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West vs East, at daggers
drawn
By K Gajendra Singh
Veni, vidi, vici ("I came, I saw, I
conquered") spoke Julius Caesar in 78 BC at a town
called Zile, 300 kilometers northeast of Ankara, after
victory in a battle lasting barely four hours over
Pharnaces II, son of Mithradates VI of Pontus.
Mithradates the Great (meaning "gift of the Aryan god
Mithra"), a common name among Anatolian rulers, had
contested Imperial Rome's hegemony in Asia Minor.
Of course, the self-styled successors of
Imperial Rome, the hawks in the US administration, had
hoped to emulate Caesar after a few days of Operation
Iraqi Freedom in the cities of Basra, Baghdad and
Kirkuk. But the reality has been quite disillusioning -
even to the point of bringing some "Shock and Awe" home
to the States.
Up to the Ides of March, 2003,
the US and Turkey had been very close allies for half a
century, with the government of the ruling Justice and
Development party (AKP) even putting up for a vote (in
spite of a large majority of Turks opposing a war on
Iraq) a proposal to allow the US use of Turkish bases
for stationing troops and opening a second front from
northern Iraq.
But things have gone awry, with
the Turks declaring that they would send more troops
into northern Iraq when they deem it necessary, and the
US making threatening noises against any such action.
Verily, the erstwhile allies are at daggers drawn.
For Turkey, questions of security and vital
strategic concerns are involved. In such a situation,
Turkey is known to follow its national interest as it
did in 1974, when it invaded the island of Cyprus to
guard its interests. Turkish troops still remain there.
Echoes of Mithradates
A US victory
over Saddam Hussein does not appear to be as quick in
coming as Western leaders and the US media had made it
out to be. Certainly it is going to be quite messy. The
coalition of the willing has already lost more soldiers
in combat than in the 1991 Gulf War. But let us get back
to Mithradates. In a long career of conquest he had
saved Crimea (Ukraine) from the Scythians and the Greeks
from Rome. He was defeated many times by the Roman
generals, but his greatest victories over Rome and its
client states in Anatolia came in 88 BC, when he had
conquered most of the Roman province of Asia.
Most of the Greek cities in Western Asia Minor
had allied themselves with Mithradates, although a few
held out against him. Then he organized a general
massacre of the Roman and Italian residents in Asia in
which nearly 80,000 were said to have been killed. When
the course of the war turned against him, he became
severe against the Greeks; every kind of intimidation
was used - deportations, murders, freeing of slaves. In
85 BC, when the war was clearly lost, he made peace with
the Roman general Sulla in the Treaty of Dardanus,
giving up his conquests, surrendering his fleet and
paying a large fine. Then in the second Mithradatic war,
the Roman general Lucius Murena attacked Mithradates
without provocation but was defeated in 82 BC. After
many ups and downs, Pompey completely defeated both
Mithradates and his son-in-law Tigranes, the ruler of
Armenia. Mithradates escaped to Crimea When he wanted to
attack Rome via the Danube, there was a general revolt
against him, including by his son. A powerful man,
Mithradates would not die by poisoning himself, so he
had to order a slave to kill him.
Yes, the
victory of US war machine against Iraqis may be like
that of Caesar, but with one crucial difference: the
damage was not that widespread then. It did not turn the
world upside down, as the US attack on Iraq is likely to
do.
Lessons from the Trojan
War
Writing in the International Herald Tribune
just before the US-led war, Nicholas D Kristof recalled
the Trojan War perhaps the very first world war between
Europe and Asia, marked not just by heroism but also by
catastrophic mistakes, poor leadership and what the
Greeks called ate: the intoxicating pride and
overweening arrogance that sometimes clouds the minds of
the strong.
Troy, Kristof said, offered three
lessons: First, even when one has a legitimate
grievance, war is not always the best solution. The
Greeks were initially divided on attacking Troy. Even
heroes like Agamemnon and Odysseus were reluctant. Yet
the hawks won the day, in part by offering an early
version of the Bush doctrine: if we let the Trojans get
away with kidnapping Helen, then they'll steal women
again; if we don't fight them now, we'll have to later,
when they're stronger.
It turns out the doves
were right. So many lives were lost "in this insane
voyage", as Achilles put it, "fighting other soldiers to
win their wives as prizes", that even for the victorious
Greeks the struggle was simply not worth it. "Why must
we battle Trojans?" Achilles asks, in what could have
been an early advocacy of the alternate strategy of
containment.
A second immortal truth of war is
the crucial importance of maintaining allies. The Greeks
outnumbered the Trojans by more than 10 to 1, but they
were almost defeated because of feuding within the Greek
"coalition of the willing". Agamemnon was the Donald
Rumsfeld of his day, needlessly angering his key allies
- and outraging Achilles by swiping his concubine
Briseis. Agamemnon later tried to mollify Achilles, but
the latter still withdrew from battle, threatened to go
home and said things like "ca ne marche pas" (that won't
work).
The third lesson has to do with the fall
of Troy itself. Some experts have offered a hawkish
lesson - the vulnerability of even the most refined city
to military weakness. After all, an armed attack
destroyed Troy in an instant: yet the story makes it
clear that Troy's fundamental failing was not a military
one. Better intelligence might have helped, but above
all Troy was destroyed by its refusal to listen to
warnings about the wooden horse.
So, by Zeus,
that third lesson from Troy is the paramount need to
listen to skeptical voices. Virgil suggests that the
Trojans rashly brought the wooden horse inside their
city despite the alarm of two early pundits - Cassandra
and Laocoon, who warned against Greeks bearing gifts. If
the Trojans had just thought it over for a week, by the
Greeks inside would have died of thirst. But the Trojans
dismissed the warnings as "windy nonsense" and sealed
their fate.
"We Americans are the Greeks of our
day, and as we now go to war, we should appreciate not
only the beauty of the tale, but also the warnings
within it," concludes Kristof.
Iliad and
Odyssey
The Iliad was probably finalized around
750 BC, and the Odyssey around 650 BC (Greek writing
started around 650 BC). It is felt that the Odyssey, so
different from the Iliad, was not composed by Homer, the
blind bard of Asia Minor, but probably by a young lady
(a Jane Austen) somewhere on the Sicilian coast with
time to spare. But let that pass. But there certainly is
an historical basis for the story of the abduction of
the Spartan King Menelaus' wife Helen by the Trojan
Prince Paris. Menelaus' brother, King Agamemnon of
Achaeans, then decided on a voyage of punishment and
retrieval.
For Western culture and civilization,
the Iliad and Odyssey are almost like the Mahabharata
and Ramayana are for Indians, making their (presumed)
composer Homer one of the most influential authors in
the widest sense. The two epics provided the basis for
Greek education and culture throughout the classical age
and formed the backbone of humane education down to the
time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity.
The Homeric epics had a profound impact on the
Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the
proliferation of translations has helped to make them
the most important poems of the classical European
tradition.
Troy 6, the site of Homer's Iliad,
has been dated to about 1260 BC. At the time of the
Trojan War, there was the majestic and magnificent Asian
Hittite Empire (1800 BC to 1200 BC) in central Turkey,
the citadel of whose capital, Bogazkoy, has a
circumference of five kilometers. The Troy fortress
measures 200 yards by 150 yards. Excavations show that
Troy perhaps fell as a result of weakening by an
earthquake .It was assaulted and set on fire, women and
children taken as slaves. The Hittite empire meanwhile
extended from north of Turkey to Syria and up to Babylon
(Iraq). Hittites were contenders for the control of
Syria with the Egyptian Pharaohs and the local Aryan
kingdom of Mitannis in the southeast of Turkey.
Evidence from Hittite archives indicates that
Troy was a small state in alliance or subordinate to the
empire. It was attacked when the Hittite empire was in
decline and fighting its new enemy, the Assyrians (from
Iraq) in the East. So this 10-year great Trojan war
drama was but a storm in a teacup compared to the great
sweep of Hittite history.
Mesopotamia, mother
of civilization
Western and European civilization
are founded on Greek civilization, which itself comes
from Cretian civilization, which in turn is based on
Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. Both are indebted
to Mesopotamia, verily the mother of all civilizations,
which evolved mostly between the Tigris and Euphrates in
Iraq and southeast Turkey. The evolution in human
progress took off six millennia ago.
But the
fourth millennia BC was remarkable not only here but in
the Nile Valley and the Indus Valley. From family units
the polity developed into villages and cities, kingdoms
and empires. The cities were ruled by the God and in his
name by the king. To begin with, the first deity was
Earth, the mother goddess. Civilizations in Mesopotamia
were created by Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians,
Assyrians and others. Nile adopted cylindrical seals
from Mesopotamia and the beginnings of writing. The Nile
civilizations are magnificent, well preserved but
unidirectional, as they flourished mostly in isolation.
This brief background is necessary as Westerners
talk of the superiority of their culture over the East,
including even some prime ministers, eg Silvio
Berlusconi.
Wars in southeastern Turkey and
Iraq
Barely 80 kilometers east from Adana lies
Issus, just north of the Turkish port of Iskendrun
(where US armored units had been awaiting permission
from the Turks to be taken into the country).This is
where the the emperor Darius fled when attacked by
Alexander of Macedonia, even leaving behind his family.
The final defeat was inflicted at Gaugamela between
Nineveh and Mosul (in Iraq). Nearby Kirkuk is now the
bone of contention among Arabs, Kurds, Turkomens and
Turks. Diyarbakir, which the US had wanted as a base for
its troops, is ancient Amida, now the largest Kurdish
city. Nearly 250 kilometers northeast lies Manzikert,
near Lake Van, where the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV
Diogenes was defeated and captured in 1071 by the Seljuk
Turk Sultan Alparslan.
Romanus had come with
150,000 soldiers to teach Alparslan (with 14,000
horsemen) a lesson. Divisions in the Roman ranks led to
their defeat. Romanus's Turkomen troops had gone over to
Alparslan, and one of his generals, Andronicus Ducas,
fled with his men. Even the Seljuk chief Alparslan was
saved only by the loyalty of his Turkish mamelukes
(slaves). This opened Anatolia for Turkish conquest,
first by the Seljuks and then by the Ottomans, whose
janissaries knocked at the gates of Vienna twice in the
16th century, a memory which even now sends shivers down
European spines.
Around 200 kilometers south of
Malatya (another base the US had wanted) lies another
Kurdish city, Haraan, near the border with Syria. Here
the Parthians had defeated the Roman emperor Crassus
Marcus Licinius in 53 BC, capturing the legion standards
and taking the loot to Ctesiphon (near Baghdad), then
the winter capital of the Parthians and later of
Sasanians. Crassus, who was governor of Syria, had
attacked the Parthians with a large force to gain
military glory and be at par with the other triumvirs,
Julius Caesar and Pompey. After he lost the war at
Carrhae near Harran, he was killed.
If one
zigzags a few hundred kilometers south from Diyarbakir
along the Tigris (Dicle in Turkish), one will pass the
city of Batman, then Hassan Kief, the Kurdish Ayubid
stronghold now submerged under a dam, and then Cizre,
the hot border post between Turkey and Kurdish Iraq.
(Many believe that it was on the nearby Judi mountains
that Noah's ark rested, and not on Mount Ararat as is
generally believed). Another 50 kilometers south along
the Tigris into Iraqi Kurdish territory, one will reach
Gaugamela, the battlefield of final victory by Alexander
over Darius and the termination of the Achaemenean
empire, then at its peak.
When you drive south
from Diyarbakir, after 100 kilometers you will reach
Mardin, an old Arab city. Perched at 1100 meters above
sea level, it gives a panoramic view for hundreds of
kilometers of flat upper Mesopotamian plains below
toward Baghdad, Basra and the Gulf. A 20-kilometer
descent south takes you to a modern West-East highway
coming from Turkish ports of Iskendrun and Mersin along
the border with Syria. Before the 1990 sanctions against
Iraq, hundreds of trucks used to ferry goods from Turkey
and Europe to Iraq. To reach the northern Iraqi Kurdish
highlands, you have to drive 150 kilometers east to
Turkey's frontier towns of Cizre and Silopi.
The
Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iraq are difficult
mountainous terrain. They constitute upper Mesopotamia,
the center of many civilizations and also of many
historic battles and wars. Unable to produce enough to
establish or sustain a large kingdom or empire, the
divided Kurdish highlands have always remained a place
of dispute between empires based in Iran, Iraq and
Turkey, and even as far as Russia.
Numerous
battles have decided the fates of empires and kingdoms
in the region. This area will soon see new battles
between Arabs, Kurds,Turkomens and Turks -- and perhaps
even Iranians.
Current war on
Iraq
There has been wide public opposition to the
British prime minister supporting President Bush in his
war for Iraqi regime change. Speaking in the House of
Commons against the war on Iraq without a UN resolution,
former British Defense Minister Peter Kilfoyle warned,
"We are having a 19th century gunboat war in the Gulf,
when the real dangers of terrorism should be isolated
and dealt with as the first priority. [I] believe that
this act would be illegal, it would be immoral and it
would be illogical." Of Blair's propensity for comparing
opposition to war to Munich appeasement, Kilfoyle said
that "in 1938 I do not recall the League of Nations
having inspectors in Germany dismantling the Panzers, as
we have inspectors dismantling the weapons in Iraq
today. He (Blair) made much about the terrorist dangers
and quite rightly so. But does that not point out the
idiocy of fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at
the wrong time, against the wrong enemy."
Referring to the name of the allied operation -
Shock and Awe - Kilfoyle said: "Think of what that name
implies. The US is aiming to put 10 times as many
missiles and precision bombs in the first 48 hours as
was committed in the whole of the last Gulf War. This is
against a country that has been decimated. I would say
earnestly and honestly to the government that its
impatience will reap a whirlwind, a whirlwind which will
affect us and our generations to come."
Charles
Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused the
government of acting inconsistently over Iraq and
criticized the Conservative party for its support for
Tony Blair. "When we come to consistency, can we remind
ourselves where the Conservative party is concerned?
Take the issue of weapons of mass destruction. After
Saddam Hussein used them in 1988, they [the Conservative
government] continued to sell arms to Iraq. They
provided them with anthrax and other chemical weapons
and they approved the construction of dual-use factories
in Iraq." His conclusion: Compared to Iraq's US$1.5
billion defence budget, the US's, at nearly $450
billion, is 300 times as large. Iraq has been starved of
food and medicines for 12 years, it got only $20 billion
of $60 billion promised from the oil-for-food program
(where is the rest?!). The world is certainly awed by
the fact that the US spends as much to defend itself as
the rest of the world put together, helped by the
printing and export of greenbacks. Its deficit is as
much as its defense spending. In spite of all that
expenditure, current and former US administrations were
not able to anticipate or avoid September 11, 2001.
Unable to get hold of Osama bin Laden and others
dead or alive, the US is behaving like a castrated and
raging bull. It is a successful example of self-hypnosis
by the US media machine - with much help from the
political leadership, beginning with Bush. It has even
convinced the American public that many, if not most, of
the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were
Iraqis, when most of them were from Saudi Arabia and
others from Egypt. None was in fact from Iraq. No
linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda has been proved, in
spite of the forging of documents by the US and the UK.
Without any casus belli, the US and its
allies have now attacked Iraq with all their weapons of
terrible destruction. Listening to some US defense
experts, one can sense their glee in how the new war
weapons and machines being used for the first time have
such improved performance. As in the bombing of Serbia,
new and better arms are being tested and used.
Look at the way the US treats prisoners of war
from Afghanistan in Guantamano Bay. Its media was first
to show Iraqi prisoners of wars, but when US POWs were
shown on Iraqi TV or the Arab satellite news channel
al-Jazeera, US leaders started talking about the Geneva
Convention and human rights. The US has not even joined
the International Criminal Court.
This war on
Iraq without support from the United Nations Security
Council is illegal. In the words of UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan, the war is against the UN charter. Yes, the
US and the UK do want the United Nations involved in the
reconstruction of Iraq, as if the body is a mere
non-governmental organization (NGO), one of many. His
Holiness Pope John Paul and most religious leaders
around the world are opposed to this unjust war. This
writer had a ringside view of the 1991 Gulf War in
Amman. A clear case of Iraqi aggression against the
independent state of Kuwait had been established.
It was opposed by all Arab and Muslim countries.
Their governments were able to contain the anger and
frustrations of the masses. Since then, they and the
world have watched the butchery being enacted daily by
the state of Israel. There are daily demonstrations in
Arab cities, as well as cities around the world, against
the war and the killing of civilians in Basra, Baghdad
and elsewhere. With Ariel Sharon in power, a mention of
the road map for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian
problem made by George Bush before the war - apparently
more as an afterthought than anything else - has not
fooled anyone. There could soon be total chaos verging
on civil war in northern Iraq, with such little US
presence in that turbulent area and no agreement with
Turkey.
It was rumored in Amman during the 1991
Gulf War that Saddam Hussein had been warned that
Baghdad would be nuked if he used his weapons of mass
destruction. This time he, his family and supporters
have only one choice - to fight to the finish. He will
use whatever means are left in his hands. Iraq is now
very much weaker than it was in 1991, but Saddam Hussein
and his reliable Republican Guards, fedayeen and other
forces will defend Baghdad and other cities and towns to
the last. It is strange that the cold warriors in
Washington have forgotten that Iraq's Republican Guard
troops are battle tested, many with experience of
hand-to-hand land battles against fanatic Iranian
revolutionaries. It is bringing death and devastation
onto the poor hapless long-suffering Iraqi population,
and the consequences will be unpredictable. It will
fully ignite the Crusade vs Jihad conflict.
Let
there be no doubt about it. This war only exposes the
bankruptcy of Anglo-Saxon policy, when 19th century
methods of "bomb the natives, frighten and numb them by
force", are being used to handle complicated 21st
century problems of Islamic fundamentalism. In the words
of Mary Robinson, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights,
Bush is leading the world into unchartered waters, and
bin Laden must be chuckling, wherever he might be.
What is being achieved is beyond bin Laden's
wildest dreams.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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