IRAQ’S DESCENT INTO EHTNIC MAYHEM: VICTOR SHARPE
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11180/pub_detail.asp
The challenge for the United States in Iraq was not simply to defeat the Saddam regime and the later coalition of jihadists and terrorists who infested the territory. The challenge should have been whether or not to undo the artificial nature of Iraq’s borders and provide justice for the different ethnicities, which make up the mosaic that is called Iraq.
The Ottoman Turks occupied the territory known also as Mesopotamia for 400 years until the map was re-drawn by Britain after defeating Turkey in World War 1 – again blurring ancient ethnicities.
The Butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, subdued the different peoples of Iraq through fear and violent repression. But the ethnic yearnings were always simmering under the surface like a slow boiling pot.
The United States Administration under President Bush might have been better served if it had undone Britain’s artificial creation of Iraq and instead brought into existence several new sovereign nation states. Justice would have been served by the creation of such states. Now it is too late, thanks to President Obama’s retreat from Iraq.
In a Washington Post article of July 17, 2007, titled, Exit Strategies, by Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks, the writers suggested four years ago that three developments would likely occur once the U.S. withdrew:
“Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.
“That was the conclusion reached in recent “war games” exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson.
“I honestly don’t think it will be apocalyptic,” said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But “it will be ugly.
“Some military officers contend that, regardless of whether Iraq breaks apart or outside actors seek to take over after a U.S. pullout, ever greater carnage is inevitable.
“The water-cooler chat I hear most often . . . is that there is going to be an outbreak of violence when we leave that makes the (current) instability look like a church picnic,” said an officer who has served in Iraq.”
“A senior Bush administration official closely involved in Iraq policy imagines a vast internecine slaughter as Iraq descends into chaos but cautions that it is impossible to know the outcome.”
The laudable aim of bringing democracy to an Arab, and a predominately Moslem region, was and will always be doomed to failure. Islam, after all, means submission to the will of Allah, not – as in a true democracy – to the will of the people. So who are the different peoples of Iraq?
The Kurds are members of an ethnic group spread over northern Iraq, north-western Iran, parts of Syria and south-eastern Turkey. They have lived mostly as a mountain people for millennia and adopted a form of Islam during the 7th century. The Kurds make up nearly 20% of Iraq’s population and have yearned for an independent Kurdistan for centuries. They, not the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, are the true deservers today of an independent and sovereign state of their own.
The predominately Moslem Turkomen are an ethnic group with close ties in language and culture to Anatolia in Turkey. They represent 2% of the Iraqi population but have been an integral part of the area’s mosaic since the 12th century. They are to be found mainly in northern Iraq.
The Assyrians embraced Christianityin thefirst century and include various Christian sects such as the Chaldeans. Like the Armenians, who suffered genocide under the Ottoman Turks in the early years of the 20th century, the Assyrian Christians are a persecuted minority subjected to repeated massacres and deportations by Sunni Moslem Arabs and during the regime of Saddam Hussein. Like Christians throughout the Arab and Muslim Middle East their numbers are dwindling as more and more Christians flee Muslim persecution in Egypt, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere.
The Marsh Arabs are mainly Shia who lived for centuries in the area where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow close to each other in southern Iraq. Most of these Arabs were subjected to severe depredations by the regime of Saddam Hussein
The Sunni Arabs are barely 20% of the population but have dominated the Shia majority and Kurdish minority since Iraq was created in 1921 by Britain. They date back to the 16th century when Sunni Ottomans occupied the region. There is much hatred between the Sunni and Shia Arabs, going back to the 7th century origins of Islam, which may explode into new civil war at any time.
The Shia Arabs make up almost 60% of Iraq’s population. They predominate mostly around Basra in the south but are also to be found in large numbers around Baghdad. The Shia may well demand a separate state side by side with Iran, which is already infiltrating an Iraq riven by ethnic tensions. However, Arabs and Persians have a long history of animosity between them.
The 2,500 year old Jewish presence in what became Iraq should not be overlooked. Like the Christians, the Muslim authorities routinely persecuted the Jews. In 1941, the pro-Nazi Arab regime of Rashid Ali launched a frightful pogrom on the hapless Jewish population.
But it was to be followed in 1948 by the expulsion of the Jews at the time of modern Israel’s rebirth in its ancient, biblical homeland, thus bringing to an end the millennial presence of an ancient Jewish population, which preceded Islam and the Arab conquests by well over 1,000 years.
Iran has been greatly emboldened in its support for terror worldwide by what it sees as the increasingly feeble response from the Obama regime. Iran’s relentless march to create a nuclear weapons arsenal to use against Israel and Western interests and its arrogant threats to forbid international traffic through the Straits of Hormuz; the gateway to the Persian Gulf, are the fruits of Obama’s present policies.
As Frank Gaffney and other contributors in the book, War Footing, claim:
“Iran directly supports most of the Shi’ite based political movements in Iraq and their militias. Indeed, Iran largely created the revolt in Najaf fomented by the radical Shi’a cleric Muqdata-al-Sadr whose troops were reportedly trained at camps in Iran.”
It should be the United States official policy to support regime change in Iran. The population is crying out for western, especially US encouragement and support. But, alas, it is not the policy of Barack Hussein Obama who has spurned the Iranian masses yearning for an end of the mullahocracy yet has given a green light to the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists throughout North Africa, the Gaza Strip, and much of the Arab world.
Obama’s whittling down of the United States military by several hundred billion dollars and his Secretary of Defense, Panetta’s, statement that America can only fight one war at a time gives great aid and comfort to the Iranian mullahs and their evil clown president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
So Iraq may, through its own ethnic hatreds, dissolve into three de facto mini-states and, like a new domino theory, neighboring Jordan may also follow into civil war. Syria’s Alawite minority regime of Bashar al-Assad will eventually be overthrown and it is certain that a Muslim Brotherhood party will take control.
Remember that under Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, the same Muslim Brotherhood staged a revolt in the city of Hama some thirty years ago, which Hafez al-Assad destroyed, killing over 20,000 demonstrators.
The so-called Arab Spring, which may well have been instigated by Obama’s own speech at Cairo University, was the president’s very first speech of his presidential career. It has inexorably led to the overthrow of Mubarak of Egypt and Gaddafi of Libya – Arab dictators to be sure – but at least ones who kept the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood in check.
Now Obama’s legacy is looking more and more as one which leaves the world, especially the Middle East, with catastrophic violence, war, and severe economic disruption in the months and years to come.
Iraq may yet be one of the most dangerous of Obama’s dominoes.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including the Politicide trilogy, available at www.lulu.com and www.amazon.com.
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