Sulayman’s Stories

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A few months before the [Abu Ghraib] scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to “the little people.” (Source: Newsweek)

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“(Bush is) just a sick f***. I think we’d be hard-pressed to get someone worse than Bush. I think if you had to sum it up he’s an incredibly selfish man and his administration in my opinion puts Americans ahead of people in other countries.” — MCA from the Beastie Boys (source)

“(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!” — Al Gore (source)

“…George Bush is not Hitler. He would be, if he f*cking applied himself.” — Margaret Cho at a MoveOn Award Ceremony (source)

“Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.” -Mark Crispin Miller, biographer and author of Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (source)

“[Bush] has been painted to be this hero, and he’s got our troops over there dying for no reason . . . I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he f**ked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.” –Eminem, Rolling Stone interview

“George W. Bush has built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard M. Nixon” –Al Gore, speaking on May 26, 2004 at NYU

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Last week some fool posted a silly op-ed in the Washington Square News, ranting about Muslims coming to “infect” America and how the West is too weak to stop it. It touched upon Iraq but not coherently, jumping from topic to topic and not really backing his assertions up with anything. In the end, it was a xenophobic tirade with poor logic.

I wrote a reply, and it was published, albeit cut down to half the size. I thought maybe I should post the full thing, which I couldn’t have done without my friends Haroon and Jawad.

Last week an author named Sam Gilbride wrote a piece on these pages called “In the war on terror, failure means the end of our world.” Title aside, he changed his argument to a “war on Islamic fundamentalism,” launching into a polemic about Muslims and how nearly 1/3 of humanity are bogeyman coming to get him. First, I think his premise is misinformed; it’s not a war on islamic fundamentalism, its a “war on terror.” As a Muslim, I know that someone who believes in the peaceful fundamentals of Islam cannot be confused with someone who’s a violent terrorist. Murder is a sin according to my religion; those who do so violate the clear language of the Qur’an. Anyone who can’t tell those two groups of people apart shouldn’t be writing editorials.

I won’t call it “the war against Islamic fundamentalism” as he did. It’s a common myth that all terrorists are Muslim, and he 
seems to buy this. All religious extremism is equally dangerous; Christian fundamentalists were convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Jewish 
fundamentalists assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, Hindu extremists went on pogroms against minority Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, etc. While terrorism is certainly an important issue, as Bush loves to remind us, terrorists have never won against any government yet. Instead, governments fall from within through domestic forces, e.g. the Nazis used the terrorist attack on the Reichstag building as a justification for seizing power and suppressing rights.

He chides the weakness of the liberal model without defining it. If Mr. Gilbride believes the Western liberal model is weak, then why is he defending it? 
Let me do it for him; The strength of the USA is our ability to accept difference and allow diversity in a society. If a society can’t show genuine 
tolerance and acceptance, then it is diseased. Until that’s fixed, people will always look for an external enemy.. In this case, Mr. Gilbride is trying to target Muslims. He’s appealing to emotion not reason; if Americans don’t deal with the Muslims, they’ll “infect our civilization,” as he put it. There’s nothing to respond to, it’s just fluff. He apes Hitler, only substituting “Jew” with “Muslim.”

Mr. Gilbride profoundly misunderstands the Muslim world. It’s not Islam that hates the West, although Islam hates injustice wherever it appears. People aren’t fighting for Islam as an ideology, but fighting against what they perceive as injustice. How come Al Qaeda never attacks Sweden? He also overgeneralizes; none of the thousands of Muslims I know hate the West. Albanians are Muslim, but they greeted Bush last year like he was a rock star. People in Iran wear Levi jeans. MTV is popular in Egypt. Mr. Gilbride doesn’t seem aware that the so-called “clash of civilizations” has been debunked years ago.

Mr. Gilbride, why not lay blame on those who place us in danger? Our CIA financed and trained Afghani fighters, who years later joined Al Qaeda. Iran’s democracy was toppled in a CIA-led coup, later backfiring spectacularly against us. We with France overthrew democracy in Algeria in 1992, in Palestine in 2006, appearing as hypocrites in the world. Bush reacted to 9/11, but he never addressed any causes. Instead, with Iraq he created armies of terrorists, feeding Al Qaeda’s air supply, he fanned the flames. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were gasoline on his fire.

At the least Gilbride might define his terms within the title: What is he considering a “loss” in the war on terror?
 Would giving Iraq more craters than the moon be a loss, or withdrawing? When America lost in Vietnam, did America cease to 
exist? Did disgruntled Vietnamese bomb America in retaliation for the millions of deaths in their country? No.

According to him, these ‘bogeyman’ Muslims don’t respect Western freedoms. That’s odd, aren’t these freedoms the Bush administration is curtailing? All civil liberties progress since Martin Luther King has been wiped out in Bush’s war; there’s talk of resurrecting COINTELPRO, racial profiling is now endorsed by some politicians, people are calling for segregating Muslims at airports, 39% of US citizens want Muslims to carry special ID. It’s an odd irony of life that Muslims strongly endorsed Bush in the 2000 election; he promised an end to Clinton’s “secret evidence” laws and championed Arab-American rights.

Here I am, having to rebut an absurd argument that pretends the West is under siege from the Islamic world. This is especially aggravating when Mr. Gilbride presumes to tell us that we have not faced a threat so great since Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military and largest economy arguably of its time, at least the most sophisticated. Nazi Germany was able to conquer most of Europe and drive deep into Russia in the span of a few years; the United States could never have defeated Nazi Germany alone. Now we’re supposed to imagine that countries like Iran or Pakistan represent a similar threat to the world. Are we using drugs? The total annual military budget of Pakistan, the only nuclear power in the Muslim world — is about the same as the Harvard University’s endowment ($20-30 billion). The US spends over $124 Billion on its Navy alone. In other words, they are simply too weak to cause serious or long-term harm to the West.

If the West “loses” the war on terror and we all wind up in a dictatorship, it will be by our own actions, not by others. Foreign forces don’t create police states, it’s the populations within that give up freedoms and arrive at that outcome.

In the words of Russ Feingold, when he was one of the few who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001, “Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.”

In the play, “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More questions Mr. Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. “What would you do?” More asks, “Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper affirms, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.” More replies: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

I don’t like the idea that Mr. Gilbride is peddling; that Muslims are less than full members of our America. Last I checked, over half of
 all Muslims live in democracies, Muslim Americans are better educated than the national average, and there are thousands of American Muslims serving in 
Iraq. It was just as wrong when Hitler singled out Jews in this manner, and it’s just as wrong to do the same to Muslims today.

–Sulayman F.

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I watched The Road to Guantanamo. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do so. (Trailer) Right now. I mean it. Heck, I’ll even pay your cab fare and the price of a ticket.

The film centers on the “Tipton Three,” three British citizens of Pakistani descent who were arrested in Afghanistan, sent to Guantanamo, and later released. The actual three are in the film, narrating and remembering what happened, although much of the film is a dramatization with their narration of it. It starts off with them in Pakistan to attend a wedding in 2001, and told they could make a difference if they brought supplies into Afghanistan. Of course, they get stuck because of the war and wind up in US custody. They were sent to Guantanamo and tortured into admitting they were physically with Bin Laden years earlier, until the UK passport check proved they hadn’t even left the UK until a year after the video. The film is graphic in its recreation, and it will leave you horrified at the abuse: to me it was like reading Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, or watching a movie about the Holocaust. The Northern Alliance rounded up and killed lots of prisoners, and that’s mentioned. We all left the film feeling a bit shaken.

Interesting tidbit: After the film, I saw Shafiq Rasul, one of the main characters, on CNN. Wolf Blitzer’s first question was, What do you think of Osama Bin Laden? Shafiq was trying to say, I’m not a fan but what difference does that make? Wolf Blitzer dropped the ball on this interview, the interview was very unproductive and I didn’t learn anything new about Gitmo, which Thomas Friedman called “the anti-Statue of Liberty.”

I think this film highlighted some of the nasty stuff that went on in Guantanmo and seems to be building here. CAIR had an alert about some idiots fairly south who decided to buy a Quran, shoot it full of bullets, and throw it at a mosque, videotaping it and posting it online. It reminds me of the jerk who purposely threw the detainee’s Qurans into the waste area of the camp. Multiple times.

I disagree with Umar Lee on how innocent they were. Yeah, it was a foolish idea, and they said on CNN they regretted it. However, their treatment and the sheer barbarity of the entire thing made me walk out of the theater ashamed to be American. If you want to criticize that, go see it first.

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Back in 2002, the Daily Show did a really funny piece about a Conservative group trying to block positive education on the Quran. It’s a two parter (sorry, hadithuna chokes on the embedded players)

The Daily Show: “Allah Young Dudes” 2002

Terror UNC | The Daily Show

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My God, I think I lost most of my faith in Americans.

Oh, and the rest of the episode is a free video podcast on The Chasers website

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I’m a big fan of Khalil Bendib’s political cartoons.

I stumbled upon this cartoonist, Tales of Iraq War, by Latuff

Oh don’t forget Get Your War On

I have another but I lost the source: Sadly, this is how a lot of Muslims view American policy today:

Source unknown

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I’ve noticed a few of my friends are grappling with the issue of democracy, either extolling it or pointing out its flaws. I think the problem is that people associate different things to it, and people in the different camps will give opposing definitions. Yes, there’s not one kind of democracy.

In a representative democracy, the people elect officials who are supposed to translate the views of the public into government action. That’s oversimplifying, but the point is that those in office represent and have to act on the public’s interests. A problem is that the public is not informed on many matters or popular things aren’t always right. In such cases, many political scholars argue, politicians therefore have to become leaders rather than followers. Their job as leaders is to educate public opinion and lead the people towards what is right. According to my textbook, “democratic leadership occurs either when politicians move an existing distribution of opinion toward their stated position OR when they create a distribution of opinion following their stated opinion.”

Edmund Burke made two labels for this. In a “trustee” democracy, politicians use their own values and judgments when they make choices and hope they can lead the voters into agreeing or change (even expand) their minds. In a “delegate” democracy, politicians are required to obey the majority (regardless of whether the politician personally agrees) and translate the public’s wishes into government policy. In a “trustee” democracy, leadership is what people want, and in a “delegate” democracy, people want followership.

Both of these ideas aren’t that compatible, but most citizens want a balance; otherwise the entire system breaks down. This makes public opinion surveys important, as well as a population that’s informed through good media etc. Without it, you have a politician who thinks he knows what everyone thinks, and does something that proves to be either unpopular or very wrong-minded. That is known as “leadership by mistake” or if he miraculously comes out on top, “leadership by accident.”

If the public feels strongly about something and it’s obvious to the politician in polls etc. , he or she will have no choice but to follow the majority. If the people don’t care strongly either way, then a political leader can rally the people to their side. This is called “Wilsonian leadership” in reference to President Wilson traveling the country to rally America into joining the League of Nations. If the public feels strongly on an issue and the President tries to get the majority to change their mind and agree with him, it’s “Periclean leadership.” This was referring to the Greek hero Pericles who rallied the people to his side in an epic struggle against the Spartans.

So which definition prevails? Do politicians line their positions up with what the majority wants (are they followers) or do they try to shift public opinion towards what they campaign on (as leaders)? Howard Dean once remarked that he felt a President should follow what the people want, but in some cases he should lead the people when necessary. It’s an important balance that leaders will always be cursed by; either they are spineless and going with the popular whims, or mavericks who don’t care about majority opinion.

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Plenty of Americans wonder why the US is so disliked internationally. Although many have a sense of why since the Iraq war began, people are quite oblivious as to what the US (and other Western countries) were doing before it. Plenty of knowledgeable people in America point out US failures like the Israeli-Palestinian struggle or quagmires like Vietnam. Those may be the most well-known examples, but there’s a list of countries, each with a strong case to make on how the US shares the blame for their troubles today. You could make a list, Iran, Afghanistan, Chile, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, etc.

Before the US was criticized for supporting the coup against the democratically elected Palestinian government, people were already saying the US deliberately overthrew democracies and installed dictatorships. Overthrowing the democracy of Iran in the 1950’s was one such case. One other country that seems to escape the attention of Americans and most Westerners is Algeria, Africa’s second largest country. Algeria; an Arab country that borders the Mediterranean Sea, Morocco, and Libya, was ruled by the French for over 100 years. This wasn’t just colonialism, the French considered it a part of France itself. In 1954, independence movements in the country erupted into warfare that lasted for eight years and resulted in over a million deaths. It was a brutal war against the French, which today mirrors that of the struggle in Iraq. (Even the US military privately admits the similarities, they have screened the film The Battle of Algiers at the Pentagon for top level leaders.)

In 1989, the military government in Algeria announced that it would hold free elections for parliament. A new constitution was set forth, calling for a multi-party system. In 1990, the first local and regional elections were held, where the surprise winners were the Islamic Salvation Front (which is known in French as FIS), winning with 54% of the votes cast. The party grew stronger as they announced their opposition to the then-current Gulf War, Desert Storm. They organized huge demonstrations to protest the government’s gerrymandering, which only ended when the government promised fair parliamentary elections. The government grew nervous, arresting the leaders, but the party itself remained legal and on the ballot.

Full National elections followed, when on December 26, 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front won 48% of all the votes across the country, winning 188 of the 231 seats offered in the first round. It was amazing, unanticipated, and clearly heading for an overwhelming majority. An FIS-dominated government seemed inevitable.

The largely secular military government in power became extremely nervous. This was clearly something they weren’t counting on. The problem, they saw, was that the Algerian constitution at the time allowed parliament to amend the constitution by a simple majority vote, which would then be approved in a popular referendum. This is unlike the US; the states or provinces in Algeria don’t ratify the Constitution, instead the population votes on it. The Algerian military could plainly see that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) would soon get the majority once the rest of the elections took place, and could change the constitution at will.

This is what really made the military officers sweat, so to speak. The way they saw it; the FIS party could change the constitution so that there could never be another vote, if the FIS wanted. They could make Islamic law the rule of the land. They could have the Algerian military leaders executed if they liked (as it had happened in Iran during the revolution). Nobody knows if that would have happened, but the military wasn’t worried about their intentions, but what the FIS could do.

The military staged a coup, taking control of the country, forcing the President out, and canceling the election results on January, 11, 1992. They banned the FIS party, claiming the party was anti-democracy (but somehow fairly elected by the majority), and instituted the High State Council to rule over the country. This enraged the FIS, Islamic groups, and the majority who voted in favor of the FIS.

How did the USA react? What about France, the country who had colonized Algeria and still had interests in it? Did they send in peacekeepers like in Haiti? Did they put pressure on the current government to step aside and allow the democracy to take place? Did they even do as little as to condemn the Algerian military in a useless speech? No! In fact, France supported the coup. The US issued a formal but low-key statement on January 13 condemning the coup, but retracted it 24 hours later and offered support. Both countries opposed the FIS, which was anti-colonialist and thus anti-French and anti-American. As the US Assistant Secretary of State, Edward Djerejian said when he showed his support, he thought the FIS would cancel democracy (after getting fairly elected by the people) by making it “one man, one vote, one time.”

At the time, the Arab world hadn’t seen a populist democratic process like Algeria’s in quite a while. But still, the US willingly accepted the coup and the cancellation of that process. The FIS, which was a democratically elected Islamist government, was considered unacceptable in Washington. Why? Because the FIS was openly hostile to American dominance. The democratically elected FIS-led government was extremely unlikely to allow the US to use Algeria as part of its attempts to create a hegemony, but the army government was much more willing to cooperate with America’s ambitions.

So many FIS members were arrested- the government said 5,000 but the FIS said 30,000- that the jails had no room to hold them all. The government had to set up concentration camps in the Sahara desert where there were many reports of widespread torture. Men with beards became afraid to leave their houses lest the government arrest them as being “Islamist.” The government cracked down on protests, suspended many rights, and Amnesty International reported that the government frequently tortured many people. The army took power, democracy was ended, and the popular FIS was scattered.

For those FIS people who remained free after the initial mass arrests, many took it as a declaration of war. The FIS developed a sizable guerrilla army and fought, gaining back control of some territory. Barely a week after the coup, fighting began. They initially targeted the army and police, but some guerrillas launched a bloody campaign against any and all supporters of the military regime. Some Algerians turned to violence and terrorism, including the government, plunging Algeria into chaos. Factions fought one another, human rights abuses were committed, and the people suffered. The government forces routinely arrested, detained, and killed Algerian citizens accused of being members or supporters of the banned groups. Amnesty International reported in 1997 “Arbitrary and secret detention, unfair trial, torture and ill-treatment, including rape, ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial executions, deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, hostage-taking and death threats have become routine.”

The government claimed that many of the massacres of civilians were done by “Islamic terrorists,” yet many took place “within shouting distance of army barracks” and lasted for hours with no government intervention. The majority of these massacres took place in the capital, Algiers, in one of the most militarized areas of the country, yet the government didn’t stop the killing nor stop them from leaving. The most telling fact is that the vast majority of the victims weren’t non-Muslims; whom one would think “Islamic terrorists” would obviously target. Instead, the victims were almost entirely poor villagers; the Muslim people who voted overwhelmingly for the Islamic party. Rarely were officials or pro-army supporters targeted, both enemies of the FIS. Why would the FIS massacre its own supporters, its own popular base, rather than its real enemies?

According to the UK newspaper The Independent, one 23-year old soldier reported how some of the army soldiers wore fake beards and went into town to kill civilians, acting as “Islamic terrorists.” The government would “respond” to such attacks by arresting dissidents and using torture to get confessions. Several doctors of hospitals and morgues reported that “the dead from those who commit these horrible crimes were not circumcised.” Circumcision is the norm for all Algerian Muslim males, which implies that the perpetrators weren’t Muslim, despite what the military government insisted for years.

The war pitted secular and religious forces against one another, killing well over 100,000 persons since 1991, through constant village massacres and urban assassinations lasting more than a decade. The Algerian Civil war became a terrible internecine conflict. Only today, over a decade later, are the people trying to reconcile their differences and put an end to the ongoing bloodshed. It left Algeria in tatters, despite its promising economic future that was in store for them.

The US, despite all its public rhetoric on promoting democracy, didn’t help support democracy when Algeria came under the coup. They just did the same as they did in Venezuela when President Chavez was overthrown; they supported the undemocratic people doing the coup while the White House praised the dictators for helping to bring “democracy” to the country. The informed know that it’s actually the opposite, democracy is subverted by a dictator more friendly to the US, and thus green-lighted by US officials.

Actually, it’s far more similar to when Salvador Allende, a Marxist, won the 1970 Presidential election democratically in Chile. Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State (who later was accused of war crimes), said “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.” Apparently democracy, the freedom of choosing your government, only matters to the US if you make a choice they like, otherwise you are “irresponsible.” As he also famously said, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” As the US saw Communism as a threat to the world, they decided to take power out of the hands of the Chilean people. Kissinger’s CIA group sent a message to its operatives; “It is firm and continuing policy that [the democratically elected government of] Allende be overthrown by a coup…” The Chileans suffered when the US-staged coup succeeded, bringing Dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, who then ordered the murder of over 5,000 Chileans. Chile is still recovering from the effects.

Why did the US government support the coup in Algeria? Their stated official reason was because they feared the Islamic party would get too much of a majority and thus control the government completely and reshape it. That’s absurd when you think of it; the Republican Party in America controlled the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and numerous state governments and legislatures with sizeable single-party majorities. Does that mean America was at risk of losing their democracy, and thus should be invaded and overthrown? Some argue that the Republicans don’t have the intention to get rid of democracy, but the GOP threatened the “nuclear option” in 2005. That plan was to use their majority votes in the Senate to remove the minority rights of Senators, imposing a “tyranny of the majority” against minority parties in the government. Did the FIS of Algeria ever threaten anything like that? Critics claim that some of the FIS leaders and preachers who backed the party were anti-democracy in their speeches, but they followed the Constitution and were voted for anyway by the people, winning the election fair and square.

As a Canadian official said, “the West supported the coup in Algeria in an effort to prevent Islamic fundamentalists coming to power through the ballot box.” This is a clear case of hypocrisy. The West claims to consider democracy its best form of government available, and works to promote it in their speeches and economic policies. However, when a democracy like Algeria allows a democracy that the West doesn’t agree with, they support its overthrow and even work to keep the dictators in power. Europe’s access to Algerian oil would have been jeopardized by an Islamic government, simply because a genuine Islamic government would use its resources for its population instead of allowing them to be owned by Western companies. Part of the Western support for the new Algerian (military-controlled) regime stems from its promises to open the country to foreign trade and liberalize its economy.

Algeria’s oil exports are over $33 Billion alone. It’s a member of OPEC and 90% of it goes to Europe; a pipeline is in the works. For a steady source of oil and Natural gas, of course a country like France is willing to turn a blind eye to the government’s human rights violations. France even contributed, quietly giving the Algerian army helicopters, aerial surveillance and night-vision equipment, and French spy agencies monitored all Algerian radio round-the-clock to help the Algerian military track the FIS. Considering the Algerian military was a corrupt and torturing tyranny, it makes the “pro-democracy” France all the more hypocritical. The UK gave nearly £5 Million in military equipment, knowing full well the atrocities the military committed. The US did similiarly, training the Algerian military and getting the use of Algerian ports in exchange. The fact that the Algerian military was implicated in the deaths of thousands seems not to have bothered anyone in the US government at all. The EU provided around $65 Million, provided the Algerian generals allowed Western involvement supervised by the IMF and World Bank.

Rather than pressuring the Algerian government to end the war, the West did the opposite. By giving weapons to the tyrannical regime, they are directly supporting the mass killing with the excuse of fighting “Islamic terrorists.” Of course it’s not mentioned that Algeria has oil or many companies want to get access to Algeria’s Billions of dollars in resources. Everyone wants a piece of Algeria; France wants to extend its culture and language to Algeria and get its oil, the US wants the Arab Maghreb markets to sell in. British journalist John Sweeney put it best when he called the 100,000 deaths in Algeria as “Europe’s gas bill.”

Of course, not only was oil a factor, but also the West’s distrust of Islam. If the FIS won, it would have put dedicated Muslims in power of a country nearby Europe. The West would rather have a corrupt, brutal junta in power than a cleaner and popular FIS which is not subservient to the West. When it comes to its interests, the West is quite prepared to abandon its self-proclaimed ‘principles’. It demands democracy in a country like Burma and criticizes the dictatorship for not respecting the wishes of the people, but backs the dictators in Algeria. This can be proven by hundreds of American engineers working on the oil areas in Algeria, and companies like Exxon, Mobil, and BP exploring the country for more oil fields, while the Algerian people’s income steadily decreases every year.

The US and West really showed its hypocrisy and betrayed its values when it came to Algeria, as well as elsewhere. Many hearts and minds were lost in the 1990’s by this, let alone after the 2003 Iraq war or toppling the popular Somali government. Supporters argue that the US acted pragmatically, but in doing so the US government lost all moral authority it sanctimoniously claims. The West proved that human rights are irrelevant or only selectively enforced when it comes to foreign policy, as a rich country like Algeria is too good to pass up in economic imperialism.

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