Bahrain was also once ruled by the Safavids. Bordering Saudi Arabia, it is ruled by a Sunni king who suppressed the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrations of Shiites against religious discrimination by calling in Saudi forces. (The U.S., which bases its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, made no protest when Saudi forces invaded in March 2011 to crush the peaceful protests.) In Iraq the Shiite population is concentrated in southern Mesopotamia, nestled against Irans Khuzestan province with its large ethnic Arab population. There are large Shiite minorities in Yemen (especially in the north, bordering Saudi Arabia), Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and some other Arab countries, and millions in India and Pakistan. The Syrian leadership around the vilified Bashar al-Assad is mostly Alawites, members of a sect considered a Shiite spin-off.
In the early 1920s following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, victorious British and French imperialists divided Ottoman territory among themselves, creating new countries. They paid no attention to the question of historical religious divides, or if they did, they used them to divide and conquer. The French colonialists established for a time a separate Alawite state in Syria, and considering the Alawites and Druze the only warlike races the region, recruited them into their army for use against rebellious Sunnis. This is the origin of the current Alawite hegemony in Syrian politics.
Meanwhile the colonialists created modern Iraq out of an Arab Sunni-dominated west and Arab Shia-majority south-east, and a Kurdish region to the north. They split off Kuwait to serve as a compliant oil supplier. Iraq made no real sense as a country, any more that Nigeria or Sudan did. The people themselves were not consulted. Had they been, there would perhaps have been a very different regional configuration, including a Kurdish state straddling what is now Turkey, Syria, and Iran.
The British having cultivated the Wahhabi Sunni leadership of Arabia installed Sunni kings in Jordan and Iraq. In the latter country, this occasioned a rare joint Sunni-Shiite uprising that with Prime Minister Winston Churchills fervent approval was crushed with bombs and mustard gas. Iraqs last king was overthrown in a republican revolution in 1958. Then the Iraqi branch of the Arab Baathist Party took over.
This party had been formed in the 1940s in Syria by Syrian Christians and Muslims. Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawite, was co-founder. The Baathists were committed to secularism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism (meaning the development of independent national economies). The Alawites of Syria have never been interested in establishing a religious state but rather have used the Baathist party to establish religious inclusiveness and prevent the emergence of a Sunni-dominated religious state. Bashar al-Assads father even attempted to change the constitution to remove the stipulation that the Syrian president be a Muslim. (This occasioned a massive Sunni uprising in Homs which he brutally crushed in 1982.)
During the 1950s the U.S. embraced the Baath party as the only alternative to communism (the Iraqi Communist Party was the largest in the Middle East) and Islamism. Its view changed after the 1967 war, when Washington came to see the Middle East through Israels eyes and bought the Israeli line that Baghdad was a sponsor of terrorism. The U.S. might still occasionally differ with Israel (as when the Reagan administration condemned the Israeli bombing of the Iraqs Osirak nuclear reactor in 1982). It might even align itself with Iraq, as it did from 1980 to 1988 when Iraq was fighting a war of aggression against Iran. But (especially as the neocons gained ascendency in the regime) Washington sought regime change. President George W. H. Bush did not obtain this during the 1991 assault on Iraq, thinking (quite accurately) that the fall of Saddams Baathist government would produce regional disorder. But his son used the 9/11 attacks to one-up his dad and accomplish a long-held ambition.
George Dubya Bush gleefully destroyed the Iraqi state. He smashed a state in which Christians served in high posts, women attended college and felt free to leave their heads uncovered, rock n roll blared from radios, liquor stores operated legally, and there was even a gay scene. He replaced it with an occupation run by clueless cowboys literally marching around Baghdad in cowboy boots, issuing ordersmost notably the orders of dissolution of the Baathist Party and the Iraqi Army.
But these were the main vehicles of power for the Sunnis, currently about 20% of the Iraqi population. (Again, theyd been chosen by the Brits as the appropriate leaders of Iraq, quite unfairly in the 1920s.) These were secular institutions, not tools for the propagation of any theology. Their dissolution was an attack, not on a religious belief system (about which the Occupation could have cared less), but on the Sunni community that had provided Saddam Husseins support base and dominated his regime.
The Sunnis violently resisted the Occupation. The Shiites, sensing opportunity, stood by looking sullen, then in response to Ayatollah al-Sistanis call, mounted peaceful protests, demanding elections. After the Abu Ghraib torture photos scandalized the world, the U.S. was forced to allow elections for an Iraqi advisory body, dominated by Shiites, and to return sovereignty to a now-Shiite led regime in 2009. Meanwhile a Sunni-Shiite civil war broke out. The U.S. had opened a Pandoras Box of ethnic strife, which continues. It is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian free-lance terrorist, decided to establish an Al-Qaeda branch in Iraq. He found ample support among the Sunnis of Anbar Province. His group was largely chased out during the U.S. surge of 2007, but found a home in Syria. In 2011, during the ill-fated Arab Spring, a pro-democracy, anti-corruption protest movement erupted in Syria. Obama announced that President Bashar Assad must resign. (Why? Here was another secularist, another Baathist, presiding over another country where women dress in Western fashions, go to college, drink beer and listen to rock n rolla country striving for a normalized relationship with the U.S. but spurned by the State Department due to its opposition to Israel, which illegally occupies its Golan Heights, and due to its alliance with Iran).
The peaceful movement vanished, supplanted by a multi-headed armed insurrection dominated by al-Qaeda affiliates and spin-offs that capitalized on Assads religious identity. While Syria obviously has a very different government system than Iran, it receives support from Tehran in part due to religious solidarity. Both Damascus and Tehran fear the sort of militant Sunni Islamism represented by al-Qaeda and ISIL, and both support the powerful Lebanese Shiite party Hizbollah.
ISILhaving been spurned by al-Qaeda Central as too murderously violentcame to dominate the anti-Assad movement in Syria, challenging the al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, and the negligible U.S.-backed moderates. Then, suddenly, to the great consternation of the U.S. State Department, it advanced into Iraq, taking Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah and approaching Baghdad, beheading Shiites all the way.
The chickens have indeed come home to roost. The neocons ignorant of Islamic divisions, eager to remake the Middle East as they pleased, have let the genie of sectarian strife out of the bottle. But they will never acknowledge it. Lets not dwell on the past, they say, when asked about events in 2003. We need to focus on this new threat to the Homeland. When asked why Iraq is such a mess, they reply: They squandered the opportunity [for democracy etc.] that we gave them. In other words, in their weird little age-old religious disputes over arcane issues worthy of Trivial Pursuit, the Iraqis brought this chaos on themselves, and now we, as the responsible adults, have to go in and straighten things out. (This despite the fact that Iraq has a 270,000-strong army trained by the U.S. at the cost of $ 17 billion. It buckled when confronted with ISIL and Baghdad has only been saved by Shiite militias that once fought occupation troops.)
Meanwhile all significant anti-Assad Syrian factions, hitherto at war with one another, have just signed a non-aggression pact. It will remain in effect until the regime led by Nussayri (a disparaging term for Alawites) is overthrown. Obamas announcement that he will bomb Syria has driven these factions to unitenot that there werent earlier ties. The (small) U.S.-backed so-called Free Syrian Army has been intermittently allied with the (al-Qaeda) al-Nusra Front. The family of Steven Scotloff states that the journalist was sold by moderate Syrian rebels to ISIS for $25,000. Youd think the U.S. would learn that it cant just snap its fingers and produce a Syrian opposition that stands for religious tolerance and democracy, regards the U.S. as a true friend, and wont in its determination to drive out Assad align itself with the worst of the fundamentalist brutes. Such suppositions are the height of neocon arrogance.
While the Syrian Foreign Ministry has actually welcomed U.S. strikes against ISIL in the country, the president (and the Russians) have said they would be viewed as attacks on the Syrian state if not coordinated with Damascus. John Kerry rules such cooperation out, declaring Assads regime (despite the recent multiparty election, in which Assad received 88% of the votes) illegitimate. He further spurns a French suggestion that Iran be invited to a conference in Paris on Sept. 15 to discuss an international response to ISIL. Kerry, in his wooden way, responds: The United States does not cooperate, militarily or otherwise, nor does it have any intention in this process of doing so, with Iran.
(The Iranian deputy foreign minister retorted that the Paris meeting has a selective guest list and is just for show.)
Thus the U.S., waging war on regional secularists like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, thereby provoking sectarian war, declares it can defeat anti-Shiite Sunni extremism relying on Sunni allies (including the Shia-phobic, Sharia-implementing, adulteress-stoning Saudis) and European crusaders, plus (maybe) some Sunni Turksalongside the mostly Sunni Kurdish peshmerga, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the so far embarrassing Iraqi Army. And at the same time it plans to build some reliable puppet force to topple Assad and (largely in response to Israeli demands) maintain pressure on Iran to end a non-existent nuclear weapons program or face bombing. The plan is patently unworkable and doomed.
We will not be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq, declares Obama (as though some external force had once hauled a reluctant U.S.kicking and screaminginto the last war). But he has indeed announced a campaign of indefinite bombing of Iraq and Syria, and now his spokesman Josh Earnest declares,In the same way that we are at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe, we are at war with ISIL.
Obama, wanting to show some balls last August when he nearly attacked Syriabut thwarted in that effort by public opinion and deft Russian diplomacyhas now opted to play the reluctant warrior by vowing to eliminate ISIL. He enjoys the near full support of the political class and the captive media. Public opinion polls even show a third of the people favoring boots on the ground.
How malleable people are! How soon they forget.
The air (and probably, coming ground) campaign against ISIL will inevitably be viewed by millions as a war of Washington, its Iraqi Shiite allies (and just possibly in time, a new-found shadow ally, Iran) and corrupt pro-U.S.hence apostateSunni kings against the Sunni world. Its a recipe for disaster.
If the U.S. were not controlled by the 1% wedded to the military-industrial establishment, and if common sense were the operative principle, it would make sense to refrain from any military action, leaving it to the Iraqi and Syrian people to deal with these new oppressors, perhaps with local powers support. The record shows that U.S. military actions in the Middle East produce no good but rather lots of harm. Rooted in the quest for imperial expansion, shaped by deep ignorance of history and profound disrespect for the peoples affected, they produce mounting hatred for this country, and intensified prospects for blowback.
GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
In the early 1920s following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, victorious British and French imperialists divided Ottoman territory among themselves, creating new countries. They paid no attention to the question of historical religious divides, or if they did, they used them to divide and conquer. The French colonialists established for a time a separate Alawite state in Syria, and considering the Alawites and Druze the only warlike races the region, recruited them into their army for use against rebellious Sunnis. This is the origin of the current Alawite hegemony in Syrian politics.
Meanwhile the colonialists created modern Iraq out of an Arab Sunni-dominated west and Arab Shia-majority south-east, and a Kurdish region to the north. They split off Kuwait to serve as a compliant oil supplier. Iraq made no real sense as a country, any more that Nigeria or Sudan did. The people themselves were not consulted. Had they been, there would perhaps have been a very different regional configuration, including a Kurdish state straddling what is now Turkey, Syria, and Iran.
The British having cultivated the Wahhabi Sunni leadership of Arabia installed Sunni kings in Jordan and Iraq. In the latter country, this occasioned a rare joint Sunni-Shiite uprising that with Prime Minister Winston Churchills fervent approval was crushed with bombs and mustard gas. Iraqs last king was overthrown in a republican revolution in 1958. Then the Iraqi branch of the Arab Baathist Party took over.
This party had been formed in the 1940s in Syria by Syrian Christians and Muslims. Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawite, was co-founder. The Baathists were committed to secularism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism (meaning the development of independent national economies). The Alawites of Syria have never been interested in establishing a religious state but rather have used the Baathist party to establish religious inclusiveness and prevent the emergence of a Sunni-dominated religious state. Bashar al-Assads father even attempted to change the constitution to remove the stipulation that the Syrian president be a Muslim. (This occasioned a massive Sunni uprising in Homs which he brutally crushed in 1982.)
During the 1950s the U.S. embraced the Baath party as the only alternative to communism (the Iraqi Communist Party was the largest in the Middle East) and Islamism. Its view changed after the 1967 war, when Washington came to see the Middle East through Israels eyes and bought the Israeli line that Baghdad was a sponsor of terrorism. The U.S. might still occasionally differ with Israel (as when the Reagan administration condemned the Israeli bombing of the Iraqs Osirak nuclear reactor in 1982). It might even align itself with Iraq, as it did from 1980 to 1988 when Iraq was fighting a war of aggression against Iran. But (especially as the neocons gained ascendency in the regime) Washington sought regime change. President George W. H. Bush did not obtain this during the 1991 assault on Iraq, thinking (quite accurately) that the fall of Saddams Baathist government would produce regional disorder. But his son used the 9/11 attacks to one-up his dad and accomplish a long-held ambition.
George Dubya Bush gleefully destroyed the Iraqi state. He smashed a state in which Christians served in high posts, women attended college and felt free to leave their heads uncovered, rock n roll blared from radios, liquor stores operated legally, and there was even a gay scene. He replaced it with an occupation run by clueless cowboys literally marching around Baghdad in cowboy boots, issuing ordersmost notably the orders of dissolution of the Baathist Party and the Iraqi Army.
But these were the main vehicles of power for the Sunnis, currently about 20% of the Iraqi population. (Again, theyd been chosen by the Brits as the appropriate leaders of Iraq, quite unfairly in the 1920s.) These were secular institutions, not tools for the propagation of any theology. Their dissolution was an attack, not on a religious belief system (about which the Occupation could have cared less), but on the Sunni community that had provided Saddam Husseins support base and dominated his regime.
The Sunnis violently resisted the Occupation. The Shiites, sensing opportunity, stood by looking sullen, then in response to Ayatollah al-Sistanis call, mounted peaceful protests, demanding elections. After the Abu Ghraib torture photos scandalized the world, the U.S. was forced to allow elections for an Iraqi advisory body, dominated by Shiites, and to return sovereignty to a now-Shiite led regime in 2009. Meanwhile a Sunni-Shiite civil war broke out. The U.S. had opened a Pandoras Box of ethnic strife, which continues. It is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian free-lance terrorist, decided to establish an Al-Qaeda branch in Iraq. He found ample support among the Sunnis of Anbar Province. His group was largely chased out during the U.S. surge of 2007, but found a home in Syria. In 2011, during the ill-fated Arab Spring, a pro-democracy, anti-corruption protest movement erupted in Syria. Obama announced that President Bashar Assad must resign. (Why? Here was another secularist, another Baathist, presiding over another country where women dress in Western fashions, go to college, drink beer and listen to rock n rolla country striving for a normalized relationship with the U.S. but spurned by the State Department due to its opposition to Israel, which illegally occupies its Golan Heights, and due to its alliance with Iran).
The peaceful movement vanished, supplanted by a multi-headed armed insurrection dominated by al-Qaeda affiliates and spin-offs that capitalized on Assads religious identity. While Syria obviously has a very different government system than Iran, it receives support from Tehran in part due to religious solidarity. Both Damascus and Tehran fear the sort of militant Sunni Islamism represented by al-Qaeda and ISIL, and both support the powerful Lebanese Shiite party Hizbollah.
ISILhaving been spurned by al-Qaeda Central as too murderously violentcame to dominate the anti-Assad movement in Syria, challenging the al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, and the negligible U.S.-backed moderates. Then, suddenly, to the great consternation of the U.S. State Department, it advanced into Iraq, taking Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah and approaching Baghdad, beheading Shiites all the way.
The chickens have indeed come home to roost. The neocons ignorant of Islamic divisions, eager to remake the Middle East as they pleased, have let the genie of sectarian strife out of the bottle. But they will never acknowledge it. Lets not dwell on the past, they say, when asked about events in 2003. We need to focus on this new threat to the Homeland. When asked why Iraq is such a mess, they reply: They squandered the opportunity [for democracy etc.] that we gave them. In other words, in their weird little age-old religious disputes over arcane issues worthy of Trivial Pursuit, the Iraqis brought this chaos on themselves, and now we, as the responsible adults, have to go in and straighten things out. (This despite the fact that Iraq has a 270,000-strong army trained by the U.S. at the cost of $ 17 billion. It buckled when confronted with ISIL and Baghdad has only been saved by Shiite militias that once fought occupation troops.)
Meanwhile all significant anti-Assad Syrian factions, hitherto at war with one another, have just signed a non-aggression pact. It will remain in effect until the regime led by Nussayri (a disparaging term for Alawites) is overthrown. Obamas announcement that he will bomb Syria has driven these factions to unitenot that there werent earlier ties. The (small) U.S.-backed so-called Free Syrian Army has been intermittently allied with the (al-Qaeda) al-Nusra Front. The family of Steven Scotloff states that the journalist was sold by moderate Syrian rebels to ISIS for $25,000. Youd think the U.S. would learn that it cant just snap its fingers and produce a Syrian opposition that stands for religious tolerance and democracy, regards the U.S. as a true friend, and wont in its determination to drive out Assad align itself with the worst of the fundamentalist brutes. Such suppositions are the height of neocon arrogance.
While the Syrian Foreign Ministry has actually welcomed U.S. strikes against ISIL in the country, the president (and the Russians) have said they would be viewed as attacks on the Syrian state if not coordinated with Damascus. John Kerry rules such cooperation out, declaring Assads regime (despite the recent multiparty election, in which Assad received 88% of the votes) illegitimate. He further spurns a French suggestion that Iran be invited to a conference in Paris on Sept. 15 to discuss an international response to ISIL. Kerry, in his wooden way, responds: The United States does not cooperate, militarily or otherwise, nor does it have any intention in this process of doing so, with Iran.
(The Iranian deputy foreign minister retorted that the Paris meeting has a selective guest list and is just for show.)
Thus the U.S., waging war on regional secularists like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, thereby provoking sectarian war, declares it can defeat anti-Shiite Sunni extremism relying on Sunni allies (including the Shia-phobic, Sharia-implementing, adulteress-stoning Saudis) and European crusaders, plus (maybe) some Sunni Turksalongside the mostly Sunni Kurdish peshmerga, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the so far embarrassing Iraqi Army. And at the same time it plans to build some reliable puppet force to topple Assad and (largely in response to Israeli demands) maintain pressure on Iran to end a non-existent nuclear weapons program or face bombing. The plan is patently unworkable and doomed.
We will not be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq, declares Obama (as though some external force had once hauled a reluctant U.S.kicking and screaminginto the last war). But he has indeed announced a campaign of indefinite bombing of Iraq and Syria, and now his spokesman Josh Earnest declares,In the same way that we are at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe, we are at war with ISIL.
Obama, wanting to show some balls last August when he nearly attacked Syriabut thwarted in that effort by public opinion and deft Russian diplomacyhas now opted to play the reluctant warrior by vowing to eliminate ISIL. He enjoys the near full support of the political class and the captive media. Public opinion polls even show a third of the people favoring boots on the ground.
How malleable people are! How soon they forget.
The air (and probably, coming ground) campaign against ISIL will inevitably be viewed by millions as a war of Washington, its Iraqi Shiite allies (and just possibly in time, a new-found shadow ally, Iran) and corrupt pro-U.S.hence apostateSunni kings against the Sunni world. Its a recipe for disaster.
If the U.S. were not controlled by the 1% wedded to the military-industrial establishment, and if common sense were the operative principle, it would make sense to refrain from any military action, leaving it to the Iraqi and Syrian people to deal with these new oppressors, perhaps with local powers support. The record shows that U.S. military actions in the Middle East produce no good but rather lots of harm. Rooted in the quest for imperial expansion, shaped by deep ignorance of history and profound disrespect for the peoples affected, they produce mounting hatred for this country, and intensified prospects for blowback.
GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
