What Noble Cause Did Casey Sheehan Die For?

What do you suggest be done at this point, OE?

Having served in Desert Storm and having seen first hand what Saddam and his thugs did,I would have been happy no matter WHO removed him.
They can install whatever govt THEY CHOOSE.
But the key words are THEY CHOOSE.

I see absolutely nothing here to object to.

I have. The Germans elected Hitler. They choose to have him.


Isn't saying "They are a souvereign nation (now, all of a sudden), they can have whatever form of government and constitution and law they want to have" just another form of, dareisayit, appeasement?

No

Why not?

Name the Hilter figure in Iraq to whom one abases oneself in appeasement.

By the way, the German people did not elect Hitler. In the 1932 elections, the NSDAP garnered 37% of the vote. Under the terms of the flaccid form of parliamentarianism common in Europe, they were therfore free to select their party leader to attempt to form a government. The weakness and indecision of the the other political parties made it impossible for them to set aside their sqabbling and form a government, so it was ridiculously easy for Hitler to sweep up disaffected members from the fringes of other parties and form a government, leaving no choice to Hindenburg but to appoint him Chancellor. The office of Chancellor as designed by Bismark gave him incredible power, and the Nazis did not stand upon the order of their going, they got busy and created the nightmare state of their dreams. It is more than a little naïve to baldly and simplistically state that "the Germans elected Hitler."

OE--

I don't think you have a grasp on the meaning of appeasement.

Somebody give me a nitro pill . . . i think this is the big one . . .


I completely agree with Lash.

Who could have imagined that of a guy named Old Europe?

(peed)

Interesting reaction.

Okay, to clarify: I think saying "the Germans elected Hitler" equals saying "the Iraqis want to have Sharia law in their constitution".

I don't think that that would be a valid statement. I cannot imagine why, for example, the women of a formerly secular state would want to have a legislation that would discriminate them. I can imagine why somebody would want to have it, though.

However, I cannot fail to notice, that while Iraq is propagated to be a souvereign nation when it comes to the constitution-drafting process, this seems to be somewhat different when it comes to American military presence.

Despite the eagerness of people on the right in the United States to claim that we were fighting "the war on terror" in Iraq, and constantly silly repetitions of "better to fight them there than here," the evidence points to a home-grown insurrection. Musab al Zarqawi had no affiliation with al Qaeda before the invasion, and the Iraqis claim his foreign fighters of "al Qaeda in Iraq" come largely from neighboring countries.

Without any credible evidence of a significant presence of "pre-existent" international terrorists, the inescapable conclusion is that the insurrection is largely, if not entirely, fomented by former Ba'atists and Sunnis whom they have not unreasonably convinced that "the worm is turning." After the overthrow of the monarchy, Iraq was ruled by a succession of leaders of minority Sunni "Arab" tribes, of whom Hussein was simply the most effective and successful. Sunnis have good reason to fear "pay back time." It is in the interest of Ba'atist to have a continually destabilized Iraq.

Given that there seems not to have been any plan for the "reconstruction" of Iraq in the original invasion plan, other than vague high-blown phrases, and a subtext of corporate croneyism, more than two years on, no effective Iraqi police force and national guard have been created who are capable, at present, of dealing with the insurrection. I have always held, since the invasion (the evidence is all over these fora), that on the principle of "you broke it, you fix it," we cannot in good faith abandon the country until such time as there is in place an effective government with the police, paramilitary and military resources necessary to assure their survival and prevent the nation disintegrating into civil war.

If you read current accounts of the constitution drafting process, it is plain that the current sticking point is federalism. There is no problem with the Kurds, as they've been granted a limited autonomy within a Federal system, and they've been sufficiently well organized and united for years. Sectarian conflict has never been very evident in Kurdistan. The problem is in how to deal with the Sunni "Arab" minority. Marginalizing them will assure the continuance of the insurrection, and might lead to full-blown civil war. Iraqi Shi'ites are the western fringe of Shi'ism in the Muslim world, and almost all of Iraq's neighbors are populated by Sunnis, any number of whom could be convinced to join a civil war. The one Shi'ite power in the world, Iran, is unlikely to want to become involved, although they likely would do all they could short of military involvement to prop up a Shi'ite state. The Persians ain't dumb, they know the roof would likely cave in on them if they actually attempted to intervene militarily in Iraq.

The biggest bright spot is that not only are the Sunni Iraqis a minority, the Ba'atists are representatives of tribal factions within that population, and there is not universal Sunni support for the insurrection. Some Sunni tribesmen work with American forces, usually sub rosa providing intelligence, but sometimes acting directly as guides and even fighting along side the Americans. The evidence is that it is possible that a comprehensive settlement acceptable to the majority of Sunni tribesmen could be accomplished. The possibility is not the problem, it's the probability.

I don't think the United States needs to or should pull out any time soon. I also think it unrealistic to expect that the Iraqis will solve a problem which no one has ever addressed in the slightly more than eighty year history of that nation. Former masters of "Mesopotamia," as in the Seljuk and Osmanli Turks, did not even attempt to make these people live together in peace. The last great hurdle for the Iraqis to surmount if an accomodation can be arrived at with the Sunni tribes will be to what extent the character of the new state will be secular. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and Iraq has been, more or less, secular for the lifetimes of most of the population. If once an accord is cobbled together between Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurd, the final battle will be between hard-line fundamental Islam and secularism.

It is ominously noteworthy that the founder of Shi'ism, Ali, son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet, when he came back from "the mother of all battles" in Persia, immediately clashed with the Companions over the issue of "infidels"--Sunni comes form the term sunna, meaning the modus vivendi of the ancient desert nomads for moving among the people of the oases and cities without violence. The Prophet adopted the term to describe how a righteous man could live among infidels. The Companions saw this as authorization for the ulama, the righteous (an alim is a man recognized by the community as righteous), to live among infidels who were not actually pagan. (That means Christians and Jews--it is little known that among the three Abrahamic religions, the Jews were earliest as proselitizers, and quite successful--a great many, and perhaps a majority, of Arabs were confessional Jews before the coming of Islam.) Ali was opposed to the toleration of any pagans or infidels. He was the fourth of the orthodox caliphs, and there were serious rebellions against him in his lifetime. Whether the majority of Shi'ites and Sunnis can learn to live in peace is one problem. Whether Shi'ism can tolerate any degree of secularism is the other major problem.

As for the Kurds, the great hero of Islam in the Crusades was Yusuf, Salah'al-Din--the Saladin of the Christian history. He was a Kurd. The Kurds are a relatively stable population politically, and a mostly autonomous state in Kurdistan could be a magnet for the people in the portions of Kurdistan which lie in the territory of Iran and Turkey (which is incidentally why the Turks have been less than enthused about this process). The Kurds could function to seal the deal, or to break it. Whatever role they play, their history suggests that they will fight if necessary, and that they will survive.

OE--

This is my distinction.

There must be a figure in a position of at least competing--or better, dominant-- power to appease or to cater to. Actually, in a scrimmage between the US and Iraq, only we could be appeased by them.

Iraq would have to have some threat over us in order to cause us to appease them. We're just allowing them to run their own show and hoping for the best.

You need CPR?


I have done PR - for the C you will need somebody else.

Setanta, you seem to know a lot of the history of Iraq (and other places) and seem to have a grasp on the political process going on now.

How do you figure this will all turn out? Do you think the Shiites will have their way of having a mostly Islamic state or will it be mostly a secular state? Or is that question completely unknowable at this point?

I agree with you and lash on the question of only Iraq deciding for themselves the conditions of their government. Otherwise this whole democracy experiment would be a sham on our part.

Well, i do rather think that it is unknowable--the secularism of the Ba'atist regimes benefited the tribal cronies of which ever tribal leader was in power at any given time. When the English ran Iraq as a League of Nations mandate, they gave extraordinary power to the Sunni tribal sheiks, and reduced their people to virtual serfs. They also gave the tribal sheiks judicial authority (although in line with prior casual practice, these sheiks had never before exercised real, civil judicial authority--it was truly an idiotic idea). They treated the urban poor and the middle class as though they were the mob in Paris in 1789, and a long and bloody insurrection ensued. A Hashemite monarchy had been established by putative plebiscite in 1921 (modern Arab scholars dispute the election process), and when the British mandate ended in 1932, Iraq was ostensibly an independent parliamentary monarchy.

But the Sunni sheiks were unwilling to give up the power they had now exercised for so long, and the monarchy was unstable. The return of the English in the Second World War propped up the monarchy, but contributed to discontent and an undercurrent of instability. England and the United States were focused on establishing a puppet monarchy in Persia to assure a route for supplies to the Soviet Union, and paid little heed to the situation in Iraq.

Since the Great War, a concept of "pan-Arabism" had been current among the political groups of the middle east. The Hashemite Kings of Jordan and Iraq, early in 1958, wanted to incorporate Kuwait (still an English possession) and form a single Hashemite monarchy, but faltered on the issue of which king got to be the one king. Jordan and Iraq were only technically united. Politically militant officers in Arab countries from Egypt to Iraq in the late 1940's had formed within each country an organization known as "the Free Officers," who did not necessarily espouse a political doctrine, but considered the monarchs to be puppets, and wanted the English out of the middle east.

After the humiliation of Arab forces in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the Free Officer organizations began to foment rebellion, but did not yet come out into the open. In 1952, Mohammed Naguib in Egypt toppled King Farouk's government and threw the English out for good. He was Sudanese, however, and he was quiety and respectfully told in no uncertain terms that an Egyptian would rule Egypt; he retired, and was revered as the leader of a successful Arab rebellion, but took no further part in politics. He was replaced by Gamal Abdel-Nassar, who preached pan-Arabism, and tried to form a pan-Arabic state, which did not really succeed, although for a few years, Syria and Egypt were nominally united as the United Arab Republic. In 1956, Nassar, supported by his two most militarily and politically effective subordinates--Anwar al-Sadat and Muhammad Hosni Said Mubarak--convinced the ruling military junta to grant him plenary powers, and to seize the Suez canal. The ensuing crisis, in which England and France sent airborne forces to seize the canal, and Eisenhower sent the fleet and Marines to the Lebanon to protect American interests and bolster Israeli defense, while refusing to join or support England and France, seriously destabilized the middle east.

In Iraq, the Free Officers then carefully plotted their own coup. The attempt of King Hussein of Jordan and Faisal II of Iraq to unite their states and seize Kuwait in 1958 created more instability and discontent, and the Free Officers succeeded in convincing the other officers of the army to join them or stand aside. In July, they seized Baghdad, and executed the King and his brother, then later captured and executed the Prime Minister. They repudiated the 1956 pact which had united Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, the United States and England in a feeble, NATO-like organization, but couldn't form a stable government--they were far less politically adroit than the Egyptians Nassar and Sadat, and had no program in advance. They did succeed in supressing the tribal sheiks who had taken Nassar's UAR and seizure of the canal as a signal for a general Arab uprising, but they failed of unity. In 1961, Iraq gave up the fiction of their union with Jordan. (It is a tribute to the skill and leadership of King Hussein that Jordan remained stable and peaceful in those trying times.) England granted independence to Kuwait, but thwarted Iraqi claims to the emirate by sending troops.

A new political organization arose from pan-Arabism in the 1950's, the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. Ba'ath means resurrection, and the party also envisioned pan-Arabism, but not necessarily rule from Cairo by Nassar. In Syria, they took over in 1963, ending the UAR, and they have ruled there ever since. They took over in Iraq at the same time, and significantly, used the discontent of the Sunni tribal sheiks to form a power base. Thereafter, the party, and therefore Iraq, was dominated by one tribal faction or another. Saddam Hussein was born near Tikrit, and he eventually took over the tribal power base there, calling himself "al Tikriti." Like all of the old-time tribal sheiks, Hussein rewarded support and punished opposition among the Sunnis, with the constant theme that only Sunni tribesmen mattered, and that the Kurds and Shi'ites could be ignored--unless they caused trouble, in which case they would be ruthlessly suppressed.

The tribalism of the Sunni Arabs was actually encouraged and maintained by the English during the mandate. The Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party exploited it to form a power base and seize power. All the Ba'athist leaders have used tribal support to maintain their regimes, but have been careless about exploiting and repressing other tribes. The Sunnis are an extremely unstable portion of the population, and as likely to fight among themselves as they are to war on the Kurds and Shi'ites. But they also have been the largest beneficiaries of Ba'athist secularism, and are unlikely to accept the imposition of an Islamic state by the Shi'ites, particularly as they see the Shi'ites as heretical.

Even this description lacks detail and oversimplifies much of the history of the region. But the point is that the outcome is indeed unpredictable, and that there are significant factions with a stake in an Islamic state, others in a secular state, and still others in a federal state with autonomous regions.

So, yes, the answer to the question is "unknowable." Or rather, there are too many powerful factors and factions to make a realistic prediction. Anyone who tells you they know what the outcome will be is talking through their hat.

Seems like an uphill battle no matter which way it goes. I am not going to pretend that I retained all that information. But I think enough to form an impression of the long struggle Iraq seemed to have to form an independent united government. Oddly enough Saddam's regime seemed to be the only successful one, although through sheer brute force and oppression.

Has anyone heard of the stampede on the Iraq bridge?

Yes. Freakish. They say 800 dead Shiites in the stampede. Someone at a protest rally scared the crowd--saying there was a suicide bomber.

I can't imagine that many people dead in one place.

Well, at all really, but especially in one place.

Horrible accident in Baghdad.