Whoever thought that 'terrorising' the people of one's own country through dictatorial methods is equivalent to terrorism, as generally understood, is learning a new lesson in Iraq. With the failure to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass-destruction even months after the despot's exit, the US is finding that to the average Iraqi, it is not a 'liberator' but an 'occupier'.
The discussion on global terrorism and terrorizing one's own people assumes relevance in the light of increased American hints at marketing 'democracy' as a panacea for 'all ills and evils' in and of West Asian sheikhdoms. Deflection is as much a game in strategy as stone-walling is to democracy.
Saddam Hussein did help divert global and American domestic attention as the fountainhead of all evil, when Osama bin-Laden went missing. True, Saddam Hussein was among the worst dictators of our times, post-Amin, but Anglo-American experiments with the creation of Israel in Palestine land, should have taught them better.
West Asia, for instance, is different from Africa. In the latter case, the locals did celebrate the overthrow and exile of Idi Amin by the 'Frontline States' in Uganda's neighbourhood. The last time it happened in West Asia, it was when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini exiled the Pehlvis, the longest surviving ruling dynasty that the world had known.
Parlour theories that democracy is a panacea are riddled with examples like Pakistan, where military dictators have had their rule interrupted occasionally by a failed semblance of democracy, now and again.. Elsewhere, as in the Iran of Shah Reza Pehlvi or the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos, 'democratisation' came about despite the US. They were not certainly in the way the West has known democracies and republics to be.
It does not stop there. 'Democratisation' of Pakistan did not lead to Pakistan ending State-sponsored terrorism. If anything, democracy has been seen as a threat to the continuance of State sponsorship of terrorism by Pakistan, and the latter has won thus far. If the US blessings helped Pakistan continue with anti-India terrorism, it was the American need to teach Iran a lesson after the 'embassy hostage crisis' that emboldened Saddam Hussein to gas the Kurds the way he did. The shoe, if anything, is on the other foot, and there could be more Irans and Iraqs in West Asia, if the American strategy has had its way.
If the US is a homogenous community, with democracy and capitalism as its existential values appropriate to be touted elsewhere, it is not because of what it is. Instead, it is because what it is not. History, ethnicity, culture and traditions are as much alien to the US as it is known as 'democratic values' and liberal views are to West Asian sheikdoms as they are.
By confusing 'terrorising' of the people with 'terrorism' of the extremist-fundamentalist kind, the world runs the danger of a new attribute to the 'civilisational clash' that has been absent. 'Western values' are sure to be confused with 'western faith'. In the name of introducing 'western democratic values' in nations and societies that have no use for them to get counted otherwise - the oil-wealth would see them through -- the Anglo-American combine run the risk of being dubbed revivalists of 'western imperialism'. It's an identity that could upturn the global war on terrorism on its head, and paint the perpetrators as the victims, and vice versa. It's too early to predict who's who and what's what in the evolving global situation, where Afghanistan and Iraq have the tendency to stir up regional and sub-regional identities that were only in the minds of the western academic-strategic community, thus far. Not any more.
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