Articles

Target Iran: The Truth about the White House's Plans for Regime Change by Scott Ritter. Pub: Nation Books, New York, 2006. Pp: 316. Hbk: US$25.95.

As the political trouble sparked by the sacking of Pakistan’s chief justice in March shows no sign of abating, DR PERWEZ SHAFI of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) tries to understand it using a model of political behaviour proposed by the late Dr Kalim Siddiqui.

Three times in the last 50 years – in 1960, 1971 and 1980 – the Turkish military has seized power from civilian governments whose policies they deemed unacceptable. In 1997, Turkey suffered a “soft coup”, when the military forced prime minister Necmeddin Erbakan out of power for being too Islamic.

The countrywide protests that began in Pakistan when President General Pervez Musharraf declared the country’s Chief Justice (CJ), Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, “non-functional” on March 9 are continuing, with no sign of the crisis being resolved in the foreseeable future. For the CJ’s supporters, the ideal outcome would be the withdrawal of charges against him at the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) – a forum for internal accountability of the judiciary – and his restoration to his position; in other words, a return to the status quo existing before March 9.

In recent years, Syria has come to occupy a somewhat paradoxical international profile. On the one hand, it is an authoritarian dictatorship in the best traditions of the modern Middle East. On the other, it is a constant target of US political attack; accused of being a sponsor of terrorism because of its enmity to Israel, and relations with Hizbullah and Islamic Iran.

If a country’s architecture can be taken as indicating its status in the world, that of Istanbul reflects fairly accurately both Turkey’s past and its present. While the grandeur of its historic buildings are vivid reminders of past glories, the blandness of its contemporary buildings–concrete and glass boxes–reflects the disrupting influence and ultimate vacuousness of its Westernization.

The threat to Muslims from an imperialistic American-Israeli power will not go away even if “Islamic terrorism” ends. The war-elites in Washington and Tel Aviv spent most of the last century sapping the resources of the world in what was supposedly a life-and-death struggle with communism. When communism collapsed, the politicians went looking for a new enemy to justify continuing their aggressive policies. Unable to find any convincing enemies to promote, they set about creating one from the movements of resistance created by their own policies; and so we now have “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamo-fascism”.

At the end of April, western human rights and charitable bodies organized a series of events to mark the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of fighting in the Darfur region of western Sudan. During this period, Darfur has become a by-word for human tragedy, with the Sudanese government of Omar Bashir being blamed for perpetrating a “genocide” against “African” tribes-people in the region, with the help of the notorious Janjaweed, described as militants belonging to “Arab” tribes, supported and equipped by the Sudanese government.

Barely a month after he announced his intention of returning to the political stage, Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister, is back in limelight. Since being released from jail in late 2004, he had been travelling around the world delivering speeches to academic institutions and thinktanks. Now he has promised to give the Malaysian opposition a shot in the arm.

On March 31 a five-year-old boy wandered out of his parents’ sight during a shopping trip to a mall in Kuala Lumpur. The story immediately made its way into the mainstream media, which began publicizing the parents’ desperate plea to anyone to return their missing child. Most had little hope of finding the boy, at least not alive.