Ritual Reality

Event Horizon

November 23, 2004

It's tempting at times to signify Iraq as "the situation in Iraq" or maybe "the war in Iraq" or "the war against terrorism and how it justifies bombing the fuck out of Iraq". However, simply put, Iraq is a mess and the mess is reality.

Anyone old enough to remember the "end" of the Viet Nam War knows what it means to witness a seemingly endless conflict draw to a close. It's a surreal experience on many levels. One day the Fearless Leaders proclaim inevitable victory and the next day people grasp at helicopter skids as the last chopper powers away from the rooftop. Real people, from innocents to cognisants to conspirators, get lost in the propeller wash. Chaos. Helicopters swarming the carrier decks, dumped into the ocean to clear the decks for the next wave, human cargo spilling out like ants, the fortunate, the canny, the connected. Meltdown and retreat. Defeat.

Iraq is headed toward the event horizon. At some point the Bush Administration is going to make decisions that bring the entire horrific episode to a close--at least as far as American involvement is concerned. But the day is coming. Iraq is not going to be pacified. That much is clear. Just today NPR is reporting that the 3rd Infantry Division is being primed for a return to Iraq, a re-invasion 20 months after the same force thundered across the desert and into Baghdad. Mere days after the horrific assault on Fallujah is declared a resounding success, attacks across central Iraq beget American and British military crackdowns--Mosul, Jabella, Anbar. They call it the Triangle of Death, the hotbed of Hussein loyalists insurgency. If Viet Nam was a quagmire, Iraq is quicksand and tar pits. The USA either pulls out or risks occupation without end. This strategy cannot succeed. The Bush Administration is busily strangling our federal government, which some of its advisers have publically advocated as desirable, racking up record deficeit spending and declaring it our patriotic duty to pour billions more into the endless conflict in Iraq. And we are doomed to repeat history.

Edwin Black, author of the recently released Banking on Baghdad, Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict, had this to say in a Chicago Sun-Times article published on November 21:

America cannot succeed in Iraq until we understand the history we ignored and recently repeated. For the past century, Iraq has offered only one attraction to the Western powers: oil. It has been a fatal attraction.

During World War I, Britain invaded Mesopotamia (as the three neglected Turkish provinces were called) for oil and only for oil. Despite this, the British declared in their May 18, 1918, proclamation, read aloud in Baghdad: ''Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.''

As part of that liberation, the British illegally seized the most valuable oil lands in Mesopotamia, the Kurdish Mosul region, this on Nov. 7, 1918, a full week after the general armistice with Turkey. This invasion enabled Britain to cobble three ethnically separate provinces together -- Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad and Shiite Basra -- into a single land that London would rename Iraq. The name ''Iraq'' came from the ancient Arab cartographic designation.

The British then established Iraq as a nation for the sole purpose of structuring the exploitation of its oil. Arnold Wilson, the British civil administrator of Mesopotamia, the man who authorized General William Marshall's unauthorized push into Mosul, wrote, ''Thanks to General Marshall, we had established de facto, the principle that Mosul is part of 'Iraq,' to use the geographical expression. . . . Whether for the woe or weal of the inhabitants, it is too soon to say.'' Wilson added that, had General Marshall waited just 24 hours for the restraining instructions from London to arrive, history would be otherwise. But, Wilson continued, Marshall did not wait to invade Mosul, and so ''laid the foundation stone of the future State of Iraq.''

But Arab and Islamic nationalists in the newly invented Iraq did not want to share their land with infidel European Christians. Nor did they choose to share European values of democracy and pluralism, ideals that had never taken root in the Islamic Middle East for 7,000 years. It did not take long for the Iraqis to rise up in terror raids, burning, bombing, kidnapping and massacring Westerners, including those sent to commercially develop the land and its waterways.

Source

Like the equally disastrous Anglo-American "social engineering" in Iran that led, after years of unrest and persecution, to the rise of fundamentalist government there and its theocratic sanctioning of violence and terror, the British atrocities in Iraq led more or less directly to the rise of Saddam Hussein. A strongman, chieftain, and brutal oppressor of the people of Iraq. Hussein was "our man" and then he wasn't. Unhinged and power-mad, Hussein eventually overstepped his bounds and was brought down. As always, the Iraqi people suffer most. Black again:

The outraged British response to such horrors was aerial bombardment to shock and awe the villages. But the Iraqi violence and the British resolve to combat it with troops and tanks persisted, all for the oil wealth of Iraq.

After World War I, the British and the French, becoming ever more dependent upon oil, engineered a secret petroleum pact, sanctioned by the League of Nations, which divided up oil drilling and pipeline rights in Syria and Iraq. The oil pact was announced at San Remo the same day the League of Nations granted mandates to Britain to rule oil-rich Iraq, and France to rule Syria where the pipelines would run to the Mediterranean. The British worked hard to instill democratic values in Iraq, thus creating a stable environment for the oil to flow. But it was a governance disaster because the people did not want it. Genocide against minorities, ethnic cleansing, repression, corruption and neglect were the rule in Iraq for years.

Another, more recent episode in history looms over the bloody American actions in Iraq; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The then-rival superpower never recovered from the protracted occupation of that country and was rent asunder by the ensuing chaos. It is unlikely that the USA would suffer a similar fate, for numerous reasons, but it's almost certain that the greater aims of the neocons infesting the Bush Administration won't be realized. Quietly, some of the hawks circling the beltway are advocating the withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq. To say this is a pragmatic view is an understatment. Beneath the measured tones is a sense of urgency.

A growing number of national security specialists who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein are moving to a position unthinkable even a few months ago: that the large US military presence is impeding stability as much as contributing to it and that the United States should begin major reductions in troops beginning early next year.

Their assessments, expressed in reports, think tank meetings, and interviews, run counter to the Bush administration's insistence that the troops will remain indefinitely to establish security. But some contend that the growing support for an earlier pullout could alter the administration's thinking.

Those arguing for immediate troop reductions include key Pentagon advisers, prominent neoconservatives, and some of the fiercest supporters of the Iraq invasion among Washington's policy elite.

The core of their arguments is that even as the US-led coalition goes on the offensive against the insurgency, the United States, by its very presence, is stimulating the resistance.

Source

What this newfound pragmatism ignores, of course, is the number of Iraqi civilians murdered and maimed, terrified and displaced by the ongoing conflict. Estimates of civilians murdered by American military actions range from 16,000 to 100,000. As the resistance grows--and it surely will--there's no telling how many Iraqis will wind up caught in the crossfire. For this reason alone, the Bush Administration should abandon its overarching scheme of exploiting Iraqi oil resources and stabilizing the Middle East.

You've failed, President Bush, in spectacular fashion. You brought this down out of sheer arrogance. You and your cronies lied about the rationale for war, you continue to lie about Iraq's significance in your chimerical war on terrorism, and you're lying to yourself about its success and the eventual benefits. You risk engulfing the entire region in a massive, endless conflict and dismiss criticism with a smirk and a swagger. You ignore the building threat to Americans, who are and will be the most accessible and vulnerable targets of any future terrorist actions, and demand we sacrifice young men and women for a cause that is as futile as is it bloody. You are an amoral and arrogant elitist frittering away the chance to use our nation's boundless creativity and wealth in order to prop up a handful of multinational corporations and a wasteful, rapacious energy policy. And the greatest travesty, should the worst of worst case scenarios manifest, is that you will be among those protected, coddled, whisked away to some secret bunker in the interest of Continuity of Government while the American citizens, for whom you profess such deep abiding affection, eat shit.

Oh, and I've been meaning to ask you this; did you get a flu shot, President Bush?