Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to The Times of India (March 27, 2016), claimed during a Sunday Times interview that many millions of Muslims are "fundamentally incompatible with the modern world." He did not explain what he meant by "modern world," but most commentators believed that he meant industrially developed societies. This, however, is not the view held by most enlightened minds. The eminent Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung suggests that people do not become modern just because they own the latest technology. "He alone is modern," says Jung, "who is conscious of the present," and such a person is solitary. British novelist Iris Murdoch goes further in claiming that if the Western societies have to have a religion, it must be without a divine God, the God that Christianity promotes, because believing in such a God has become impossible in the scientific age. In other words, Christians are incompatible with the modern world. But Blair is neither a philosopher nor an intellectual. He is a politician. So his view is more mundane.

He is concerned with the violence perpetrated by extremist groups like al-Qaeda, Taliban, Daesh and others in the name of Islam. But violence is also perpetrated in the name of other religions. Christian extremists, like The Lord's Resistance Army and Antibalaka, slaughter Muslims in Sudan, Nigeria, and Central African Republic. Hindu extremists, like the Bajrang Dal, RSS and others, murder Christians and Muslims, and bomb mosques and shrines in India. Buddhist extremists kill Muslims and burn their homes and mosques in Myanmar. Jewish extremists in Israel kill Christians and Muslims, and burn churches and homes. All these people are unfit for the modern world, according to Iris Murdoch, because they destroy life and property in the name of a divine God.

But Blair's radar catches none of them, except Muslims. He focuses on Muslims because he has a hidden agenda, an agenda that has been exposed by John Perkins, who correctly says that the wars in the Middle East are about "economics, not religion." In his best-selling book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins reveals that he was hired by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1971 and put on the payroll of an international consulting firm, Chas. T. Main, as an economist. In the name of alleviating poverty in countries from Indonesia to Panama, he advanced the interests of the US corporatocracy, made up of international banks, major corporations, and the government. He was, in his own words, an economic hitman, who quit his job in 1980 to work for peace. Writing from personal experience and citing scholars, he reveals how the US, in order to avoid another oil embargo like the one the Saudis had imposed against it during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, set up the United States-Saudi Arabian Joint Economic Commission (JECOR) in 1974, signing an agreement for American firms to 'build' the Arab Kingdom. To that purpose, Saudi Arabia delivered hundreds of millions of dollars of its oil money to the US Treasury, which held it until the time came to pay American vendors and employees. "This system assured that the Saudi money would be recycled back into the American economy."

Perkins asserts that the US economic hitmen desired such a deal with Iraq's Saddam Hussein. But they failed to convince the dictator. When they fail, Perkins says, more sinister creatures called 'jackals' step in. "And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . young Americans are sent to kill and to die." That's how Saddam lost his power and his life on the false accusation of possessing weapons of mass destruction. Getting that obstinate dictator out of the way, the US has built a military base, that they termed an embassy, in Baghdad on 104 acres of land - the largest 'embassy' in the world, employing almost 15,000 people and thousands of mercenaries from Europe, Asia, and Africa, to secure the supply of oil. The case of Libya's strongman Muammar Gaddafi is not much different. According to the recently disclosed emails of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the Foreign Policy Journal reports, Gaddafi wanted to create a gold-backed currency to compete with the euro and the US dollar. But Clinton falsely claimed that he was planning genocidal attacks against his domestic opponents. So NATO intervened and threw him out, turning Libya into a haven for extremists like the Islamic State, just like Iraq.

So it is not religion but the West's desire for dominance for economic exploitation that is behind the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. If religion was the cause, then the US would not give Saudi Arabia special treatment, turning a "blind eye to many Saudi activities, including the financing of fanatical groups," as Perkins says. In fact, as Perkins writes, the US "actively sought and received Saudi Arabian financial support for Osama bin Laden's Afghan war against the Soviet Union." In other words, the US used Saudi money and its jihadi extremists to achieve its goal. That is why, although 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 were Saudi citizens, the US did not attack Saudi Arabia but Iraq, a country whose citizens played no role in the terrorist attack.

Tony Blair is desperately trying to minimise his culpability in the illegal US invasion of Iraq that he supported in 2003. He and former US President George W. Bush were already indicted in 2011 by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal for committing crimes against humanity during that invasion. A German human rights group, The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, has filed criminal complaints against the Bush administration for its barbaric torture programme. Blair is culpable in that, too.  Hence, he resorts to prevarication like a typical politician, talking about the need for Muslim countries to make a "painful transition to modernity." But thanks to John Perkins, he has lost all credibility.

The writer is an English professor and educator at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.