By Syed Zafar Mehdi: West, Breeding Ground for Terrorism!

Today, the war drums are beating again,, and this time the target is Syria. "By ordering air strikes against Syria without UN Security Council support, Obama will be doing the same as Bush in 2003," writes Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat and politician. Blix was the head of United Nations monitoring, verification and inspection commission from March 2000 to June 2003, which searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none." "There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism," notes Noam Chomsky in widely-acclaimed book Western State Terrorism. "One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states." Chomsky maintains that there are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States puts its rivals to shame when it comes to perpetuating 'international terrorism'. A 2010 research undertaken by Professor Marc Sageman of University of Pennsylvaniea lends credence to what Chomsky says. The research findings establish the fact that terrorism is a product of the West. Syria, more than two years into the foreign-sponsored militancy. Let's make no bones about it, the menacing threat of nuclear powers who form the core of the NATO alliance, and keeping intimidating and threatening the non nuclear weapon states. The history of US imperialism is replete with stories of unilateral belligerent military strikes, gory massacres and socio-cultural aggression. In this no-holds-barred brinkmanship, the US and its allies have sought to impose their writ on other nations, more so on those who have refused to swear allegiance to Uncle Sam's hegemony. The blatant war-mongering and sinister desire to inflict suffering on others is best explained by these words of American writer Andre Vitchek. "West has always behaved as if it had inherited, but undefined, right to profit from the misery of the rest of the world. In many cases, the conquered nations had to give up their own culture, their religions, even their languages, and convert to our set of beliefs and values that we define as 'civilized'. Guatemala Civil War that continued from 1960 to 1996 was bitterly fought between the government of Guatemala committed worst human rights abuses and engineered genocide of Mayan population of Guatemala. Historical Clarification Commission set up under the Oslo Accords of 1994 concluded that the Guatemala military committed murder, torture and rape with the tacit support of CIA. The commission stated that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations." Noam Chomsky in his book What Uncle Sam  Really Wants writes, "Under Reagan, support for near-genocide in Guatemala became positively ecstatic. The most extreme of the Guatemala Hitlers we've backed there, Rios Montt, was lauded by Reagan as a man totally dedicated to democracy. In the early 1980s, Washington's friends slaughtered tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Indians in the highlands, with countless others tortured and raped. Large regions were decimated."