Posted on June 14, 2011
Funnily, the Obama administration is reportedly spearheading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems for dissidents to undermine “repressive” regimes. Could there be a bigger hilarious joke than this, whereas America has habitually been a staunch patron and friend of the most tyrannical autocracies and despotic rules if suiting its interests? One needs not going into distant past to know this. Its selectivity in these very times in support of the indigenous Arab spring should be enough of it to grasp its perfidy. It is out with daggers drawn to dethrone Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria for its loathing of the two rulers because of their defiance to be its puppets. But it has only kid gloves for President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen for his role of an obeisant vassal to the American lords in fighting their battles on his land and the Bahraini rulers for hosting lovingly the 5th US naval fleet for decades. In fact, it went the whole hog to save Saleh’s wobbling presidency in the face of the tidal storm of public revolt against his repressive rule of nearly four decades, failing which it roped in the Arab Gulf monarchs to secure him a safe exit. That’s a different matter if he is not ready to abdicate and wants to hold on to his shaky throne. As he is recuperating in Saudi Arabia from his injury he sustained in a rebel attack on his palace, it is his son commanding the crack republican guards who is holding the fort while the country’s is vice president supposed to run the country in his absence is just a nominal figurehead. And if it was not on their prodding that the Saudi and the UAE military forces had moved in Bahrain to prop up the collapsing rule of the Gulf island’s monarchy, the Americans had had no cudgels at all against this foreign military intervention. No issue had they made of it. They maintained a deafening calculated collusive muteness.As a matter of fact, in Egypt they had on to Hosni Mubarik, their favourite Man Friday in the Middle East, until it became evident that his wobbling repressive autocracy would inevitably be swept away by the tidal wave of an unrelenting public uprising. They had to change, albeit grudgingly, to stay on the right side of this public fury which they have since been trying deviously to take charge of, as yet not so triumphantly. Ironically enough, while they are making much of an Arab League resolution supporting their military campaign in Libya, not even one member of this Arab grouping is a functioning democracy by even a modicum. They all are an appalling constellation of tyrannical autocracies and despotic rules, congenitally intolerant of even a speck of dissent and opposition, compulsive violators of human rights, and brutal repressors of civil liberties and political freedoms. Yet the American overlords are quite indulgent of them as they obediently and servilely play ball with them as they want and dictate them. So this project of shadow deployment of communication systems is a huge charade, a big trick in the works in Washington, and possibly its conspiratorially-allied western capitals. It is not what it is being touted to be intended for. The intent goes too deeper. After discovering social networking such an effective tool for mobilising the youth street power in the ongoing Arab spring, the western adventurists led by the Americans are wistfully latching on to this instrument to manipulate it eventually for their own political ends. Previously, they would surreptitiously set up dissident groups, incite exiles and mount inflammatory broadcast networks and services to trigger revolts against the foreign governments they deemed too uncomfortable and too difficult to put up with. Now they would use the social networking, instead. But the times have changed, conditions have changed and even peoples’ mindsets have changed. The new generations may not be as subservient to them and as easily pliable to them as were their elders, as must have the US-led western global players learnt so uncomfortably in Tunis and Egypt and must be watching now with so much of unease in Yemen and Bahrain. Syria and Libya would be no different in the long run, for sure.