What Noble Cause Did Casey Sheehan Die For?

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.