as to make American authority felt across the whole world as ancient Rome had attempted to spread pax-Romana in the ancient world. To put it simply, what we are now witnessing is the opening stage of a campaign to establish American global hegemony by force of arms, no less.

The US has begun her campaign to conquer the world with the opening of hostilities in Iraq but with the ultimate goal in this phase of taking possession of all the countries in the Middle East, not for any particular hatred for, or hostility to, the Arabs and Islam but because of the vital economic, security and strategic importance of the huge oil reserves of the Arab countries. As the sole super power in the world, America cannot countenance the prospect of being denied free and unfettered access to the fuel oil of the Middle East . Oil is a very precious natural resource for which the USA has developed an almost insatiable appetite. It is the predominant energy fuel that keeps the production machinery of America 's industries humming. Better yet, fuel oil is vitally significant for America 's on-going world wide military campaigns. Without access to this fuel oil of the Arabs America cannot hope to successfully wage the campaigns to achieve her goal of unchallenged global hegemony. The aim is for the US to first capture the oil fields in the Middle East and to then utilize this oil to wage her campaign of global conquests. This school maintains that it is really only an accidental coincidence that the richest oil-producing countries are in the Middle East and that these states also happen to be Islamic. All the currently on-going US military operations in the Middle East and the world over are mere manifestations of new US imperial ambitions and not, as some fear, acts that reflect hostility to Islam. These are the salient features of this school's hypothesis, which, despite the lack of any tangible evidences to back it up, nevertheless continues to command considerable popularity.

III. The Christian Crusade Theory:

Although both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, who have led the recent attack on Iraq , are known to be extremely religious individuals, the question of whether the exceptional belligerence of Great Britain and the US is driven by a religious motivation, is really not a clear-cut case. But there have been strong suspicions for sometime now that a confrontation between Islam and Western Christendom might be in the offing. In the late 1970s Western political thinkers began to speculate about the imminence of a clash between Islam and the West. Three contemporaneously occurring incidents gave rise to this speculation. They were:

A. Waning of the Communist Peril :

The likelihood of an all-out war between East and West had been on the decline steadily since the early 1950s, largely because of the “ balance of terror ” that these two antagonistic military camps had attained with their acquisition and accumulation of nuclear armaments, with which they could, in a hot war, mutually destroy each other. The two sides, however, continued for sometime to regard each other with suspicion and unambiguous hostility. The period spanning most of the second half of the twentieth century, characterized by persistent feelings of mutual mistrust between the two sides in conditions of no war but with no real peace, came to be known as the “ Cold War Era ,” a time during which the states of the Capitalist West and those of the Communist East engaged in stiff diplomatic warfare, no less deadly than the forceful military warfare that they were trying to avoid. But the commitment on both sides to the avoidance of a calamitous war was strong enough to enable them to put a cap on aspects of the arms race between them. The new spirit of shared, albeit guarded, commitment to the maintenance of international peace then began to chip away at the wall of mistrust that separated East from West since the 2 nd World War. By the mid 1970s, the gradual thawing of the diplomatic frost that characterized the relations between East and West and the parallel diminution of the fear of an all out war between the NATO and the WARSAW PACT military alliances had allowed these two divergent political camps to jointly sponsor the enactment, as well as the enforcement, of a UN policy seeking to restrict the proliferation of nuclear weapons and all other arms of mass destruction. Acting essentially as co-gatekeepers at the exclusive club for the handful of nations that had attained by the early 1960s the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons, the US and the Soviet Union tried to henceforth deny the possession of, and/or the technical capability to produce and develop, these arms of mass destruction to all non-nuclear nations. The gradual diminution of mutual mistrust between East and West also gnawed away at the gripping fear of obliteration at the hands of the Communists that the citizens of Western powers had felt. This fear finally evaporated into thin air with the intellectual fossilization of the revolutionary spirit of the World Communist Movement during comrade Leonid Brezhnev's extended but intellectually comatose period of leadership in the Soviet Union . Years before the late 1980s' collapse of World Communism, some western scholars began to warn their political leaders of the growing influence in world affairs of Muslim countries, which in the estimation of the western scholars, presented a threat to the security of the Western Christian Civilization, much greater than the Communist menace of the previous half century.

B. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War :

After six years of strenuous preparations, Egypt went to war in 1973 to regain the territory that it had lost to Israel in the 1967 six-day war. Only Syria joined Egypt in this venture. The Egyptian military made a lightening strike across the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur Jewish holiday in early October of that year. Surprising the Israeli forces on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar during which many Israeli soldiers were probably fasting, the Egyptian forces successfully broke through the Barleve fortifications, thought by most military experts of the time to be impregnable to an Egyptian attack. The unusual secrecy with which Egypt and Syria carried out their preparations for war also surprised everybody and enabled their forces to catch the ever vigilant Israeli military napping on that day. Breeching the Barleve defenses was a remarkable feat beyond the wildest dreams of the Egyptian military. Prior to the 1973 October war, Egypt suffered from an incapacitating sense of inadequacy, as a result of a succession of defeats that Israel had inflicted on her. Therefore, the brilliant performance of Egypt's war machine in the first day of hostilities was a great morale booster for her military and the harbinger of much needed psychological liberation for all Egyptians from the collective feeling of worthlessness that they had lived with for a generation. In the short term, the war had two other beneficial consequences for Egypt , which appear to have sufficiently compensated for the losses in men and materials that it had sustained in the war. It destroyed, happily for the Arabs, the myth of the Israeli military's invincibility and it signaled the coming of age of Egypt as a military power, worth reckoning with. But that was not all. In addition to being a memorable episode in the history of modern Arab-Israeli relations and a landmark achievement for Egypt's armed forces, the war generated a storm of an unanticipated political and economic agitation that ruffled many feathers all over the world. The political and economic fallout from this war had a global impact, which made of it a bona fide turning point in world history. Most significantly, the war caused Arab countries to serendipitously discover their ability to influence world affairs as the war revealed to them the West's easy vulnerability to economic warfare, possibly more perilous to the West than the previous military threat of communism. This economic threat came from the Arab countries of the Middle East. As an expression of their solidarity with Egypt, Arab member states of OPEC, an exclusive organization for the world's major oil-exporting countries, led this global oil cartel to hike up the prices of fuel oil on which the economies of the United States and of other Western powers that dutifully supported Israel depended so much.

C. The Iranian Islamic Revolution :

The unease that the US and her allies felt from the newly realized capabilities of Arab/Muslim countries to economically harm the West was made to loom much larger than real by events unfolding at that time in Iran. In 1979, the then Iranian regime led by Shah Mohamed Bahlavi, considered to be the West's best friend in the Middle-Eastern Region, was toppled in a campaign of mass uprisings waged at the behest of an exiled Muslim cleric, called Ayatollah RuhuAllah Khomeini. With this changing of guard in Tehran, the Iranian system of governance underwent a radical change, a political shift that appeared to be inimical to the interests of the West. The Iranian revolution, steered by conservative Islamic clerics, immediately declared an end to dynastic kingly rule in Iran , decreeing the establishment in its place of a militant form of Islamic republicanism, strongly opposed to the growing interests and influences of the West in the Muslim world. The new leaders in Tehran derided and openly denounced the materialistic ethos that permeates the politics of western liberal democracies as ungodly, thus adding a moral dimension to Islam's challenge to the globally dominant Western Civilization. In the Iranian clerics' eyes, the secular materialism of the West was indicative of a serious retrogression in morality the dangerous pitfalls of which the Muslims were strongly urged to avoid by distancing themselves from the West altogether. As a result, a confrontation soon developed between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the West, especially with the US leader of the West, which the religious leaders of Iran now began to refer to as the ‘ Great Satan '.

The idea of an Islamic challenge to the West was born essentially out of western scholarly studies attempting to evaluate the immediate impact of these three historical occurrences, separately or in combination, on international relations, and to envision the enduring legacy that these events might bequeath to world affairs. The theory of Islam's hostility or challenge to the West has been repeatedly analyzed, and kept alive since the closing years of the 1970s, by Western think tanks, established on different occasions to determine the most effective policies or programs the West could employ to deal with this Islamic moral, economic, political and, potentially, even military challenge to the West's world leadership. Frequently, the patrons of those research activities and the beneficiaries of the think tanks' policy recommendations were the political leadership and/or the managers of security agencies of the Western powers. Documented evidences that conclusively link Anglo-US violence against the Muslims to the work of the think tanks have not surfaced yet, but at the same time it is not altogether inconceivable for the conducting of preemptive military strikes against the rising stars among the states of the Muslim world to have been one of the many policy options that western academicians and policy analysts might have recommended to their political leaders and/or the bosses of the security apparatuses of the western powers. Whatever the case, America's brute muscle flexion in Afghanistan and in Iraq, not to mention her saber-rattling posture vis-à-vis Syria and Iran, definitely shows the signs of a crusade against Islam, a 21 st century revival if you will of the famous medieval Christian invasion and despoliation of the Near East.

IV. Biblical Prediction or an Insider's Information?

The 2003 A.D. Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has caused the present writer to recall some of the curious contents of a booklet that he chanced upon and leafed through half attentively in 1985, shortly after its publication by a Bible College located on the pacific coast of North America. What the author of the booklet wanted to get across was intriguing and purposely obvious from the title of the book, but in 1985 the book failed to raise any eyebrows. Citing biblical passages that he said were incontrovertible evidences in support of his arguments, the author of this booklet determined that the peoples of Great Britain and the US represented the 10 lost tribes of Israel who would, according to the predictions contained in the biblical passages he quoted, conquer the Middle East by military means in the then not too distant future, and establish political dominion over the Middle-Eastern sub-region. In 1985, this writer thought that the predictions contained in that book were fancied and even laughable and the meanings given to the quoted biblical passages forced. What is more, no sane mind could give in 1985 any credibility to the silly suggestion of an Anglo-American joint military adventure in the Middle East . At the time hardly anybody took the book seriously, and many probably thought it to be the creation of a deranged mind. Like his contemporaries, this writer quickly discarded the little book, judging the time spent on his desultory browsing of the little book as time wasted. The extraordinary events of the past three years, however, make one to think again. It is difficult today, as it was in 1985, to give much credibility to the claims of predictions in the cited biblical passages, but, in the wake of the US and Great Britain's recent departure from the norms of legality and morality that have governed the behavior of member states of the UN since the 1945 founding of this body, we cannot help but suspect that the author of the booklet might have been privy to a mid-1980s' secret accord between Great Britain and the United States, a pact the central plank of which was for these two western powers to jointly conquer the Muslim countries of the Middle East!

Turning a deaf ear to the loud outcry of the international community and brazenly defying the authority of the United Nation's Organization, Great Britain and the US unilaterally went to war against Iraq . Because of their vast military superiority to Iraq, a country economically and militarily weakened by the privations of an embargo that lasted a dozen years or so, the US and Great Britain managed to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime with relative ease. However, what followed on the early battle successes against Saddam's military has not been to the liking of the Anglo-American conquerors. A hydra of rebellion and resistance has raised its many heads all over Iraq , inflicting heavy losses of life and equipment on the conquerors. The Americans and the British found themselves trapped in a quagmire from which they could not extricate themselves safely and with dignity. They, therefore, decided to “hand over” authority, in theory only, to an Iraqi government, headed by none other than former employees of the CIA and MI-6 spy agencies of the US and Britain , respectively. But even after the handing over of authority to the Iraqis, the American and British forces have continued their presence in Iraq , as announced, allegedly at the request of this Iraqi government. More likely than not, however, the troops of the conquerors are in Iraq to ensure the good behavior of the government of stooges that they have installed as Iraq's authority, a façade through which the US and the British hope to practically continue running the affairs of that country. The decision to stay put in Iraq , despite the unpleasant turn of events, shows the strong determination of the Anglo-American conquerors not to leave Iraq anytime soon, lending weighty support to the popularly held view among the Muslims that the US and its allies are bent on erasing Islam from the face of the earth.

Be that what it may, it is abundantly clear from recent developments, proffering surprising validation for the predictions of an Anglo-American military conquest in the Middle East that the Bible College booklet we have referred to above spoke of, that the Muslims have every reason to fear foul from the intentions of the current US and British authorities. We have not heard yet any credible explanation for what has motivated America 's rather perplexing activities in the Middle East during the past three years. Needless-to-say, a very simple appraisal of how the Americans have conducted the so-called “war on terrorism” would reveal an unmistakable pattern of hostility to Islam, serious enough to serve as a clarion call for all the Muslims of the world to wake up from their deep slumber and to draw together their resources for their collective protection . Among the many alarming signs indicative of an Anglo-American disposition to hurting Islam and the Muslims are:

Field reports on the events of the Afghanistan war, showing the ravages of indiscriminate aerial bombardment and the commission as well of horrendous atrocities on the ground, have proven that America has been in the mood for shedding Islamic blood and would not hesitate to inflict massive pain on millions of Muslim people with aerial bombardment that does not distinguish the innocent from the guilty;

1. The US declared in 2002 that their forces would wage war in Somalia after bringing hostilities against the Taliban regime of Afghanistan to a conclusion. Fortunately, the US threat to invade Somalia has not come to pass. The outcries of the world's press and scholarly authorities in the know on Somali affairs along with the intercession of European governments have saved Somalia, a nation already dead in all but name, from devastation by wrathful American attacks. Observers of the events unfolding since then have recently reinterpreted the significance of this episode. They now suggest that the global outcry that helped avert the attack on Somalia has not only saved that country from destruction but it has also upset America's preferred plan for effecting her conquest of the Middle East, which consisted of first taking full control of Somalia and Afghanistan and then deploying troops to bases in those two countries whence Anglo-American allies would unleash simultaneously timed attacks from the east and west on the countries of the Middle East.
2. With their plans to invade the Middle East from bases in Somalia and in Afghanistan foiled, the Americans now fell back on plan no. 2, which was to establish bases in Iraq from which British and American task forces would initiate hostilities and radiate in all directions until they brought the whole of the Middle East under their control. To that effect, Great Britain and the US informed the Iraqi transitional authority their intention to keep permanent military bases in Iraq , four for the US and two for Great Britain . The reaction of most Iraqis, including members of the transitional authority that the British and US conquering allies had nominated, was swift and violently opposed to the idea. The plan has not come up for public debate again, but, despite the formal transferring of authority to an Iraqi government, the conquering army continues its occupation of, and violence against, the Iraqis and their country under altogether unclear terms and circumstances.
3. It appears that why Britain and the US have kept their armies in Iraq is not to help the transitional government with the task of restoring law and order, as has been publicized, but to remain conveniently poised in Iraq for the eventual launching of their planned invasions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria and possibly even Saudi Arabia . The US and Britain have not even attempted to hide their hostile intentions toward Iran and Syria while their repeated indictments of the Saudis and impossible demands appear to be perverse attempts on their part to create a pretext for a confrontation with the Saudis that only the excessive deference of the Saudi authorities might have defused or delayed its occurrence.
4. America 's indiscriminate bombardments of civilians, quite reminiscent of Israel 's genocidal operations against the Palestinians, and the scandalous treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war are all suggestive of extreme hatred and willingness to eliminate as many Iraqis as can be disposed of with discretion. What else but a premeditated plan to cause massive casualties can one call the heartless engagement of America 's elite war planes, including F-16 and F-18 fighter jets along with Apache attack helicopters against the population of al-Falluja ? The heartrending scenes of sorties of American planes repeatedly dropping their deadly loads on civilians and the grisly pictures of death and destruction that the attacking planes have left behind reminded one of the heartless bombardment of the village of Guernica in Spain by Generalissimo Franco's warplanes in 1937, immortalized in Pablo Picasso's famous painting known by that same name. What a pity! There are no Arab or Muslim painters to memorialize the atrocities and terror that the brave people of al-Falluja, the Iraqi Guernica , have endured at the hands of the Americans.
5. America 's unwavering support for Israel since the planting of this cancer on the Middle East is another indisputable evidence of that country's boundless animosity toward the Arabs, and Islam. In fact, it appears that there was a planned tripartite aggression on the Middle East , with Israel given a license to eliminate as many Palestinians as possible while the eyes of the world were turned to the Iraqi conflict. Certainly the greatly heightened tempo of Israel 's war of attrition and extermination against Palestinian community leaders and settlements since the outbreak of the Iraqi hostilities could not be an accident.
6. Another example of Anglo-American hostility to Islam and of their plans to secure control of the resource rich areas of the Middle East can be seen from the campaign currently afoot to manufacture a pretext for the US and Great Britain to intervene in the Sudan. The government of the Sudan , distinguished from the states of the region only by its strong will to promote Islam and to closely conform politically to the basic precepts of Islamic governance, has never been popular with the West. Disturbances in the Darfur region have apparently provided the US and Britain the excuse they were looking for to militarily intervene in the Sudan and to take possession of this region where, in addition to oil and gold, huge deposits of uranium, a mineral indispensable for the making and the development of nuclear arms, are known to exist. Kicking off a carefully planned propaganda campaign quite reminiscent of the prelude to their attack on Iraq, Britain and the US have in recent weeks been repeatedly, and rather unfairly we may add, accusing the government of the Sudan of giving support to Arab militias that have allegedly engaged in ethnic cleansing in that region, and have in the process given rise to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. It appears now that the US and British governments have decided to invade the region without first asking for a Security Council decision on the matter. Britain 's top military officer has confirmed during this week that British and American troops will indeed be put in the Darfur region of the Sudan next week, without asking for permission from the government of that country.
7. The hypocrisy with which the US deals with the world of Islam has become abundantly clear from the latest announcement from Washington . The US has stunned the world with the declaration that it will extend protection to the Iraq based Mujahidiin Khalq, an organization that had been waging war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The US had classified this group as a terrorist group but in a hypocritical knock about turn, the US has now found it convenient to befriend this organization that it had earlier branded as evil and as an enemy to be persecuted and eliminated. We know that the services of Iraqi traitors and unwitting opposition groups have made it possible for the US and Britain to smash the Iraqi forces with relative ease. Therefore, one must see the US's sudden change of heart with respect to the Mujahidiin Khalq for what it is—an unethical attempt to exploit the insecurity of this Iranian opposition group that has faced hard times since the toppling from power of their patron, Saddam Hussein, and to recruit them for services in a planned US or Anglo-American joint attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
8. Strong corroborative evidences for the existence of an Anglo-American policy of crusade against the world of Islam are provided by other official statements from Washington and London, which also show the boundless arrogance that partially accounts for the inexplicable aggression of the US and Great Britain in recent years. The latest announcement makes known their plans to force the secularism of the Western Civilization on the countries of the Middle East even though they know very well that secularism is objectionable to the Muslims and will not go down well with the peoples and authorities in the Middle East . Despite the patent impracticability of their demands, the US and Britain have openly threatened the concerned Muslim countries with reprisals if they refuse to comply with their dictations. Among the many “reforms' suggested to a number of Arab countries are to carry out a drastic overhauling of the curricular content of the Quranic schools in those countries and to legislate and enforce secular policies that introduce man-made modifications to the basic tenets of Islam, with the aim of corrupting the Muslims' religious observances . If that is not an attack on Islam, I fail to realize what is!
9. America's unveiled threats of violence against the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria and the Sudan, her unflagging support for Israel, whose violations of international law as well as the Jewish state's well documented trampling on the civil and human rights of the Palestinians that the US routinely condones, are occurrences that betray unmistakable signs of American enmity to Islam and Muslims. America 's policy toward the Middle East betrays the practice of unconscionable diplomatic double standards, constantly harassing Muslim countries by falsely accusing them of non-existent plans to secretly develop nuclear weapons while never attempting to confront Israel on her illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons and other arms of mass destruction that she has developed and stockpiled over the years . This Anglo-American hostility to the Muslims has lately sunk to the depths of depravity to the point of manifesting itself in countless incidents of extra-judicial arrests of Muslim citizens of the US and Britain, for no reason other than their being Muslims, and the detention of these victims of state terror for indefinite periods of time in secret locations where they are made to endure physical torture and other unimaginable acts cruelty.

Dr. Ali A. Hersi

Mogadishu , Somali

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The author of this essay is a former Dean of Lafoole College of Education and President of the Somali Academy of Science and Arts

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