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Banned
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I know that all of you mean well, but I think that even folks with whom I usually agree (willravel) with, are almost as out of touch about this crisis as Seaver is.
Consider the two people, in the past 90 years, who have had the most "lucK" in balancing the rival factions in Iraq, and thus, in maintaining the peace.
First, there was Gertrude Bell, a gifted linguist who fluently spoke Arabic of the shia and sunni, Farsi of the Iranians, and the Turkish language of the Kurds. Ms. Bell understood, as I've documented below, that there will be no peace without accomodation of the sunni minority. Bell came to know the sunnis as; <b>""The truth is I'm becoming a Sunni myself; you know where you are with them, they are staunch and they are guided, according to their lights, by reason;"......</b>
Gertrude Bell in 1921, chose and groomed a sunni to be the new king of the new nation of Iraq. History proved Bell's assumptions to be correct. Saddam is a sunni who worked within the framework of the reality that he faced. His constituency was less than 20 percent of the total population. He recognized that he could instantly end up as King Faisal's grandson did, in 1958.
Saddam surrounded himself with a loyal inner circle, he used a food taster. He periodically purged his inner circles and his military leadership to preserve a climate of intimidation. He appointed christians to key positions to avoid a closed, "sunni only" organization, and because he had no use for religiously dominated shia who were also untrustworthy because they were of the majority. Saddam was tribal centric, even as he worked to rid the influence of tribal influence and religious rivalry from Iraq. It was unprecedented that he was able, through charisma, repression, and propaganda, to summon all male Iraqis to war against an Iran three times the size of Iraq. Shia fought against shia.
Saddam was described as never sleeping in the same be two nights in a row, or of disclosing in advance, where he would spend the night. Please tell me how any man, in the collection of rivalries that is Iraq, with the grievances against him that Saddam accumulated, and with his main adversary being the shia, could survive and remain an effective head of state, without resorting to the oppression and brutality that Saddam projected. Externally, he was able to contain a belligerant, newly emerged, islamic republic, three times the size of his own country.
In hindsight, the bloodshed and misery that Saddam was responsible for, seems almost insignifigant compared to the balancing act that he was able to achieve, and which the US supported and exploited throughout the 1980's.
Saddam contained the kurds, and shia religiously fueled political ambitions, not only in Iraq, but also in Iran, to the extent that he kept Iran mostly contained and preoccupied with checking Saddam. Even after the defeat at the hands of the Desert Storm coalition, Saddam managed to hold kurdish ambitions and those of shia in Iraq and Iran, in check for 12 more years.
What is the record of the Bush administration, in comparison? In hindsight, instead of killing Saddam's two sons, shouldn't the US have been quietly grooming them to succeed Saddam, or at least not undermining them and their father?
The solution is to wipe out the male Iraqi sunni population, or to facilitate sunni rule of Iraq. Since Saudi Arabia is populated by a sunni majority, only the second choice is practical. Turkey will not accept an independent kurdish state, and Iraq will never see peace unless the country is partitioned; unacceptable to Turkey, or to the US, since if it happened, we might as well,
(hell....with current shia dominance, it is justified, now....) erect signs on southern approached to Baghdad, that read:
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In spring 2003, American centcom forces under US president George Bush, and his general, Tommy Franks, began a determined offensive, at the cost of many casualties to their own forces, that succeeded in uniting the shia of southern Iraq with their brothers in Iran. We honor the brave Americans who paid with their lives to remove the artificial border of British colonialism that kept our families apart, for so many years.....
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...opinion-center
Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein
Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution?
November 26, 2006
......Nobody seems to foresee the possibility of restoring order to Iraq. Here is the basic dilemma: The government is run by Shiites, and the security agencies have been overrun by militias and death squads. The government is strong enough to terrorize the Sunnis into rebellion but not strong enough to crush this rebellion.
Meanwhile, we have admirably directed our efforts into training a professional and nonsectarian Iraqi police force and encouraging reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. <b>But we haven't succeeded. We may be strong enough to stop large-scale warfare or genocide, but we're not strong enough to stop pervasive chaos.
Hussein, however, has a proven record in that department.</b> It may well be possible to reconstitute the Iraqi army and state bureaucracy we disbanded, and if so, that may be the only force capable of imposing order in Iraq.
Chaos and order each have a powerful self-sustaining logic. When people perceive a lack of order, they act in ways that further the disorder. If a Sunni believes that he is in danger of being killed by Shiites, he will throw his support to Sunni insurgents who he sees as the only force that can protect him. The Sunni insurgents, in turn, will scare Shiites into supporting their own anti-Sunni militias.
And it's not just Iraqis who act this way. You could find a smaller-scale version of this dynamic in an urban riot here in the United States. But when there's an expectation of social order, people will act in a civilized fashion.
Restoring the expectation of order in Iraq will take some kind of large-scale psychological shock. The Iraqi elections were expected to offer that shock, but they didn't. The return of Saddam Hussein — a man every Iraqi knows, and whom many of them fear — would do the trick.
The disadvantages of reinstalling Hussein are obvious, but consider some of the upside. He would not allow the country to be dominated by Iran, which is the United States' major regional enemy, a sponsor of terrorism and an instigator of warfare between Lebanon and Israel. Hussein was extremely difficult to deal with before the war, in large part because he apparently believed that he could defeat any U.S. invasion if it came to that. Now he knows he can't. And he'd probably be amenable because his alternative is death by hanging.
I know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain to me why it's worse than all the others.
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Originally Posted by host
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2150897&postcount=27
What's mssing now....in that area of the world? The US took out the authority figure that evolved in that environment....an artificially created, sunni dominated monarchy that morphed over time, into a paranoid repressive, burtal dictatorship. Through it all.....nearly 80 years...the British "set up" did what it was designed to do...."solve" the problem of the Kurd/Turkish conflict in the north, by avoiding creation of a seperate Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border.....
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401355_pf.html
The Woman Who Put Iraq on the Map
Gertrude Bell, Resting in Relative Peace
.....Bell sketched the boundaries of Iraq on tracing paper after careful consultation with Iraqi tribes, consideration of Britain's need for oil and her own idiosyncratic geopolitical beliefs.
"The truth is I'm becoming a Sunni myself; you know where you are with them, they are staunch and they are guided, according to their lights, by reason; whereas with the Shi'ahs, however well intentioned they may be, at any moment some ignorant fanatic of an alim may tell them that by the order of God and himself they are to think differently," she wrote home........
....."Father, isn't it wonderfully interesting to be watching over the fortunes of this new state!" she felt optimistic enough to tack on.
Resisting grumbling from Churchill -- "I hate Iraq. I wish we had never gone to the place," he said in 1926 -- Bell's camp ensured that Britain and its military would have say over Iraq's government and oil for decades to come. London installed a foreign Sunni sheik, Faisal, as Iraq's king in a rigged plebiscite with a Hussein-style, 96 percent yes vote.
To suppress Shiite and Sunni tribal revolts that followed, <b>Britain pioneered air assaults on villages and the use of artillery shells filled with poison gas.</b>
Though Iraq was given formal independence in 1932, the monarchy ensured British dominance until 1958, when mobs tore the young King Faisal II limb from limb........
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.....the useful purpose of the sunnis was to dominate and repress both the kurds and the shiites. The sunnis preoccupied Iran....with the vaccum that removal of the sunni domination, Iran and sympathethic southern Iraqi shiites are free to focus on other enemies....Israel....and the western culture.
One alternative is to destroy the military capability of Iran, before withdrawing from Iraq. This still leaves an unrestrained, pan shiite presence in Iraq and Iran, and the sunni resistance.
Like it, or not....the best solution to avoid conflict with Turkey in the north, and strengthening Iran via it's strong Iraqi <i>shiite</i> ties...is to...in all seriousness....find a way to restore the previous sunni domination and repression of the kurds and the Iraqi shiites....and renew...Iraq's aggressive posture towards Iraq.
We broke it....we own it. The hypocrisy in all of this...and the lesson...is that the Reagan era policy of providing military and technological support to a sunni strongman in Iraq, is still the best policy. We're not going to do that now....so we are trapped there, militarily, and politcally.
Partition Iraq, and you risk a permanent, disgruntled, ambitious oilless sunni state, a kurd state at war with, or repressed by Turkey, and a stronger and more oil rich union of shiite southern Iraq, and Iran.....what then? |
Link to my first post, two months ago, about Gertrude Bell:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...7&postcount=39
Quote:
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/it...urst_bell.html
<b>Gertrude Bell and Iraq</b>
Though she is remembered today mainly by Middle East scholars and travel writers, there has recently been a modest revival of interest in Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) because of the key role she played in the creation of modern Iraq in the early 1920s. She was involved not only in putting King Faisal, son of the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, on the throne in Baghdad, but helped draw the new country’s borders and mobilized its tribes and religious groups to support the new nation-state.
Gertrude Bell traveled all over the Middle East and lived for years in Mesopotamia (as Iraq was then known), where she arguably knew more about what was happening on the ground among the local tribes than anyone else at that time. She was always in the thick of things, before and after the birth of Iraq in 1921, with innumerable contacts and confidants — both among local people and the British administrators, who feuded with each other and with London almost as much as the Iraqis themselves..........
....This Week's Headline
To read her copious letters from Baghdad during the 1920s is like scanning this week's headlines: many of the issues she confronted are the same ones the U.S. administrators and the new Iraqi government are dealing with today.
For example, in a 1922 letter to her father Bell describes Iraqi skirmishes with the Saudis on the southern border, and the difficulty of negotiating a border treaty after the Saudis had conquered a large swath of north-central Arabia. Faisal had sent a camel corps to defend the border, and the "Akwan" or Muslim Brotherhood, as the Wahabis called themselves, fired on them from an airplane. Bell goes on to say, "Ibn Saud may, of course, repudiate this action of his followers; that's the best that can happen, for otherwise we're practically at war with them." If one substitutes "al-Qaida" for "Akwan," we are in familiar territory: the House of Saud claims to repudiate terrorism among the extremists within its borders, but has been slow to do anything about it.
In tlie early 1920s, after the British-held plebiscite and a general agreement among the leaders of the various factions in what was then known as Mesopotamia to unite and become a nation, a friend of Bell's, a tribal sheik, said that all the pillars were standing for the formation of a new state and now what they needed was a roof. Shortly after that, Faisal, the protege of Bell and T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), was imported from Mecca to become the "roof." In early 2004, David Ignathis wrote in the Washington Post about the offer oft Prince Hassan of Jordan, the great nephew of Faisal, to mediate among Iraqi religions factions to bring them together and become a "provisional head of state."
Bell describes and photographs a grand gathering in 1921 at Falluja of Sunni tribal leaders on camels greeting Faisal, and Faisal's swearing allegiance to them, saying their enemies are his enemies and vowing solidarity. He is "a great Sunni among Sunnis," Bell wrote to her father. And now Falluja, as a center for Sunni insurgency, is in the headlines again.
In her letters Bell reports that the people of Kirkuk in the north are ready to give allegiance to Faisal, but those in Basra have come to her to plead with her government for a separate southern province within a confederation. Her response: I am your Friend, but I am also a servant of the British government, and London says no to anything less than a unitary government.....
......By the time Cox arrived in Baghdad after the Turkish defeat in 1917, she had been in and out of the region many times, and he soon realized how invaluable her experience and local connections would be in carrying out the British mandate that would result from the Paris Peace Treaty.
She seemed to be everywhere — in the British intelligence office in Cairo before her four-month jour-ney by camel caravan into north-central Arabia in 1914; at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where she met Prince Faisal of Mecca, the leader of the Arabian revolt against the Turks during the war. Faisal, with whom the British government (through Lawrence), had made a bargain, was promised a crown, though not the one he ultimately got. And in early 1921 she was at the Cairo Conference led by Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, where it was decided that Iraq was to be self-governing because it was too expensive to support as a protectorate. There, resplendent in furs and a big hat, she posed with Cox, Lawrence, the Churchills and other dignitaries while seated on camels lined up before the Sphinx at the pyramids.......
.....Baghdad At Last
When she finally settled down in Baghdad in 1917, having followed the victorious British army into the city where she would remain until her death less than 10 years later, she became the right-hand "man" for the High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and was named Oriental Secretary, her first paid position with the British government. She was given a house and an office, and had virtual carte blanche to deal with the local political, tribal, ethnic and religious leaders to promote the interests of the British governnient. And since she believed that the British mandate was the best thing that could have happened to Mesopotamia, especially after what she perceived as the misrule of the Turks, she had no problem trying to persuade her clients that what was good for Britain was good for them. Many of them, but not all, agreed.
In a 1920 letter home, she described her method of collecting information. She and a male colleague were invited by a leading figure in Baghdad to meet merchants and caravan drivers in a coffee house. "I do them a good turn whenever I can and they respond by coming in to see me whenever they return from Syria or Arabia and telling me what they've heard and seen. The tea party was delightful. The walls of the diwan are mellow with decades of tobacco smoke, the furniture, benches around the room and one table for us at the upper end. ... We talked Arab polities with great gusto for an hour and a half. ... I do like them so much. They are to me an endless romance. They come and go through the wilderness as if it were a high road, and they all, most politely, treat me as a eolleague, because I, too, have been in Arcadia. When they talk of tribes or sheiks or watering places, I don't need to ask who and where they are. I know; and as they talk I see again the wide Arabian horizon."
Ever the realist, in another letter she refers witli disdain to the English newspapers that expected Cox to bring about a stable, modern state instantly. "He has only to say 'Hey, presto' for an Arab government to leap on to the stage, with another Athene springing from the forehead of Zeus. You may say if you like that Sir Percy will play the role of Zeus, but his Athene will find the stage encumbered by such trifles as the Shiah [sic] problem, the tribal problem and other matters, over which even a goddess might easily stumble." And in another letter, "One of the papers says, quite rightly, that we had promised an Arab government with British advisers, and had set up a British government with Arab advisers. That's a perfectly fair statement. ..."
In a retrospective summary of conditions in Iraq at independence — inserted among Gertrudes letters by her stepmother, for their posthumous publication — Percy Cox noted among other things that "the most thorny problem on the Euphrates at that time (early 1920s) was not so much the tribes as the holy cities of Islam, Karbala and Najaf." The sheiks of these towns, given small monthly allowances and sent home with orders to maintain law and order, "were found to be abusing their positions and making hay while the sun shone; while, worse still, the existence of a brisk trade in supplies to the enemy, both on the Iraq front and in Syria, was brought to light.".......
....Coda
Political strife in Iraq did not settle down after the coronation. In 1923 Shia divines in the south began to stir up trouble and were shipped off to Persia. The areas east of Erbil, Kifri and Kirkuk were causing headaches for the adminis-trators in Baghdad. The Kurds in the north were kicking up trouble. And, finally, the Turks were ejected along the northern border later that year. But the reign of the Hashemites lasted until 1958, when Faisal's grandson and family were assassinated.
Today, almost 80 years later, Cox's words, written shortly after Bell's death and bound into a volume of her letters, come back to haunt us:
"The Kingdom of Iraq has been placed on its feet, and its frontiers defined; its future prosperity and progress rest with the Iraqis themselves."
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