Ali Mussawi, a media advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, confirmed the deal, without giving further details about the delivery date. Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, proudly disclosed that $1.4 billion has already been transferred as a partial payment. This comes at a time when thousands of Iraqi children are dying because of lack of adequate health facilities in the country; the country has several hundred thousand displaced people and there is no social rehabilitation plan which can effectively restore the broken structure of the society following invasion and occupation.
Yet, the new government of the “liberated Iraq” has gone on a weapon-buying spree, just like the Saudis, to whom the Obama administration was able to convince last year that they need to enter into a $60 billion defence deal, the largest US arms deal ever. The Gulf Emirates are not too far behind in their extravagance on arms and pomp.
These misplaced priorities are merely the tip of the iceberg, underneath the apparent gold rush of the few “rich” Muslim countries; there is rot of unimaginable proportions: a populace living on state handouts in a vast intellectual and spiritual wasteland, with thousands of foreign workers doing all the dirty work. These are men who are literally slaves of those who have “hired” them for monthly wages which are equal to what they spend on their afternoon snacks. There is an underworld of essay writers for Saudis graduating from universities, most of which have been set up on the fly during the last decade. There is no planning whatsoever, because institutions for planning do not exist.
Those Muslim countries where oil money is non-existent – and the majority of the 57 Muslim states fall into this category – the realities of daily life are so stark, that as soon as one starts to look at them, one is left with a sense of utter doom. As if this were not enough, there is violence, corruption of un-imaginable kind, poverty, dishonesty, insecurity and despotic rulers. All of this is now enmeshed with a sense of despair that erodes any hope of a turnaround.
This state has emerged rapidly on the ruins of a hope that one billion Muslims cherished during the decade of the 1970s when, following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, their self-appointed leaders met in Rabat and established the Organisation of Islamic Conference. That was on September 25, 1969. The leading figures behind the emergence of this dramatic movement were either Zionists agents who had been hand in glove with powers that be, or sincere but gullible men coned into a big joke at the expense of one billion believers. The OIC, as it turns out, has been the greatest scandal in the political history of the Ummah.
The OIC, better known as “O, I see”, was established to ensure that newly emerging political activism, social awakening, and above all, the life-energies of a whole generation of Muslims were completely defused.
This is not mere speculation. During the decade of the 1990s, I had the opportunity to closely observe the working of the OIC and what I saw was extremely frightening: old, mostly retired men working in makeshift offices with untrained and unprofessional staff to create a paper organisation; mid-range officials who could not even draft a one page summary sitting in decision making positions. High officials on huge salaries who spent all their time in meetings in which nothing happened but high talk; wonderful sounding resolutions leading to no action, because there was simply no institutional structure to carry out the empty decisions. An utterly vacuous organisation which had no capacity to do anything real.
In time, the OIC made itself superfluous, though it still exists on paper. In its stead, there emerged violent groups who were not conscious of their self-defeating strategy but who decided to take up arms against whoever they felt was not doing what they thought should be done. This violence achieved two extraordinary things: it buried the emerging hope of a change on the basis of ideals of Islam and it brought the Western forces back into the Muslim world.
It achieved the first by hijacking Islam and making it a violent ideology which, in turn, allowed the huge military apparatus of the state, supported by the Western powers, to crush the nascent Islamic awakening. It achieved the second by proxy as no Muslim state could have withstood the violent attack of a determined group, they rushed to buy arms and security from the Western powers, which were only too keen to reinvade the Muslim world. The amount of money now being spent on buying arms by some of the Muslim countries is merely a footnote in this sad tale.
As things stand now, there is simply no hope in the near future. The destruction of so many realms of Islamic life and ideals has led the entire Muslim world on a suicidal path: the transformation of Mecca and Madina into Las Vegas-like cities is only an outward spiritual indicator of the rot that has seeped into the Muslim world.
As these two holiest cities of Islam are a mirror of the spiritual state of the Ummah now in full grip of iron clutches of an arms mafia on the one hand and Hajj and Umrah Inc. on the other; both being multi-billion dollar industries supporting three distinct and inter-related edifices of the modern world: (i) the utterly despicable life-styles of thousands of princes and petty mullahs, who have sold their religion for dirhams and dinars; (ii) The Chinese economy through a multi-million dollar sale of made-in-China goods ranging from cheap plastic rosaries to equally cheap zamzam containers; and (iii) an arms industry situated in secret locations throughout China, Europe and America, selling weapons of mass destruction to despotic rulers.