The thinking Obama

In 2006, when the Americans executed Saddam Hussein and buried him at Al-Awja in Tikrit they did not know he was a seed - eight years on to sprout as the Islamic State. He was a secular leader having no great longing to be a practising Muslim, but his powerbase, both in politics and defence forces, essentially comprised the Sunni Arabs, one among them being Al-Baghdadi who heads the so-called Caliphate that spreads over vast swathes of Iraq and Syria. Al-Baghdadi was one of the thousands of Saddam soldiers who were imprisoned by the US-led invading forces, only to come out as a blood-seeking avenger, soon to be joined by thousands other Iraqis. President Barack Obama is therefore spot on when he says the Islamic State is one of "unintended consequences" of the Iraq invasion ordered by his predecessor George W Bush in 2003, "which is why we should generally aim before we shoot". But shooting by habit the Americans must do, for they believe, albeit absolutely wrongly, that they are supposed to babysit the entire world. The invasion of Iraq to secure regime change in Baghdad was politically wrong and legally untenable, and scandalous on the part of so-called champions of human rights. Of course, Saddam Hussein didn't brook political opposition, but so do many others in the region and in return receive pats on the back. During Saddam's times, Iraq was a vibrant polity, roads were safe to travel by day or night and schools and hospitals best equipped. Compare today's Iraq as it has come to obtain in the wake of the tyrant's ouster with his Saddam's Iraq, you would like to check if you rightly understand the phrase 'liberation and democratisation'. And what an irony Saddam Hussein was the West's protégé, brought up and equipped to contain Iran's growing clout in the region, and then ditched to make his people live in fear and deprivation. The so-called Islamic State is nothing more than a reincarnation of Saddam Hussein.
Howsoever good-intentioned and holy-purpose the invasion of another country may be it cannot be accepted; much less the farce invented by Tony Blair and lapped up hook, line, and sinker by the American leadership. The fact on ground then was since the destructive Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear plant at Arak there was no indication whatsoever that Saddam had any interest in heating up the nuclear lab again. So when an American army chief went around hawking Blaire's canard with the help of a pencil sketch of a so-called mobile laboratory the first to reject it was the International Atomic Energy Agency. But George W. Bush and his sidekick Tony Blair were bent upon removing Saddam Hussein. He was removed and killed, but there was no victory and the invading forces left behind a broken and chaotic Iraq, which has thrown up the Islamic State. How come President Obama has not mentioned Afghanistan, Libya, Tunis and Yemen that too are victims of the United States' excessive dozes of 'liberation and democratization'. We hope what President Obama has said about the genesis of the Islamic State is not merely his hypothetical deduction of the United States' foreign expeditions and interventions. We hope reality has begun sinking in minds of global babysitters that days of gunboat diplomacy have long passed. And so are the ideas and mindsets that profess and promote ascendance of a particular brand of culture or political philosophy over others, and therefore must prevail. Saddam's Iraq had everything that made life livable barring space for political contenders; but what we have now in the liberated Iraq - President Obama's thinking must reach his detractors in the US Congress who had the audacity to cheer up Benjamin Netanyahu when he said if re-elected he would make sure there is no state of Palestine!