Hypocritical voices in the West

By Kofi Akordor
Once again the United States of America has demonstrated that it has permanent interests and not permanent friends when it joined protesting Egyptians to give a final push to Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In the last days of Mubarak’s administration, he struggled desperately to hang onto the powerful shoulders of the US, its main sponsor and supporter for well over 30 years but realised rather disappointingly that when it matters most, the US looks towards the direction where it will find protection for its interests.
In 2003, the US tried and succeeded somehow to whip up international sentiment against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, describing him as a maniac who will bring the world to destruction because of his large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam was accused of being dictator who was oppressing his people and annihilating some with chemical weapons. Without any UN mandate, the US, supported by Tony Blair’s Britain and some of their appendages launched an attack on Iraq.
They succeeded in toppling Saddam, which was the main objective but failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, because there was none. They also succeeded in destroying the infrastructure of Iraq, one of the best in the Middle East and pushing backwards centuries-old civilisation if that will secure them the oilfields of Iraq and give the Jewish State of Israel the leverage it requires to maintain its dominance in the Middle East.
In a way, the invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain exposed the hypocrisy of the West regarding their international diplomacy. At the time the US was waging war in Iraq to save the people from dictatorship, it had been busy over the last three decades propping up dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt who never shared power with anybody and suppressed all forms of dissent.
Democracy was not an important commodity for the people of Egypt and Hosni Mubarak was a good leader so long as he served the US interest of policing the Middle East and giving protective cover to Israel, a protégé of the US.
Mubarak himself was a consequence of the Camp David Accord signed on September 17, 1978 between Anwar El Sadat, President of Egypt and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter of the US. This led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. The two leaders were jointly honoured subsequently with the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978.
Even though Egypt regained control over the Sinai Peninsula as part of the peace accord, Egyptians in particular and Arabs in general never forgave Sadat for the Camp David Accord, which to them was a kind of betrayal of the Arab cause. On October 6, 1981, while reviewing a military parade, shots rang out and Sadat was airlifted away in a military helicopter. The man was dead. That was how Hosni Mubarak, an air force general who became vice president six years earlier became the President of Egypt, three years after the Camp David Accord.
It did not take long for Mubarak to stir himself into the saddle and proved wrong, all those including the Americans who doubted his ability to hold onto the peace treaty with Israel and to steer the affairs of Egypt in a volatile region with its power play dynamics.
The US did not take long to embrace Mubarak and made him one their allies alongside Israel in the Middle East. With Egypt effectively compromised through the Camp David Accord, the US was left with Iraq and Iran as the only dangerous countries to contend with as far as its interest and that of Israel are concerned.
The 10-year 1979-1989 Iran-Iraq war over a piece of land was not accidental but had the remote hands of the US and its allies in it to weaken the two countries. It was not surprising that soon after that the first Gulf War – Operation Desert Storm – was fought between the US and her allies and Iraq. The 2003 invasion was to finish what President George Bush started in 1991 and which never came to any definitive conclusion.
For 30 years, Mubarak was the darling of the US and its Western allies. Then the unexpected happened. First President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, another US ally in the Arab was toppled suddenly by what started as a normal street demonstration. Then the Egyptian protests began but the Americans confident that Mubarak will deal with the situation viciously with dispatch just as he had done in the past decided to play the cautious game.
From a distance, they started urging Mubarak to avoid violence and enact reforms. One may ask, since did it occur to the West that Mubarak had been ruling for over 30 years without even a vice President? Meanwhile the West started to denounce deposed Ben Ali and all his close associates and relations. The Canadian government for example, declared its intention to arrest and depot Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother-in-law of Ben Ali when he arrived in Montreal in a private jet.
“He is not welcome, we are going to find in the context obviously of current legislation, ways to assure as quickly as possible that we might comply with the demand from the Tunisian government”, Lawrence Cannon, Canadian Foreign Minister said.
Immediately, Interpol also issued an alert for the arrest of Mr Ben Ali and six family members on request from Tunisia which accused them of property theft and illegal transfer of foreign currency, among other charges. Where was the West’s sense of fairness when Ben Ali was in power and amassing wealth at the expense of the state of Tunisia?
As the protests continued in Cairo continued and it was becoming increasingly obvious that Mubarak’s days as President were numbered, the US changed its tone and started mounting pressure on the beleaguered leader to quit.
On Thursday, February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak was expected to announce his resignation, President Barack Obama delivered a speech which virtually denounced the former Egyptian President and threw him over to the dogs.
“The Egyptian government must put forward a credible, concrete an unequivocal path toward genuine democracy and they have not yet seized that opportunity. As we said from the beginning of this unrest, the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people” Barack Obama stated.
He went on: “But the US has also been clear that we stand for a set of core principles. We believe that the universal rights of the Egyptian people must be respected and their aspirations must be met. We believe that this transition must immediately demonstrate irreversible political change and a negotiated path to democracy. To that end, we believe that the emergency law should be lifted. We believe that meaningful negotiations with the broad opposition and Egyptian civil society should address the key questions