The 35-year-old Ba'athist government that the US
unwisely chose to topple with the second Iraq War in
April 2003 saw Iraq as playing a key role in providing
strategic depth and vigor in the eastern flank of a
re-emerging Arab nation. Iraq, after all, was the
artificial product of Western geopolitical maneuvers in
the cradle of civilization during the age of European
imperialism, and Iraq's full geopolitical spectrum has
always included Pan-Arabism beyond narrow state
interests.
Pan-Arabism holds that a common
Arabic heritage is the natural basis for a cohesive,
strong and prosperous Arabic world. It perceives the
division of the Arab world into 22 states as the unhappy
and unnatural outcome of deliberate efforts by Western
imperialism to prevent the re-emergence of Arab
greatness, a strategic theme stressed repeatedly by many
Arab leaders, including Saddam, who stressed the popular
theme in public statements all through his two decades
of power. In a press conference on November 10, 1980,
Saddam said, "[Foreign] powers are still trying in every
possible way to divide these 22 parts into at least
another 22 parts."
There is ample evidence that
Israeli policy on Arab resistance has picked up this
extension of the old "divide and rule" strategy of the
imperialist West. Oded Yinon, an Israeli foreign policy
advisor, in an article in Kivunim, February 1982,
singled out Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States for further division. An Israeli official
was quoted in the July 26, 1982 issue of Newsweek:
"Ideally, we'd like to see Iraq disintegrate into a
Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni community, each making war on
the other."
The British had successfully
practiced the "divide and rule" strategy in British
India, and to perpetuate British influence by fanning
the India/Pakistan divide after independence in 1947.
Malaysia and Singapore became two nations as a result of
British decolonization policy. The US has also employed
this geopolitical strategy all over Asia for almost six
decades after World War II, with North and South
Vietnam, North and South Korea and China and Taiwan,
behind the disingenuous ideological mask of democracy
versus communism, even though neither true democracy nor
true communism were practiced in these artificial
political entities divided primarily on the basis of
superpower geopolitics.
In Europe, the case for
a divided Germany was based on the geopolitical aim of
weakening Germany's prospect of dominating Europe in the
post-war world.
A by-product of World War II was
the rise of nationalism in the colonies. The US, under
the leadership of Franklin D Roosevelt, had no trouble
getting Congress to declare war on Japan after the
"surprise" attacks on Pearl Harbor, even though the
march toward war between a rising Japan and a US eager
to defend its expanding national interests in the
Pacific should be no surprise to anyone, but to convince
the American people to war against Germany, with the
pretext of Germany being an ally of Japan, World War II
had to be sold as a good war primarily on the promise of
the spread of democracy through decolonization of
European empires.
Churchill and the Iron
Curtain British premier Winston Churchill's
resistance to Roosevelt's war-justifying decolonization
commitments was encapsulated in his famous proclamation
that Britain did not fight the war to give the empire
away. Churchill, who developed a war-time fondness for
referring to the Allies, which included communist USSR
and fascist Nationalist China, as the Democracies, had
wanted to continue the war after the fall of Nazi
Germany to rid the world of communism and to keep the
British Empire in the name of democracy. The fact was
that democratic processes were largely suspended during
war time in the Democracies. Churchill had been
appointed prime minister by the king after the failure
of the Munich peace process and granted power without a
general election to lead a coalition war-time
government.
He had to face and lost the test of
democracy in a general election in 1945, immediately
after the end of the European phase of the war. Former
premier Margaret Thatcher wrote in her Path of
Power (1995): "Churchill himself would have liked to
continue the National Government at least until Japan
had been beaten and, in the light of the fast-growing
threat from the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then."
Churchill had wanted to perpetuate the suspension of
democracy in his own country for the purposes of
defending democracy against communism. A similar
development is taking place in the US, where after the
attacks of September 11, the Patriot Act was rushed
through Congress to defend democracy from terrorism by
wholesale suspension of democracy at home. Churchill's
shameful campaign attempts to compare a future Labour
government in Britain with Nazi Germany by warning that
a Labour government would introduce a Gestapo to enforce
socialism backfired, giving Clement Attlee a landslide
victory.
Having been rejected by voters at home
even before World War II completely ended in the Far
East part of the British Empire, Churchill, out of
office at home, worked on the US by inventing the
concept of an Iron Curtain in his famous speech on March
5, 1946 in little-known Westminster College in Fulton
Missouri, president Harry Truman's home state, and
convinced an insecure and paranoid Truman to launch the
Cold War.
A year later, on March 12, 1947, the
Truman Doctrine was proclaimed before a joint session of
Congress. It committed the US to protect Greece and
Turkey militarily from communism by noting that: "The
very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by
the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men,
led by communists ... It is necessary only to glance at
a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the
Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider
situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an
armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey,
would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder
might well spread throughout the entire Middle East."
Geopolitics had been the key consideration behind the US
response to terrorist activities.
In the Iron
Curtain speech that marked the beginning of the Cold
War, Churchill said: "The United States stands at this
time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn
moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy
in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability
to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not
only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel
anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement.
Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our
countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away
will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the
aftertime."
As Churchill correctly observed, the
US became the world sole superpower at the end of World
War II, before the start of the Cold War, not after its
end. Churchill with his own geopolitical agenda played
on the American national psyche of not ever wanting to
be an under-achiever. Churchill went on: "It is
necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of
purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall rule
and guide the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in
peace as they did in war. We must, and I believe we
shall, prove ourselves equal to this severe
requirement."
Grand simplicity of decision was
exactly what it was, unnecessarily plunging the world
into five decades of divisive misery and escalating
threats of nuclear annihilation by turning a war-time
ally into a peace-time ideological nemesis. It seems
that another grand simplicity of decision is now
plunging the world into another half century of misery
by the US finding in Islam a new deadly enemy and by its
declaration that those not with the US in its frenzied
broadside of uncontrolled rage are against it.
Churchill allowed: "I have a strong admiration
and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my
wartime comrade, Marshal [Josef] Stalin. There is deep
sympathy and goodwill in Britain - and I doubt not here
also - toward the peoples of all the Russias and a
resolve to persevere through many differences and
rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships. It is my
duty, however, to place before you certain facts about
the present position in Europe." Then he delivered the
punch line: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in
the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the
continent."
Then the justification for a Cold
War against communism: "The safety of the world, ladies
and gentlemen, requires a unity in Europe, from which no
nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the
quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the
world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in
former times, have sprung. Twice the United States has
had to send several millions of its young men across the
Atlantic to fight the wars. In a great number of
countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout
the world, communist fifth columns are established and
work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the
directions they receive from the communist center.
Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United
States where communism is in its infancy, the communist
parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge
and peril to Christian civilization."
Replace
communism with Islam extremism and you have the
neo-conservative argument for widespread regime change
as the main tool of the "war on terrorism". Samuel
Huntington was not the first to talk about a clash of
civilizations, notwithstanding that the early Christians
practiced communism for centuries before Rome co-opted
the religion. One may also now draw the parallel
conclusion that the safety of the world requires a unity
in the Arab nation.
Then Churchill made a pitch
for the permanent militarization of peace: "I repulse
the idea that a new war is inevitable - still more that
it is imminent. It is because I am sure that our
fortunes are still in our own hands and that we hold the
power to save the future, that I feel the duty to speak
out now that I have the occasion and the opportunity to
do so. I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war.
What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite
expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have
to consider here today while time remains, is the
permanent prevention of war and the establishment of
conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as
possible in all countries ... From what I have seen of
our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am
convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as
strength, and there is nothing for which they have less
respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.
For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power
is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work
on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of
strength ... If the population of the English-speaking
Commonwealth be added to that of the United States, with
all that such cooperation implies in the air, on the
sea, all over the globe, and in science and in industry,
and in moral force, there will be no quivering,
precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to
ambition or adventure. On the contrary there will be an
overwhelming assurance of security."
'Peace
through strength' That was the beginning of
Anglo-US unilateralism which has existed since the
beginning of the Cold War. The argument that the enemy
respects only strength has since been repeated by Israel
about the Arabs, and the neo-conservatives about Islam
extremists. Peace through strength has been the rallying
cry of the Anglo-US alliance ever since the end of World
War II.
Multilateralism, which some critics of
US foreign policy have of late accused the US under the
Bush administration of abandoning, is a recent
development after the end of the Cold War.
Multilateralism conflicts with the prerogatives of a
superpower except as a legitimizing device of superpower
status. Defenders of absolute US sovereignty espouse a
doctrine of US "exceptionalism", arguing that superior
US domestic institutions and law take supremacy over
international obligations to lesser states, and US
domestic standards of political legitimacy may require
opting out of certain international initiatives, such as
peaceful co-existence for states with difference
political/economic systems or cultural/religious values.
It is a fascist argument that associates military power
with moral superiority.
A structural impediment
to multilateralism in US foreign policy is a
constitutional separation of powers that grants the
executive and legislative branches joint control over
foreign policy. This shared mandate, absent in
parliamentary democracies, single-party polities and
theocracies, often complicates domestic confirmation of
multilateral commitments, particularly when the two
branches of government are controlled by opponent
political parties. Because the ratification of
international treaties or declaration of war requires
the concurrence of two-thirds of the US Senate, minority
political views, particularly extremist ones, frequently
can block US participation in multilateral proposals.
The form of democracy practiced in the US gives
disproportionate power to the swing vote, particularly
on controversial issues with no clear majority view,
allowing extremism to dictate policy by default. Since
the Watergate scandal of 1974 first weakened the
prestige and authority of the presidency, and during the
first post-Cold War decade when threats to national
survival were no longer perceived as imminent, Congress
reasserted itself in foreign policy formulation, making
use of its legitimate constitutional prerogatives to
compete with the leadership of executive branch to shape
the terms of US global engagement. The attacks on
September 11 revived the perception of clear and present
danger to national security and gave new impetus to
presidential leadership. Alas, instead of enlightened
leadership towards a harmonious world, US exceptionalism
now emanates from the office of the president, whose
occupant sees multilateralism as a form of weakness.
By labeling all post-World War II populist
nationalist movements in former colonies as communist
fifth columns, Churchill gave colonialism a second lease
on life after the good war to end colonialism. A new
"democratic" colonialism based on market capitalism was
fashioned out of insipid racist colonialism to play a
geopolitical role in resisting the spread of communism.
Local elites were allowed to join exclusive white clubs
as superficial signs of liberal progress. Discrimination
shifted from racial to poverty lines, while race and
poverty remained wed among the masses. Colonial jewels
in the British Crown, such as Hong Kong, suddenly were
presented as models of democracy and freedom while a
newly benign but still dictatorial colonial rule
continued for another half century. Mercantilism, a term
describing a trade regime to acquire national wealth in
the form of gold through the imposition of monopolistic
export of manufactured products onto colonies, was
replaced by neo-liberalism, a term describing a trade
regime of deregulated global financial markets to bypass
national economic sovereignty to exploit low wages and
failed markets beyond national borders. Just as
mercantilism was the main economic tool of colonialism,
neo-liberalism became the main economic tool of
neo-colonialism. Fortunately for the colonized world,
Churchill was removed from power in his home
constituency by the very democracy he tried to exploit
as a convenient tool for keeping the empire. Political
colonialism met a timely death in many former colonies,
but economic neo-colonialism lived on through
neo-liberalism. For the Middle East, the threat of Arab
nationalism to the British Empire gave the pre-World War
II Balfour Declaration a whole new geopolitical
perspective.
Back on November 2, 1917, Baron
Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, who virtually established a
family monopoly for the floating of large international
loans (The Crimea War Loan 1856), whose influence
Britain needed to help finance World War I, received a
short letter from Arthur Balfour, British foreign
minister. The letter stated that Britain "views with
favor" a Jewish homeland in Palestine, provided the
religious and ethnic rights of all sects and groups were
upheld. This simple three-paragraph letter, which came
to be known as the Balfour Declaration, was in many ways
similar to the Crimea war, involving a decision by a
Western power to give Arabic land in the Middle East to
Jews mostly from Europe and Russia without the
participation of the Arabs. Arab nationalism was not a
significant consideration in the initial geopolitics
behind the Balfour Declaration. A Jewish state in
Palestine under British mandate did not conflict with
British plans because the British never intended to give
back the Ottoman Arab provinces to the Arabs. With the
rise of Arab nationalism after World War II, Britain
began to see geopolitical utility in using the creation
of a Westernized Jewish state as an effective proxy to
combat rising Arab nationalism. The local problem of
Palestinian-Israeli conflict was hereafter framed in the
context of a new conflict between Western
neo-imperialism and Arab nationalism.
Arab
nationalism, and resistance Post-World War II
resistance by Arabs to foreign intervention and
domination in their affairs generally takes two forms
that share common diagnosis of the problem but are
diametrically opposed in proposed solutions. The
diagnosis is clear: the centuries-long decline of Arab
culture and power invites foreign intervention and
domination. The first form of response to arrest this
decline is Arab nationalism. History has shown that
European nationalism was the main vehicle for the rise
of the West. While recognizing the importance of Islam
in Arab culture, Arab nationalists feel that Islamic
fundamentalism, as a political ideology, does not fully
encompass the modern needs of the Middle East any more
than Christian fundamentalism encompassed the complete
needs of Europe. The reasons in support of this view are
complex, weaving around three obvious strands. The first
strand is that the region includes sizable non-Arab and
non-Muslim minorities that must be reckoned with in an
inclusive political structure. The second strand is that
there are fundamental differences of religious
interpretation within Islam that would present
difficulties, if not insurmountable obstacles, to
religion-based political unification. The history of
political developments associated with the rise of
Protestantism in Europe is an object lesson. The third
strand is that Islamic fundamentalism cannot effectively
adapt to the rapid changes facing the region and the
world and that resistance to change has been the chief
reason for the decline of Arab culture and power. The
history of the rise of the West is inseparably tied to
the steady long-term decline of Christian fundamentalism
since the 17th century.
Arab nationalists and
Islam fundamentalists are both opposed to
Westernization, but Arab nationalists are committed to
Arab modernization through secularization that would
also facilitate Pan-Arab unity. In this sense, Arab
nationalism's concept of modernization is comparatively
more progressive than that of US neo-conservatives who
attempt to move a secular modernity in the West back
toward revived Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. Yet while
secularization in Christianity decidedly promoted
Western advancement and progress, Islamic fundamentalism
has been encouraged by British imperialism since the
disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and by US
neo-imperialism since the end of World War II to retard
Arab revival. The real target is of course Arab
nationalism.
Nasirism, developed by Gemal Abd
al-Nasir of Egypt, had been generally accepted as the
main political manifestation of Arab nationalism, but
Ba'athism has evolved as a more effective political
movement in recent decades. In contrast to Nasirism as
espoused in Egypt, which relied more on leadership by
personality cult in a transfiguration of tribal
structure, Ba'athists operated with a high level of
discipline in political organization. Although Ba'athist
leaders are also inescapably tied to ritualistic
supremacy in the hierarchical tradition of tribal
culture, the Ba'ath Party is designed to continue to
function in the event of the leader's sudden demise or
ouster. Thus if the US aim was to remove from power an
unruly Ba'athist leader in the person of Saddam Hussein,
the de-Ba'athification program adopted after the 2002
second Iraq war was counterproductive. Iraq might be
governable without Saddam, but it cannot be governed
without the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, at least not without a
long period of social chaos and political instability
during which the US occupation regime would face
hostility with extreme prejudice and incur costly
payment in blood while it attempts to fashion a new
political landscape out of an unnecessary political
vacuum it itself created. US marginalization of the
Ba'ath Party from the Iraqi political arena will set
political stability in Iraq back for decades, with an
end game that may very well require a reconstitution of
the Iraqi Ba'ath Party.
Birth of the
Ba'athists The Ba'ath movement was created in
Damascus in the 1940s by an Arab Christian named Michel
Aflak and a Sunni Muslim named Salah ad-Din Bitar, both
Syrians, after World War II as a nationalist
anti-imperialism movement. In 1953, the movement
crystallized as the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. It
reached its operational zenith in the 1960s when it
evolved into a strong expression of Arab revolutionary
nationalism. Aflak remained a leader of the party until
his death in 1989. Pan-Arab unity is at the core of
Ba'athist ideology and dominates all other objectives.
Ba'athism advocates a tribal socialist system
domestically which emphasizes socio-economic development
for the benefit of greater Arab society. The party's
organizational structure is similar to communist
parties, which in turn is similar to the Roman Catholic
Church. The basic organizational unit of the Ba'ath
Party is the party cell. Composed of small membership,
party cells function at the urban neighborhood or the
rural village level, where members meet to formulate
tactics to implement strategic party directives. As in
communism and Catholicism, this type of organizational
structure particularly thrives during the underground
phase of the movement and cultivates members who are
committed, intelligent, moral and principled. At the
time of the first Iraq war in 1991, about 10% of Iraqis,
the cream of the population who effectively ran what was
arguably the most socially advanced and secular country
in the region, were estimated to be Ba'ath Party
members, many being younger generation members of
conservative anti-Ba'athist parents.
The Ba'ath
Party achieved political success first in Syria, but its
leaders were exiled in 1961 after Syria's Pan-Arab
experiment of a union with Egypt failed. Aflak and
others then relocated to Iraq. In 1963, the Ba'ath Party
succeeded in taking power in Iraq, but it failed to hold
power for long due to inexperience in public
administration. The party took power again in 1968 when
General Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr staged a coup, with Saddam
Hussein as deputy. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party remained
committed to a unified Arab nation, even though in
practice pressing domestic concerns within Iraq
commanded immediate attention. Nonetheless, Iraqi
foreign policy under Saddam had been significantly
motivated by Ba'ath ideology.
Aflak saw the
dispersed Arab peoples as a single nation the destiny of
which rests with the aspiration of becoming a single
state with its own independent role in the world as a
major power. Although persuaded of the importance of
secularity, Aflak recognized the indigenousness of Islam
to Arab culture and advocated socialism in a tribal
context. In the 1950s, the Ba'ath Party called for a
pluralist democracy and free elections in Arab
countries. Although it is not indifferent to the
Palestinian question, the Ba'ath Party has not taken it
up as a primary cause, as it takes the position that the
Palestinian question is only a putrid symptom of the
cancer of Arab disunity and that a strong united Arab
nation will be able to solve the local problem of
Palestine to satisfaction. Israel subscribes to a
similar view and treats Pan-Arabism as a lethal enemy to
the long-term survival of the Jewish state.
The
Ba'ath Party entered into active politics first in
post-World War II Syria where political instability
after independence produced frequent changes of
government. Ideology and organization of the party went
through changes in response to political events. The
turning point came in 1958, the year of the creation of
the United Arab Republic (UAR) by Egypt and Syria. The
Ba'ath Party accepted the dissolution of its Syrian
section as it shared Nasir's views on Arab and
international politics. The breakdown of the UAR in
September 1961 set off a long internal crisis in the
Ba'ath Party.
The failure of the UAR caused some
senior Ba'ath Party members to reconsider the pragmatic
obstacles to the high ideals of Pan-Arabism. In Syria,
those known as "Regionalists" led by Hafez al-Assad, as
opposed to the "Nationalists" who were more in favor of
a more universal Arab line, dominated the Syrian section
after the Regionalists gained power in 1963. Nationalist
founders of the Ba'ath Party, including Aflak, were
forced into exile. Two separate Ba'ath headquarters were
set up: a revisionist one in Damascus, the other in
Baghdad, where Aflak had found refuge after the Iraqi
Ba'ath Party had risen to power in July 1968, with
Saddam in a key position. In Iraq, Ba'ath Party ideology
directed state policy, the clearest illustration being
Iraq's recovery of Kuwait in 1990, which was seen by the
party as "a stage of Arab unification". US opposition to
the Iraqi recovery of Kuwait, developed only after it
had communicated to Iraq diplomatically an initial
posture of non-interference, was a delayed geopolitical
reaction against a major material advance in
Pan-Arabism, with the reluctant silent acquiescence of
many of the Arab Regionalists. The first Gulf war was
financed by and with active logistics support from Saudi
Arabia as the wealthy head of the Regionalist snake.
In Syria, under Article 8 of the constitution,
the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party is the leading party in
the state and society. It leads a national progressive
Front that works for uniting the potentials of the Arab
masses and placing them at the service of the objectives
of the Arab nation. The party's leadership of the Front
is embodied by its being represented by majority in the
Front's establishment. Hence, the chairman of the Front
is the secretary-general of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist
Party, and he is the president of the republic. The
Front decides on policy matters of war and peace. It
approves the five-year plans of the state, discusses
economic policies, and lays down the plans of national
socialist education, and leads the general political
orientation.
Paradoxically, with the party's
rise to state power in Syria and Iraq and with policies
in these state governments forced to respond to local
needs, Ba'ath ideology began to decline in influence in
the Arab world, contradicting its key political aim of
promoting Pan-Arab nationalism. However, its secular
approach along with its socialist ideals remain driving
forces in internal party politics.
Arab
fundamentalism A separate Arabic approach to
oppressive foreign domination is the notion that Islam
provides the guiding light for unity, despite
theological divergence in the form of Islamic modernism,
reformism, conservatism and fundamentalism. This
approach took on new appeal as religious fundamentalism
was encouraged by the US all over the world as an
effective force to combat secular communism. With the
threat of global communism subsiding after the Cold War,
a special bond between the opportunistic US and Islamic
fundamentalism lost adhesiveness and the strange
bed-fellowship fell into benign neglect by the sole
remaining superpower. With the post-Cold War spread of
the US global neo-liberal economic empire, Islamic
fundamentalism, fueled by its holding of the short end
of the economic stick, then turned its wrath toward US
neo-imperialism and neo-liberalism. Continued foreign
interference in the Islamic world poses profound
reactive consequences that push all Islamic movements to
adjust political goals with a return to the purity of
fundamental Islamic values.
Arab Islamic
fundamentalism has been centered in Saudi Arabia, where
the state religion is Wahhabism, an extreme form of
Sunni Islam fundamentalism out of which rose Osama bin
Laden, who would become leader of al-Qaeda, meaning "the
base" in Arabic, a guerrilla force sponsored and trained
originally by the US in Afghanistan to oppose the
Soviet-backed communist Afghan government. After the
Cold War, al-Qaeda turned its militancy against the US,
its erstwhile sponsor. Followers of Wahhabism are
opposed to communism: which they consider a profane
ideology formulated by a German Jew (Karl Marx);
Ba'athism: another profane ideology formulated by an
Arab Christian (Aflak): and Pan-Arabism: a secular
ideology that denies both the truth faith and tribal
culture. The Saudi Wahhabis believe it is God's will to
reveal the Koran (God's constitution) in Saudi Arabia
and god has blessed Saudi Arabia, the true defender of
the faith, with oil riches and tribal social harmony.
Saudi Arabia, for decades a closed society of minimal
social contradictions due to its homogenous tribal
culture and as a result of new prosperity brought on by
the sudden quadrupling of oil revenue after the 1973
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil
boycott, feels it needs no instruction from the decadent
West on democracy and social reform. The vicissitude of
its oil fortune in the 1990s, with oil prices falling
below US$10 per barrel, caused socio-economic stress
hitherto unfamiliar in God's kingdom and led Saudi
Wahhabis to blame the infidel US for interfering with
God's will. The rise of Wahhabism in the Muslim world
coincided with the revival of Christian fundamentalism
in the US, exacerbating the conflict, leading some to
superficially frame it as a clash of civilizations,
obscuring geopolitical factors.
The US, with its
foreign policy under the second Bush administration
hijacked by neo-conservatives supported by Christian
fundamentalists, blinded by its fixation on the need to
control Mid East oil and misguided by its dismissal of
the relevance of Arabic history and culture, made the
geopolitical error of misidentifying the secular Ba'ath
Party as its target enemy in its "war on a terrorism"
waged principally by Wahhabi extremists, such as
al-Qaeda.
Non-Arab Shi'ite Islam fundamentalism,
as espoused by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of
Iran, mistrusts both Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic
Sunni fundamentalism as parochial and anti-progressive
philosophies to the point of being obstructionist
against true faith and holy justice. This ideological
conflict between Arab nationalism and meta-Arab
borderless Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism was a major
cause for the decade-long Iran-Iraq war, in which Saudi
Arabia, despite its opposition to Arab nationalism,
provided substantial financial aid to Ba'athist Iraq
because the Saudis, who are fundamentalist Sunnis,
consider fundamentalist Shi'itism a worse enemy than
secular Arab nationalism.
The Saudis, like other
Regionalists, are not against Arab solidarity. Out of
self interest, they are weary of Arab nationalism in the
form of a unified Pan-Arab state. While both Arab
nationalism and all the diverse sects of Islamic
fundamentalism oppose Western political, economic and
cultural imperialism and neo-imperialism, there is no
convincing evidence that Arab nationalism is linked to
Wahhabi/al-Qaeda, the branch of terrorism on which the
US has focused its global "war on terrorism" after
September 11. Al-Qaeda is opposed to the Ba'ath Party of
Iraq and considered Saddam an evil infidel. In fact, the
2003 toppling of the secular Ba'athist government in
Iraq served to enhance both Sunni and Shi'ite extremist
Islamic fundamentalism in the region.
Britain
drawn to Iraqi oil Oil had emerged as a key
strategic consideration in post-World War I British
policy on Iraq as the British navy shifted from coal to
oil power. The British rushed troops to Mosul in 1918 to
gain control of the northern oil fields. Britain and
France clashed over Iraq's oil during the Versailles
Conference and after, with Britain eventually taking the
lion's share by turning its military occupation into
colonial rule. In 1921, Hashimite Prince Faisal of
Hejaz, now southwestern Saudi Arabia, was hand-picked to
rule Iraq by the British following the advice of
Gertrude Bell, a Middle East expert with the British
intelligence service who had worked with T E Lawrence
(Lawrence of Arabia). In keeping with British
co-optation of the institution of democracy as a devious
tool of neo-colonialism, Faisal was made to win a
British-staged one-time "popular" referendum on his
becoming king, with 96% of the votes counted, albeit in
the absence of any opposing alternative or candidate. It
was a tribal confirmation rather than a democratic
election. Faisal was declared king of Iraq on August 23,
as the history's only king "elected" by the people. In
picking the Hashimite monarchy, the British had hoped to
exploit the temporal legitimacy of the Islamic heritage
of the al-Hashim, who were Sunnis descended from the
Prophet Mohammed. As a condition for bogus independence
from direct British control, Iraq had to allow
unrestricted Royal Air Force operation within its
borders, give Britain land and resources to maintain
military bases, and "coordinate" foreign policy with the
British government to avoid conflicts with British
interests for the next 25 years. The US extracted
similar terms from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after
World War II.
The domestic interests of British
Iraq were based on assuring water supply, overcoming
land-locked transportation, and protection of oil wells
and oil export. The foreign policy of an independent
sovereign Iraq was not independent of similar domestic
needs. The only difference was that the larger
geopolitical objective of enhancing the security of
British India was no longer a factor, and that the
dissolution of British dominance over the entire region
meant regional interests were now based on Pan-Arabism,
and that for a sovereign Iraq independent of British
control, relations with its Arab and non-Arab neighbors
had different realities.
The new Iraqi state,
ruled by a British-appointed "elected" Sunni king did
not enjoy easy afterbirth, as Shi'ites in the south, who
made up nearly 60% of the population, and Kurds in the
north, who comprised 20% of the population,
predominantly Sunnis with Sufi influence, continued to
fight for their separate independence. The Sufi (woollen
robes) are a mystic group responsible for large-scale
conversion of Hindus and Africans into Islam. One
founder was Ahmad al-Qadiana, who lived in Cairo in the
eighth century and claimed to be an incarnation of
Allah. The schism between Shi'ites and Sunnis traces
back to the early days of Islam over the question of
succession to the caliphate. Shi'ites believe that the
person of the caliph should incorporate not only secular
but also religious or divine ideals. They recognize Ali,
the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, and his descendants
to be the legitimate successors after the Prophet's
death.
The Kurdish factor Although
the Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the
Middle East, religious, nationalistic, tribal, and
linguistic differences among them have obstructed their
unity, and in turn prevented them from fulfilling their
nationalist and separatist aspirations from their
separate host countries. The history of Kurdish
agitation dates back to 1800. The Kurdish question has
remained a persistent problem for governments in the
region, including that of Iraq, with echoes of the
Jewish question in Europe. Throughout the 20th century,
Iraq's various governments of different ideological
persuasions had conducted up to 10 military campaigns
against Kurdish guerrilla, some recent ones prior to the
two Iraq wars of the past decade, some conducted with
covert US help as part of its tilt toward Iraq in the
decade-long Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. In 1970, Iraq,
under Saddam, granted formal autonomy to Iraqi Kurds,
making political concession more extensive than those of
previous governments, allowing Kurdish guerrillas to
keep their arms, extend their influence territorially
and permitting access to the media. Kurdish resistance
over the decades had qualified as terrorist attacks on a
succession of Iraqi governments by any definition.
Kurds are people who live in a land called
Kurdistan, covering southeastern Turkey, northeastern
Syria, northern Iraq, western Iran, Azerbaijan and
Armenia. Kurds also live in central cities of all these
countries, as well as in European countries and the US.
Estimates on the number of Kurds vary widely, due to
reluctance of many Kurds to openly assume Kurdish
nationality in countries like Turkey and Iraq. Estimates
run between 15 and 25 million, where the majority live
in Turkey. Kurds speak Kurdish, a language of the
western Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages.
The clear majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but a
small group of less than 100,000 living in Iraq and in
small communities scattered in Turkey, Iran and Syria
are Yazidis, the so called "devil worshipers". The
Kurdish question illustrates clearly that a common
religious heritage does not prevent ethnic conflicts, as
the Sunni Kurds resist the rule of a Sunni Iraqi
government.
Yazidism is a syncretism of
Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and
Islamic elements. The Yazidi themselves are thought to
be descended from supporters of the Arabic Umayyad
Caliph Yazid I. They themselves believe that they are
created quite separately from the rest of mankind, not
even being descended from Adam, and they have kept
themselves strictly segregated from the people among
whom they live. Although scattered and probably
numbering fewer than 100,000, they have a well-organized
society, with a chief shaykh as the supreme
religious head and an amir, or prince, as the secular
head. The chief divine figure of the Yazidi is Malak
Taus (Peacock Angel), worshipped in the form of a
peacock. He rules the universe with six other angels,
but all seven are subordinate to a supreme god, who has
had no direct interest in the universe once he created
it. The seven angels are worshipped by the Yazidi in the
form of seven bronze or iron peacock figures called
sanjaq, the largest of which weighs nearly 700
pounds. Yazidi are anti-dualists; they deny the
existence of evil and therefore also reject sin, the
devil and hell. The breaking of divine laws is expiated
by way of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls,
which allows for progressive purification of the spirit.
The Yazidi relate that when the devil repented of his
sin of pride before God, he was pardoned and
re-installed in his previous position as chief of the
angels; this myth has earned the Yazidl an undeserved
reputation as devil worshippers, since the devil is no
longer a devil once he repented. Shaykh Adi, the chief
Yazidi saint, was a 12th century Muslim mystic believed
to have achieved divinity through metempsychosis, the
transmigration of soul from body to body.
In
Kurdistan, Kurds live predominantly in rural areas, and
among Kurds there are some who keep up nomadic and
semi-nomadic lifestyles, with the majority living in
agricultural villages and cities. Agriculture and sheep
herding are dominant in the rural Kurdish economy. Kurds
have lived under foreign rulers for centuries, and have
never in their history formed larger states or ruling
dynasties. In the 20th century, there were several
serious attempts to create a Kurdistan state. Kurds were
promised their own state after the World War I. This
Kurdistan was promised to be established on Turkish
territory. But this promise was never kept for obvious
geopolitical reasons.
From 1962 to 1970 and from
1974 to 1975, Iraqi Sunni Kurds fought against a
succession of Sunni Iraqi governments, with funds from
Shi'ite Iran based on a geopolitical agenda. The Kurds
gave up fighting as a precondition for a promise of
autonomy by the Iraqi Ba'ath government in 1970, and
after a normalization of relations between Iran and Iraq
in 1975. A Kurdish rebellion in Turkey started in 1984,
and still persists even when it failed, and keeps the
issue of self-determination as a thorn in the conscience
of the world community. A Kurdish rebellion in Iraq
started on the eve of the first Gulf war in 1991 with
the encouragement of the US, but was quickly suppressed
by the Iraqi army, forcing one million Kurds to flee to
Turkey. From 1992 to 1996, a zone in northern Iraq was
controlled by the United Nation, and this area was as
close as Kurds ever have been to their own state. The
region came back under Iraqi control in 1996 and after
that some Kurdish tribal chiefs became allied with
Saddam.
The Kurds have suffered recurring
attacks from their various host governments as
punishment for their separatist aspirations. US
condemnation of atrocities against Kurdish separatists
has been tempered by changing geopolitical
considerations. For example, the US repeatedly looked
the other way over Turkish attacks on the Kurds because
Turkey is a member of NATO. And US moral indignation
leveled at Saddam over his attacks of Iraqi Kurds began
only after the official demonization of Saddam, after
Iraq moved to repossess Kuwait. The reason for the
Western powers' reluctance to support the establishment
of a Kurdistan rests on its impact on existing regional
stability and balance of power, the geopolitical
importance of the region and the fact that such a
development would affect many states in the region. If a
Kurdistan was established in one country, neighboring
countries would regard this as a hostile act. In 1991,
the US could have taken steps to form a Kurdistan in
northern Iraq, but such moves would never have been
accepted by NATO member Turkey.
Iraqi
'independence' On October 10, 1922, Iraq was
forced to enter into a dependent alliance with Britain,
formalizing its protectorate status, with the world's
then superpower. Parliamentary elections were staged in
1925 to mask colonialism with bogus democracy, packing
the Iraqi legislature with reactionary, pro-British
local elite Anglophiles. Britain was granted by Iraqi
law the right to maintain military bases in Iraq with
the power to veto Iraqi legislation. The British
immediately began privatizing Iraqi national assets and
nurtured the political consolidation of a reactionary
land-holding class on the British Indian model,
resistance to which Tariq Ali in his Bush in Babylon:
The Recolonization of Iraq attributes the rise of
the Iraqi Communist Party and popular anti-British Iraqi
nationalism. With the ending of the British mandate in
1929, economic domination and control from London
continued through Faisal's pro-British puppet monarchy
and the institution of private property imposed on a
tribal culture. Concessions to search for oil on terms
not more equitable than the Dutch purchase of Manhattan
from Native Americans were granted to British companies.
A 1930 treaty declared that colonial Iraq would be
granted "independence" in 1932, notwithstanding that
true independence cannot be granted by a foreign
occupier, any more than true sovereignty can be
transferred by the current US occupational authority to
the US-appointed interim Iraqi government. Pilfering oil
concessions in the north were handed over to the
British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), in
which US and French firms were allowed token minority
positions to defuse inter-imperialist rivalry, with the
Iraqi monarchal government receiving fixed small yearly
royalties to satisfy the selfish greed of the puppet
royalty. IPC acted solely in the interests of the
Anglo-American oil cartel, holding down Iraqi production
to maximize the cartel's worldwide oil profits. IPC
operated as a monopoly of Iraq's oil sector until its
nationalization in 1972 during the Arab oil boycott.
Iraq was declared an "independent" kingdom on
October 3, 1932 with Faisal as king and admitted to the
League of Nations. A year later, Faisal died and was
succeeded by his 21-year-old son, Ghazi. When Ghazi
assumed power in 1933, he responded to nationalist
sentiments by changing course from his late father's
pro-British policy. Ghazi denounced British imperialism,
purged his government of British lackeys and claimed
Kuwait, even before oil was found there, as a
legitimate, integral part of Iraq's Basra province. By
1936, a Pan-Arab movement took hold in Iraq, with aims
of merging with neighboring Arab states. A treaty of
non-aggression was signed with Saudi Arabia. A
mysterious car crash in 1939 cut Ghazi's life and his
nationalist program short.
Throughout the early
1920s, Britain had suppressed rising nationalist
currents in Iraq with relentless force, claiming all the
while, as they did in 1914, to be "liberators, not
conquerors" to modernize and democratize a backward
nation. With Hindu troops from the British Empire of
India who harbored century-old genetic hatred for
Muslims, Britain sustained control of Iraq amid a
violent nationwide wave of revolts and anti-British
fatwas (religious decrees). During the bloodiest
six months of rebellion, some 2,000 British Imperial
Indian Regiment soldiers of the Hindu faith were killed,
insulating the British from heavy casualty to their
homeland Christian troops.
After the death of
Ghazi in 1939, resistance to British domination
continued and in 1941, a four-week long revolt was put
down mercilessly by the British with Churchill as prime
minister. British control of Iraq was firmly
re-established with the formation of a new pro-British
government, which declared war on the Axis powers in
1943. After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948,
Iraq joined other Arab states in their opposition to the
new pro-West, mostly European Jewish country imposed on
an Arab region by the victorious West, although the
degree of Iraq's commitment to the struggle against the
Jewish state fluctuated with the degree to which its
various governments managed to be independent from
Western control or pressure. Iraq considered the
creation of Israel as a symptom of tragic fate of Arab
disunity and that the problem can only be resolved
through Pan-Arabism, a view that is shared with
apprehension by many in Israel itself.
Despite
British containment of the Iraqi revolt in 1941, British
high commissioner Kinahan Cornwallis refused to send
British troops into Baghdad to restore order to put a
stop to the chaotic looting, rioting and violence
against the Jewish population in Baghdad, allowing as
many as 600 Jews killed and over 2,000 injured, adding
to the tragic cycle of violence between Arabs and Jews.
A replay of condoned anarchy was perpetrated on the
Iraqi nation by US forces after the fall of Baghdad in
2002 in the name of "catastrophic success", albeit
without the massacre of Jews, most having already
migrated to Israel.
After World War II, to
appease Iraqi nationalism, the British allowed
substantial increases of oil revenue for Iraq while
maintaining British control of Iraqi oil. King Faisal II
assumed the throne at age 26, having been only three
years old when his father died, but democracy was
nowhere to be found in Iraq or the Middle East.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
