The world is impoverished for leadership. Yes, that’s what. We don’t have great leaders who could lead a war on terror. Though we have cellphones, the latest communication gadgets, the satellites, the works, we can’t stop what happened in Paris and Beirut. We couldn’t also stop what happened in Bombay in 2008. What happened in Bombay was ignored, forgotten, by a world which said, “It can’t happen to us, here. We have better fortifications, systems.” But the reality of terror is real and it requires special leadership qualities to deal with it. Not just retaliation, but, of course through bridge building and consensus. Of what use is the UN if it can’t step in containing the damage in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere?
American forces marched into Iraq in what was one of history’s most foolish missions. There wasn’t a war, I heard, because the enemy just disintegrated before the power of a developed nation. Or, maybe, because, they didn’t trust their leader Saddam enough to try and defend him. Saddam was supposed to have a stockpile of chemical weapons. He hadn’t. He didn’t even know what chemical weapons were, poor idiot. He was caught from a bunker, sans any chemical weapons, no, not even a gun on him.
But this war gave rise to another thing: Resentment. It was resentment that arose against US and UK and other participants of the war against Iraq. There were two rather gauche leaders in this invasion: George Bush and Tony Blaire. Both were ineffective leaders, who looked their part. Tony Blaire later accepted his folly but Bush never did. They only succeeded in killing a lot of their fellow countrymen soldiers to benefit the military industrial complex. Meanwhile, the resentment boiled inside Iraq, which became a country without a government, where militias ruled. The country was virtually handed over to the priests to govern as they liked.
The result of this military adventure: ISIS. Obama came to power on the back of expectations that he would do something. He couldn’t, because, he didn’t want to put troops on the ground. He didn’t want to commit the blunder his predecessor did. This is the Obama government’s greatest failure: the lack of leadership. We let out a sigh of relief when Putin bombs IS positions in Syria because Obama and Cameroon can’t do it. That’s the state of the world today – a lack of leadership.
This gave the much-needed encouragement to the fundamentalists to further their agenda of converting the world into a place with sharia law and where every man and woman would be a Muslim. Instead of promising jobs, they promised houris in heaven and a bungalow to all martyrs.
I have lived in West Asia and mixed with its inhabitants: Saudis, Palestinians, Jordanians, etc. While submitting to religious fundamentalism, they are also rebelling against it. Under existing laws they don’t have stable families as their fathers abandon them to go and live with a prettier partner. The youth are misled by porn movies and video games and actually believe they are playing a game when they handle AK-47s. It is a region that believes in strange superstitions.
