Why are they targeting us…?

By: Ali Askouri

In the year 2001, after the September attacks, former US President George W. Bush went out to the world and asked the following question: Why are they targeting us? Then he volunteered to answer it: “They are targeting America because it is the oasis of democracy and the land of freedoms and dreams, etc…” Or so… That is an answer that contains a lot of falsification of facts, fallacy of reality, and arrogance known to the oligarchs who rule America and control the world. Despite this, the truth remains. This understanding is what the ruling elite in America believes, whose security was undermined by a group of terrorists and which aroused their anger, so they rose up with their fleets and battleships and continued to pursue them around the world.
The other global pole, Russia, sees that it is being targeted and that the West is lurking around it by trying to include Ukraine in NATO, etc…. Iran sees that it is being targeted, as well as Iraq, China, Israel, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the two Koreas, etc.. until the world began as if everyone was targeting everyone..!
If we understand that targeting among major countries results from competition for influence, hegemony and control, how do we understand the targeting of our country?
Our understanding of the motives for targeting our country and finding the correct answer to it is what will put an end to the targeting..! As specialists know, there is no way to treat a disease before diagnosing it and determining its nature. The more accurate and correct the diagnosis is, the easier and clearer the opportunity to determine the nature of the disease, and thus the doctor will be able to develop an effective treatment for the disease..! This is an issue that doctors fully understand and represents a cornerstone of their profession. There is no prescription of medicine without diagnosis. This is also true in politics.
Since independence, our country has fallen into a cycle of international targeting for the sake of influence, control, and resources. Unfortunately, our successive leaderships have continued to deal with the targeting issue as if they were escaping it, or tending to simplify it, or that they alone are capable of repelling it, or sometimes they naively deal with the belief that the targeting does not exist, or that it is temporary and will fade away or go away with the wind and we will be able to continue our lives as we want, eating (Al-qarasah, porridge, and soup or tukshu) and reciting the poems of the Hambata and the majesty of the Islamists or the romantic slogans of the left, and we believe that this is enough to repel the targeting of our country, or that our shouting is sufficient to deter those attacking us.
Some people believe that as long as we are a (sovereign) state, the world should leave us alone to do whatever we want in the spot on the land we live on..! This naive understanding is what brought us disasters, our society was displaced around the earth, and a third of our country’s lands were gone, and the rope on the jars was gone.
The dismantling of states or empires is not something new in human history. In the last century, four empires were dismantled: the English, French, Ottoman, and Russian. Yugoslavia was dismantled and its power disappeared and became several states. The state of East Timor was recognized and left Indonesia. Eritrea left Ethiopia, South Sudan left Sudan, and the Republic of East Timor left. Somaliland was separated from the State of Somalia. Somalia was unable to re-annex it, nor was the world recognized it. Thus, it became an anomalous situation in the geography of the world.
We mentioned this to remind people that the political struggle over resources and influence is an essential part of the realities of human life, and that we are part of human society and live on a land that has many resources, especially water and agricultural land, and that the world needs those resources. We – despite the lengthy contracts – failed to exploit it with our own capabilities, and we did not allow the world to participate with us in developing all of this, and we expect the world to continue looking at us and waiting while we are in endless quarrels, chaos, and wars!
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau says that the problem of conflict over resources began after the discovery of agriculture and crop production, and that the conflict over land specifically began when one of the people fenced a land, stood on it, and declared that it was his property alone and not the others. Thus, the fencing and monopoly of the land began humans, then man discovered that he needed to defend the area of ​​the land that he declared to be his property, so he brought his children, then his relatives, then the tribe, etc., and the idea of ​​defenders of the land arose and developed over the eras until states and empires were formed and had armies to defend them and attack other states or societies to seize what they held. Then.
This war proved what is necessarily known in human conflict, that human conflict in its essence is a struggle for survival, and continuity depend entirely on obtaining resources.
Anyone who believes that the world will leave us alone to do what we want is wrong when we own vast agricultural lands, water, gold, etc. The naive belief that the world will leave us alone and that we can do whatever we want in the geographical space in which we live is what brought us to the devastation and displacement we are in, and our situation does not need to be questioned.
This situation remains the fundamental question that each of us must ask himself: Why are we displaced in the land and our country has enough to support us – perhaps with a lot of luxury – and the livelihood of many other peoples?
The answer to me is simple… which is that we are a people who do not have a vision for developing their country and do not know what the world’s role is in that vision (which we have not yet agreed upon)! As long as we continue to hesitate left and right or revolve in a vicious circle, the world will find itself forced to set a vision for us and impose it on us (willy – nilly). There are so many Janjaweed and mercenaries in the world, and so many war financiers. The greedy people are many, the competition is intense, and the victim is our people.
What most tempts war financiers to pay and finance is that any amounts they lose will be able to be compensated from our country’s resources as long as their control is over, as the resources are abundant enough to compensate for any amount of losses. Therefore they will always be ready to pay and finance. If we eliminate the Janjaweed today, they will not be able to hire another Janjaweed, and so there is something in our country that tempts them to do so.
This accursed war must have awakened us from our slumber, sleep, or prolonged slumber, and we must pay attention and focus on our mistakes and search for the defect in our society and in our state and ask ourselves why are we without friends..?
In order to stop our society and our country from all this evil and blood, we must put aside emotion and enthusiasm and use our minds, starting from the facts of reality and the conditions of our society and our country.
In order for this war, and perhaps the future ones, to stop, we must reach a practical formula that enables us to coexist with the world… The reality of the situation is that we are not in a position that enables us to impose our will or our choices on the world…! The war has displaced our society and undermined its cohesion. Perhaps its strength has been lost and we have lost it. Were it not for the steadfastness of the armed forces and the mobilized, we would have lost the state as well. See, have we learned the lesson?
Now we can summarize this long article in one line: for nearly seventy years, even though we are a country rich in resources, we have not been useful to ourselves or to the world, but rather we have been dependent on the world, begging for our sustenance, and this is a difficult situation to defend.
Of course, there is what we wish for our country and our society, but we cannot realize it or achieve it currently with a single blow, and there is what we hate, but we cannot avoid it, and some evils are lesser than others, as they say.
May God have mercy on Abu Al-Tayeb:
It is the distress of the world that one must see
There is a need to be friends with an enemy
The fatal mistake made by the right, the left, and everything in between is their old belief that the Sudanese people can fight imperialism alone…! This understanding, on both the left and the right, has burdened the simple people of our society beyond what they can bear, until they have become plundered, homeless, and miserable.
The wise man is the one who learns from others, and in history, both distant and recent, has lessons to those who want to learn!
This land is ours
May 3, 2024