JERUSALEM (AP) – Within days of the Russian invasion, Western countries invoked international law, imposed crippling sanctions, began welcoming refugees with open arms and hailed Ukraine’s armed resistance.
The response has sparked outrage in the Middle East, where many see a blatant double standard in the West’s response to international conflicts.
“We saw that every tool we were told could not be activated in less than seven days for over 70 years,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said at a security forum in Turkey earlier this month.
“Amazing hypocrisy,” he added.
The US-led war in Iraq, which began 19 years ago this month, was widely viewed as an unlawful invasion of one state by another. But Iraqis fighting the Americans were branded terrorists, and refugees fleeing to the West were often turned away and treated as a potential security threat.
The Biden administration said Wednesday the United States has assessed that Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine and is working with others to prosecute perpetrators. But the US is not a member of the International Criminal Court and firmly opposes any international investigation into its own conduct or that of its ally Israel.
When Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war on behalf of President Bashar Assad in 2015, helping its armed forces to batter and starve entire cities, there was international outrage but little action. Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe died on dangerous sea voyages or were turned back, as many branded them a threat to Western culture.
In Yemen, a grueling year-long war between a Saudi-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels has left 13 million people at risk of starvation. But even searing reports of starving infants have failed to garner sustained international attention.
Bruce Riedel, formerly of the CIA and National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it was “understandable” that many in the Middle East saw double standards in the West.
“The United States and the United Kingdom have backed Saudi Arabia’s seven-year war in Yemen, which has caused the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in decades,” he said.
Israel’s occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state is well into its sixth decade, and millions of Palestinians live under military rule with no end in sight. The US, Israel and Germany have passed laws aimed at quelling the Palestinian-led boycott movement, while big companies like McDonald’s, Exxon Mobil and Apple have won plaudits by ceasing operations in Russia.
On social media, the world has hailed Ukrainians hoarding Molotov cocktails and taking up arms against an occupying army. When Palestinians and Iraqis do the same, they are branded as terrorists and legitimate targets.
“We resisted the occupiers even when the world was on the side of the Americans, including the Ukrainians who were part of their coalition,” said Sheikh Jabbar al-Rubai, 51, who fought in the Iraqi insurgency against US forces from 2003 to 2011. armed forces fought.
“Because the world was with the Americans, they didn’t give us that glory and called us a patriotic resistance,” he said, instead emphasizing the religious nature of the uprising. “Of course that’s a double standard, as if we were subhuman.”
Abdulameer Khalid, a 41-year-old delivery driver from Baghdad, sees “no difference” between the Iraqi and Ukrainian resistance.
“The resistance against the Americans in Iraq was more justified since the Americans traveled thousands of kilometers to get to our country while the Russians pursue a perceived threat alongside them,” he said.
Of course, there are important differences between the war in Ukraine – a clear case of one UN member state invading another – and the conflicts in the Middle East, which often involve civil war and Islamic extremism.
“By and large, conflicts in the Middle East are incredibly complicated. They are not moral codes,” said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Middle East adviser to Republican and Democratic governments.
He said the Ukraine conflict is unique in its moral clarity as Russia is widely viewed as an aggressive, devastating war against its neighbor. The closest Middle East analogy might be the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when Washington responded by assembling a military coalition that included Arab states that drove out Iraqi forces.
Still, Miller acknowledges that US foreign policy is “riddled with anomalies, inconsistencies, contradictions, and yes, hypocrisy.”
The US invasion of Afghanistan was a response to the 9/11 attacks planned by Osama bin Laden while he was there protected by the Taliban. The US justified its war in Iraq with false claims of weapons of mass destruction, but the invasion also toppled a brutal dictator who himself had flouted international law and committed crimes against humanity.
Still, the invasion is viewed by most Iraqis and other Arabs as an unprovoked catastrophe that set the stage for years of sectarian strife and bloodshed.
Elliott Abrams, a senior Council on Foreign Relations staffer and White House adviser when the US invaded Iraq, said there was a difference between Ukrainians fighting Russian invaders and Iraqi insurgents fighting Americans.
“Iraqis who fought US troops on behalf of Iran or ISIS were not freedom fighters,” he said, referring to the Islamic State group. “Making these moral distinctions is not an act of hypocrisy.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back more than a century – well before the 1967 war in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Most of the world views these areas as occupied Palestinian territory and Israel’s continued settlement construction as a violation of international law. Israel presents the conflict as a territorial dispute and accuses the Palestinians of not recognizing their right to exist as a Jewish state.
“Only people with a contextual disability could compare Israel’s defensive wars with Russia’s invasion of its neighbor,” the Jerusalem Post said in a March 1 editorial on the subject.
Russia’s intervention in Syria was part of a complex civil war in which several factions – including the Islamic State group – have committed atrocities. When IS conquered large parts of Syria and Iraq, many extremists feared they would make their way to Europe amid waves of refugees.
Still, many in the Middle East saw the harsh treatment of Arab and Muslim migrants as evidence that Western nations still harbor cultural prejudices despite their commitment to universal rights and values.
Many feel that their plight is taken less seriously because of the widespread perception that the Middle East has always been mired in violence – not to mention the West’s role in creating and perpetuating many of its intractable conflicts.
“There’s this expectation that comes from colonialism that it’s more normal for us to be killed mourning for our families than it is for the West,” said Ines Abdel Razek, advocacy director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy.
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak in Washington, Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, Bassem Mroue in Beirut, and Noha ElHennawy in Cairo contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine