MOSCOW, June 16. /ITAR-TASS/. The United States’ determination to export democracy (the way it is understood in Washington) has brought about major destabilizations in many regions around the world and sanguinary conflicts, Russia’s leading experts have told ITAR-TASS, when asked about the flare-ups of armed confrontations in the east of Ukraine and in Iraq.
The civil war in Ukraine began last spring after Washington publicly threw its weight behind oppositional politicians, who eventually seized power in the country by force. The on-going upsurge in clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is a direct consequence of the armed invasion of that country by the United States and its allies in 2003.
Chaos in Afghanistan, in Libya and in Syria, where hostilities have continued unabated for three years now with no chances of ever coming to an end has forced even Western politicians and observers to acknowledge failures of their own foreign policy. US ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the French radio station France Inter her vote in support of the Iraq war in 2003 was a mistake. Emma Sky, a British researcher who worked for Iraq’s interim administration after the US-led invasion in 2003 said that inflated self-confidence played a nasty trick on the Americans and the Brits. They had thought they would be able to establish democracy and that would settle all problems, Sky said. It happened otherwise.
Iraq these days is a scene of fierce fighting between extremists and government troops. Islamists have been putting under control ever more communities. The past week of clashes in the north of the country left several hundred people dead and the number of those injured is close to one thousand.
“The Islamic militants may have far more serious intentions - they may launch an assault on Baghdad from several sides, which would bring about irreversible consequences. Iraq may fall apart into several fragments, the president of the Middle East Institute, Yevgeny Satanovsky told ITAR-TASS.
“The invasion of Iraq was not just one wrong decision by the United States. Even Hillary Clinton has recognized that. In focus is Washington’s fundamentally disastrous foreign policy, and not just in the Middle East, but also in former Yugoslavia, and today’s Ukraine. The White House’s foreign policy is pushing the whole world into the abyss. Afghanistan and Libya area already there and Iraq may follow soon,” Satanovsky warns.
“The United States lacks a strategic vision of foreign policy prospects. The White House is unable to understand even one simple thing — stay out of a conflict if you are unable to control its development,” he remarked.
“The United States in 2003 ruined the state of Iraq, and killed its leader Saddam Hussein, who largely kept that state afloat. On the ruins of the destroyed country the Americans began to build a new political system, which proved utterly unbalanced. The United States-imposed constitution of Iraq provided much fuel for religious and ethnic conflicts that are now tearing the country apart,” an oriental expert, president of the Religion and Politics Institute, Alexander Ignatenko, told ITAR-TASS in an interview.
The inter-confessional situation in Iraq has been getting from bad to worse over the past ten years or more to bring into being the Sunni movement called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Slowly but surely that movement, originally a military-political group, started transforming itself into a quasi-state in the territory of Syria and Iraq. The ISIL’s expansionist designs have caused Islamic emirates to crop up in the territories of the two neighboring states. In fact, the United States triggered destabilization and decay processes in many Middle Eastern states that had had no such problems before the United States’ intervention,” the expert said.
“Iraq is obviously falling into three parts: Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the centre and Shiite in the south. On the borders of these three zones there are many communities with mixed population. One should not rule out ethnic cleansing, like punitive operations by the Sunnis, with the mass shooting of Shiites lying in ditches and the uploading of such scenes of violence to the Internet,” Alexander Igantenko warns.
“The ISIL is out to seize Baghdad, with its Shiite community of two million. Should that happen, not just ethnic cleansing, but massive genocide will follow. And the blame for that must be placed squarely on the United States,” Ignatenko said.
Eleven years after the US invasion of Iraq the United States’ aims in the Middle East have become pretty clear. Number one is the establishment of control of hydrocarbons. In a sense, it has been achieved already. Number two is to select a country that would serve as a battle field of all against all in the interests of the US military-industrial complex — the provider of weapons for all warring parties,” Ignatenko concluded.
“To summarize the situation in Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria one cannot but say that the failures of US foreign policy are obvious. After the end of the Cold War the United States’ foreign policy became dependent on the dogma postulating democracy is important and omnipotent and the more democratic states there are around the world, the better,” the chief of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council, Fyodor Lukyanov, has told ITAR-TASS.
“Over and over again we see the White House attempts to plant its most-favored variety of democracy in different countries around the world yield the same result. I would not compare the situation in Iraq, where the United States sent a force of invasion, and Ukraine, where Washington supported certain political forces. The result is the same, though. Bloodshed, devastation and humanitarian disaster,” Lukyanov said.
“The United States’ prevailing ideological paradigm of imposing universal modes of existence upon other countries has outlived itself. It has exacerbated the security situation in the world. The United States’ illusion it can resolve all geopolitical problems on its own has fallen through with a crash,” Lukyanov said.
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