Iraq: Taming the Orient (II)

Iran,” she said. “By stirring up sectarianism, attacking Shia people, [and] attacking Christians, they are making it impossible for Iraq to exist as a coherent unified nation. That’s exactly what certain interests including Zionists and extreme imperialists want. They would like to break up Iraq into three pieces so that the Israelis could grab the […]

Iran,” she said. “By stirring up sectarianism, attacking Shia people, [and] attacking Christians, they are making it impossible for Iraq to exist as a coherent unified nation. That’s exactly what certain interests including Zionists and extreme imperialists want. They would like to break up Iraq into three pieces so that the Israelis could grab the oil in Kurdistan,” he said.
And the era of the new intervention has commenced. “The imperial military and ideological apparatus for direct intervention was firmly in place by 2000.  It led to a prolonged series of wars in multiple geographical locations, involving long-term, large-scale commitments of economic resources, and military personnel and was completely unhampered by congressional or large-scale public opposition – at least in the beginning,” said Professor James Petras of Global Research. “The ‘objectives’ of these serial wars were defined by their principal Zionist and militarist architects as the following: (1) destroying regimes and states (as well as their military, police and civil governing bureaucracies) which had opposed Israel’s annexation of Palestine; [and] (2) deposing regimes which promoted independent nationalist policies, opposing or threatening the Gulf puppet monarchist regimes and supporting anti-imperialist, secular or nationalist-Islamic movements around the world. “
And whether in aiding militants in Iraq and Syria, in its effort to guarantee peace for colonial Israel, or to land its hand on oil, all the three vital interests are visible. According to Harvey Sicherman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “Since 1948, all U.S. administrations have eventually settled on three vital American interests: (1) access to oil at a tolerable price, (2) the security of the State of Israel, and (3) preventing the region from coming under the domination of a hostile power.”
And on the issue of Iraq, Sicherman offered what he said were the three negatives that must always be given: that “(1) the Shiites and Kurds will not accept another Sunni dictatorship; (2) the Sunnis and Shiites will not accept an independent Kurdistan; and finally (3) the Kurds and Sunnis will not accept a Shiite Islamic republic. Any political system that respects those three negatives may be called a democracy, in that it reflects the popular wishes.”
Interventionist policy was most glaring in the case of Iraq—especially its aftermath. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980’s had left Iraq with roughly one million men under arms, 500 fighter aircraft, and more than 5000 tanks. Even though Saddam had never been a significant factor in Arab-Israeli wars before, Israel felt threatened that the weapons might fall into the wrong hands—that is, hands that might use them to liberate al-Quds. In order to destroy this military hardware, the Baghdad Butcher was lured into Kuwait and he fell right into an American and Israeli trap.
The Americans landed in Saudi Arabia to fulfil their long dream, set up bases in the Holy Land, Kuwait and Qatar and set about decimating the Iraqi war machine that they had earlier assembled for Saddam. All this military hardware was destroyed and so many people were killed that up to this moment the Americans are ashamed to tell the world the casualty of their own operation—and General Norman Schwarzkopf was still not in the business of body counting.
But since this war was instigated, kindled and prosecuted by the West as a measure for the defence of Israel and fought so that the two most powerful Muslim countries could tear each other, it really made no sense if Iran was left with its own military capability intact. When Iran didn’t give them the chance they were looking for, President George Bush accused it of sponsoring terrorism in Iraq, hyped the nuclear issue; and the world would have heard of another weapons of mass destruction story and witnessed another unnecessary had the American plot not been revealed.
It was investigative journalist Seymour Hersch who exposed the Americans and showed how it was they who were arming and supporting terrorists within Iraq. He revealed the details of plans and activities they were directing to destabilise both Iran and Syria, and this involved the their giving aid to the most extremist of the militants allied to al-Qa’ida: and ISIS was born. In Iran and Iraq, America is interested in reversing what it saw as “Shiite gains in Iraq;” and in Syria, to plant the seeds of sectarian conflict.
The policy of targeting and sectarian killing of Shiites and Christians was pioneered by Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi even before he swore allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri; and it was duly continued by the two al-Baghdadis who succeeded him after the merger with al-Qa’ida. This policy had two goals: the first is to make it impossible for Iraq to exist as a united country; and the second is to provoke Iran into taking some precipitate action that could justify a Western military response. And both would serve the cause of sectarian conflict being laid in Iraq.
Initially, the Western effort was led by its favourite rebel commander, General Salim Idris of the Supreme Military Council and the Free Syrian Army; but a June 10 US State Department classified briefing paper, quoted by The New York Times, painted a grim picture of the Syrian rebel situation, concluding on an ominous note: “We are headed toward our worst case scenario: rebel gains evaporating, the moderate opposition — including Salim Idriss—imploding, large ungoverned spaces, [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] holding on indefinitely, neighbors endangered, and Iran, Hizbollah, and Iraqi militias taking root.”
As one recent commentator said, “Little do the foot soldiers coming from all over the world to defend ‘Islam,’ from Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Wahhabiyah, Yemen, Kuwait, Pakistan, Chechnya, Daghestan, France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Iraq, Turkey, the USA (and Israel) know that they are the ‘useful idiots’ who are fighting the USA’s and Israel’s war against Islamic self-determination;” all the time thinking they are discharging an Islamic obligation.
As Professor Edward Said said, the Oriental is still just a pawn in the game—and so, apparently, he is destined to remain. “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists,” Said said. “Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression,” in order to make, unmake and remake their world with the help of ‘useful idiots.’
The Orient has been tamed; now the Oriental is deployed. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was detained by the Americans for four years in Bucca prison, but was suddenly released by the Americans in 2009. Watchers of the Iraqi scene believed the release of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi might have been part of a deal, though no one had given any details of what it entailed. But even without a deal, his extreme Salafism and utter ruthlessness that led to his excommunication by al-Zawahiri would serve America’s sectarian agenda for Iraq. Under his watch, ISIS indulged in bloody acts of terror—filmed public beheadings, murder of children and women and the execution of fellow jihadists belonging to other groups, massacre of Shiites and non-Salafi Sunnis that disagreed with him, all of which are then uploaded online for the world to see! Indeed, al-Baghdadi’s parting of ways with al-Qa’ida came when al-Zawahiri complained to him that ISIS brutality was giving the Islamic struggle a bad name, and that he should stop it—and get out of Syria.
But so bold and independent had al-Baghdadi become that, instead of complying with the directives of Osama bin Laden’s successor, he declared himself Caliph of the Muslims of the world. The caliphate, which al-Baghdadi said he had re-established, was abolished by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the accursed doyen of Westoxicated Muslims in 1924. And it served the Gulf sponsors of terror right: al-Baghdadi’s first fatwa was to declare their kingdoms illegal.
But that declaration of the establishment of a Caliphate by ISIS over the areas of Syria and Iraq it controls is symptomatic of the crass naiveté of the current thinking in circles of Islamic activism. It is clear that the reinvention of the Caliphate by a group facilitated by a Turkey that itself abolished the Caliphate in 1924, trained by an America that had adopted Islam as its current ideological adversary, approved of by an ‘Israel’ that had been battling Islam since Khaybar; and all of this funded by a Saudi Arabia and Gulf sheikhdoms that had equated Islamic activism with terrorism ought to sound like a fairy tale.
And so, after fighting in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya, and Syria with the full logistical backing of the US, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, these al-Qa’ida-linked militias descended on Iraq to continue their ‘jihad’ of killing their own kind in order to realise somebody else’s agenda.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with Islam; and at the end of the day, it will not lead to anything other than a rise in divisive and combative sectarianism, a fall in the prestige of Islam in the eyes of non-Muslims, shattering the mystique of the Ummah, as it becomes a laughing stock for the world and a source of great embarrassment to Muslims as a great religion is so misrepresented and twisted beyond recognition.