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 Re: تجربتي مع النظام العدلي الأمريكي ومع المنبر الحر: الحرية لنا ولسوانا (Re: Haydar Badawi Sadig)
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أختي الدكتورة نجاة،
خطر لي أن أهديك هذا المقال التالي الذي كتبته قبل غزو العراق بعدة أشهر، لعله يوضح لك ما كان يجول بخاطري في ذلك الوقت، والأوقات التي تلته، حتى تعريضي للمعاملة المهينة التي تعرضت لها. فإلى المقال.
The Quest for Peace from Sudan to America: Hope for a New World Crushed?
”I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting…. I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people.”
With this powerful commitment and dauntingly responsible statement, Brady Kiesling, a veteran U.S. diplomat concluded his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell on Feb.27. This reminded me of how I, a former Sudanese diplomat, decided to walk out of diplomatic service a little more than a decade ago. Now a proud U.S. citizen, I completely agree and concur with what Mr. Kiesling foresees.
As most Americans, I have been agonizingly unclear about what the 43rd president of the U.S. really wants to achieve for us through invading Iraq. I now genuinely think that he wants peace, but, in my judgment, he is employing the wrong means to achieve it. He says by war he will achieve peace. Not in the Middle East, and not anywhere in today’s world for that matter!
Changing the message, of the purpose of going to war, almost by the day in some instances, makes our president a constant subject for ridicule, by most people in the Islamic countries, and the rest of the world. As a Muslim American, who first supported him, I find myself joining Mr. Kiseling, and the billions of Muslims and non-Muslims from all corners of the world, who suspiciously ridicule the lack of credibility in the message, sometimes the messenger, and most importantly the sender, our 43rd president.
Given that the news narrative on the purpose of war has continuously been manipulated by the White House, and news media spinners, no wonder our president’s credibility is corroding fast at home, and in the Islamic world and most of, the western world as well. If history is any teacher, Bush will win the war, and lose the peace, because he is leading a confused and reluctant America into losing the hearts of most people in America and the rest of the world. This is a grave miscalculation, and make-believe show that the Cheneys, Rumsefleds, and Wolfotwitzes, and many fanatics of the western world would want us to buy into.
True, a leader must lead, and not succumb to the collective mind in every turn. But this time world public opinion should not be ignored, especially when the very essence of leadership, which is credibility, is damaged. The policies we are now asked to support Mr. Kiseling says are not compatible with American values and “American interests.”
In my judgment, the minute the first bullet is shot from the U.S. side, the U.S. will have lost its moral leadership of the world. The president is being seen in many circles, including American, European, and Islamic circles, as the “Front Man” for special interest groups, capitalist, and religious fanatics. And that his religious convictions are being manipulated to justify a war, which will by no means qualify as a “just war,” even by Christian moral standards.
I want Saddam expediently removed, and I want Islamic fanaticism, and any fanaticism, to be defeated and soon. However, from vast experience with confronting the terrible menace called terrorism, and its main feeder fanaticism, I can confidently state that we are treading dangerous territory. The Pentagon and White House conservatives do not know what they are getting themselves, and the nation into.
Bush is giving the fanatics their perfect tool, and making them the happiest secret observers of this war. They are not idly and inactively watching. The recruiting frenzy must have already begun, and they must have become even more elusive and much more determined than they were in the past. War will give a treasure trove of opportunities for the terrorists to launch an unprecedented campaign of recruitment, an art they have long perfected and become very skillful at. If 9/11 was any lesson, it tells us that you cannot defeat someone who is willingly killing himself and others with him/her. Yes, in Israel, girls killed themselves and others in what we rightly call a terrorist act, and what some skewed minds wrongly call Jihad
I say to our president that he is making this to look like the final battle between “imperialism/ capitalism,” and Islamic “fundamentalism/fanaticism.” And by wrongly and dangerously linking the showdown against Iraq to Islamic fanaticism, he effortlessly handed the terrorists what they could have spent millions to achieve. The Islamic world is terribly angry at the U.S. for its policies toward the Middle East. Even the most moderate Arab intellectual or official will helplessness watch as demagogues ridicule the values for which the U.S and the the “American terrorist” president, they say, stands. Bush has disarmed the moderates of their last defense: the values of justice, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all people. This is, at least, how the Islamic world and the vast majority of the rest of the world are seeing it.
If war begins, both capitalism and terrorism will drain each other. Both parties will lose, and the world will come to a stand still for a while. But at the end the two parties will lose, one of them by losing the war, and the other by losing the peace. America will win the war, but it will most certainly lose the peace.
Spilling blood in Mesopotamia, a safe heaven of our common father, Abraham, at one point in his tremendous quest for peace, should not be done by anyone who prides himself to be a true believer in biblical traditions. This is not a “just war.” Had it been reasonably “justified” as such, Americans would have flocked to the streets to support it. I am yet to meet any American who sounds as certain as our president does on this issue of historical proportions.
I am a former diplomat, who quit the foreign service of Sudan when Islamic fanatics toppled the elected government that I represented in June 1989. I decided to quit my diplomatic post, and moved on to get two graduate degrees from Ohio University. The sharp knife of fanaticism had cut that career path short, when I decided to stay in this beautiful country. A Fulbright scholarship came very timely to my rescue.
I couldn’t represent a government, which later harbored Osama bin Laden for full five years. My quest for peace and freedom made me a U.S citizen on September, 28 2001, only 17 days after Osama’s terrible tragic act in that infamous month.
In 1993 I decided to take a faculty position with UAE University in the Arab Gulf region. In 1997 I moved, with my family, to Doha, Qatar, to teach at the Department of Mass Communication of the University of Qatar. Having conducted a lot of strategic studies, as the Media Division Director of the Emirates Strategic Studies and Research Center, I know the volatilities of the region in which General Frank has set up command.
I am still in quest of the “commodity” of the heart, for the heart, by the heart: PEACE. Can corporate America and the hawks in the Pentagon and the White house produce it? No, Mr. President, I know, and you will soon know, they can’t, especially when it becomes clear that we have won the war, but lost the peace!!!
Haydar Badawi Sadig, PhD
[email protected]
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Haydar Badawi Sadig
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست