The dual policy of the West in the Middle East and Ukraine / the contaminated factions

According to IRNA, the dual standards of the West regarding the war in Ukraine and the Middle East can be seen in the reception of refugees, reactions to the war under the titles of occupation, terrorism, defense, resistance, military aid, humanitarian aid and sanctions, and their treatment of refugees and Refugees from Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries have always been strict and violent to repatriate them to another country or homeland.

The defense of the people of the Middle East, including the Palestinians, against the aggressors and the occupiers has always been called terrorism, but in the Ukraine war it is referred to as the resistance and the people resisting the aggression.

The Associated Press reports that many people in the crisis-stricken region (Middle East) see the Russia-Ukraine war as a symbol of the West’s double standards in international conflict. Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki criticized the international community’s dual approach during a security meeting in Turkey. . “It is a strange hypocrisy.”

For many, the United States war against Iraq is an illegal military invasion and an occupation of an independent country by another country. However, those who fought against the US military were labeled terrorists, and Iraqi refugees in the West were mostly repatriated and viewed as potential security threats.

Euronews reports that US President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday (March 30th) that Washington was investigating war crimes committed by the Russian military in Ukraine and would work with prosecutors and other judicial officials. The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and opposes any investigation into the war crimes committed by its ally Israel.

On the other hand, when Russia entered the Syrian civil war in 2015 to help the government of Bashar al-Assad, despite the dissatisfaction of Western countries, practically no one did anything against this military intervention. Many displaced Syrian refugees on their way to Europe either drowned, or were described as a “cultural threat to the West” and a significant number were returned to Turkey.

The Yemeni war between the Houthis backed by Iran and Saudi Arabia and its allies has left more than 300,000 dead and 13 million at risk of starvation. However, even the numerous warnings about starvation and child death from malnutrition have not attracted the attention of the international community.

“It is understandable that many in the Middle East see this as a double standard by the West,” said Bruce Riddle, a former CIA and National Security Council staffer who now teaches at the Brookings Institution. The United States and Britain supported Saudi Arabia during the seven-year war in Yemen; The war that has marked the greatest human tragedy of recent decades.

The Palestinians living in the occupied territories have been seeking an independent state for six decades. Millions live under martial law and see no “light at the end of the tunnel.” In such circumstances, the United States, Israel and Germany have enacted and enacted laws banning the “boycott / boycott of Israeli products” movement. The rules come as McDonald, ExxonMobil and Apple are banned from operating in Russia.

On social media, Ukrainian citizens holding Molotov cocktails and carrying machine guns are hailed on social media as heroes of resistance against the occupying army. In this world, when Palestinians and Iraqis do the same thing, they become terrorists and are legitimate targets.

Sheikh Jaber Rubaie is 51 years old. “We resisted the occupiers,” said a member of the Iraqi armed insurgency against the US military from 2003 to 2011. Even when the whole world, including the Ukrainians, supported the Americans and were part of their coalition. That’s why we were not proud of that [مانند اوکراینی‌ها] Let’s call for patriotic resistance. Instead of giving such a title, everyone emphasized the religious aspect of our uprising. “It is clear that there is a double standard and we are less than human.”

Abdul Amir Khalid, a 41-year-old driver from Baghdad, said there was no difference between the resistance in Iraq and Ukraine: “If there is a difference, our resistance is more legitimate. “Americans who traveled thousands of kilometers to attack our country, but Russia attacked its neighbor in the name of countering a threat.”

Naturally, there are differences between the Ukraine war, as an aggression against one UN member state by another, and the many conflicts in the Middle East; Many of the conflicts in the region are civil wars, and in most of them traces of extremist Islamists can be seen.

“The conflicts in the Middle East are largely complex,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former adviser to Democratic and Republican governments in the United States. “There is no moral game.” “Ukraine’s war is unique in its transparency of the moral issue,” he said, referring to Russia’s military strike on the neighboring country. Russia launched a devastating war on the neighboring country. Perhaps the most similar case in the Middle East was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. “The United States then withdrew Iraqi troops from Kuwait by mobilizing an international coalition, including with the participation of Arab countries.”

Despite likening the first Gulf War to a Ukraine-Russia war, Miller acknowledged the imbalance in US foreign policy: “Washington’s approach is full of anomalies, inconsistencies, contradictions and, of course, hypocrisy.”

The US occupation of Afghanistan was a response to the 9/11 attacks and was justified by Osama bin Laden’s stay in Afghanistan. The next step in the war against the assassination of the administration of George W. Bush was the invasion of Iraq under the false pretext of “weapons of mass destruction.” However, during the Iraq war, the United States overthrew a notorious dictator with a long history of crimes against humanity and violations of international law.

However, the Iraq war left many citizens of the country and the Arab world with a catastrophe of ethnic strife and bloody battles.

Elliott Abrams, a senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a White House adviser at the time of the invasion of Iraq, said there were many differences between Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian occupation and armed insurgency against US troops in Iraq. “They were Islamists (ISIS) and not freedom fighters.”

ISIL was formally founded in 2012, nine years after the US-led invasion of Iraq during the Syrian civil war and the remnants of terrorist groups in Iraq.

In its March 1 editorial, the Jerusalem Post described the comparison between Israel’s war with the Palestinians and Russia’s war with Ukraine as “very complex and strange.”

“There is an exception and it comes from a colonial approach,” said Ins Abdul Razzaq, a board member of the Palestinian Institute for Public Diplomacy. “It is more common for us to have our families killed and buried than for Westerners.”