[WCUSP] Fwd: The Gravitational Physics of a Settlement in Iraq

Tue Dec 12 04:17:48 CST 2006

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> Subject: The Gravitational Physics of a Settlement
> in Iraq
> 
> "The time has come," the Walrus said,
> "To talk of many things:
> Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--
> Of cabbages--and kings--
> And why the sea is boiling hot--
> And whether pigs have wings."
> 
> - Lewis Carroll
>
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> 
> 
> http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1211-26.htm
> 
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  The Gravitational Physics of a Settlement in
IraqPublished on Monday, December 11, 2006 by
CommonDreams.org 
 The Gravitational Physics of a Settlement in Iraq 
by Robert Freeman

Icarus's father knew it; scientists dropping ironballs
from leaning towers knew it; even markets in theheady
throes of bubbles begrudgingly know it:  gravity
eventually wins.  
Gravity is the reason that the Iraq Study Group's
recommendations will no more produce peace in Iraq
than have Bush's already catastrophically failed
policies.  Eventually, gravity will reassert itself.
The political configuration of Iraq and of the
wholeMiddle East will return to earth.  When that
happens,the new lay of the land will bear little
resemblanceto what it is today. 
Instead, the warring sectarian factions will
overridethe arbitrary national boundaries laid down at
thetime of the nation's colonialist founding and
willalign with their historic religious roots
inneighboring countries, especially Iran. 
NeitherBush's delusion of democracy nor James
Baker'sdesperate attempt at saving the situation for
the oilcompanies will come to pass.   
Iraq is a political fiction.  It was created in
theaftermath of World War I so the British could
controlits oil.  The Ottoman Empire had mistakenly
sided withthe Germans during the War and suffered
dismembermentas a result.  Jordan, Syria, Lebanon,
Iraq, andPalestine sprung into fullblown existence as
wards ofthe victors: Britain and France.  
Winston Churchill drew up Iraq's boundaries
accordingto Alexander the Great's redoubtable formula:
 divide andconquer.  Churchill enclosed rival
Shi'ites, Sunnis,and Kurds in the new country, placing
three scorpionsin the same bottle, the better to fight
amongstthemselves than against their new masters.  
Then, the British imported an alien Sunni prince
fromArabia to act as king and overlord of the much
largerShi'ite majority.  When the Shi'ites revolted in
1920,the British reinforced their Sunni puppet with
theworld's first aerial bombing of civilians,
killingsome 10,000 Iraqis.  It was a bracing display
of the distasteful but dutiful discharge of the white
man'sburden: pacifying the restive natives.  
But the uppity Shi'ites would never learn their place.
In 1953, in neighboring Iran, the world's
leadingShi'ite nation, the CIA ousted the
democraticallyelected Prime Minister, Muhammad
Mossadegh.  Itreplaced him with a western-friendly
henchman, ShahReza Pahlavi, who reliably pumped out
the oilaccording to British and U.S. dictates.  That
sameyear, the U.S. shipped weapons to Iraq's
Sunnigovernment to help suppress a strike by Shi'ite
oilworkers.  
In 1958, Iraqi colonel Abdul Kareem Qasim overthrewthe
British-imposed monarchy in an
anti-imperialistuprising intended to return the
country to thegovernance of Iraqis.  But Qasim's rule
wasshort-lived.  In 1963 he himself was ousted in
yetanother U.S.-engineered coup that replaced him
withthe secular Ba'athist party whose chief operative
wasSaddam Hussein.   
In 1979, Iran overthrew the puppet the U.S.
hadinstalled in the 1953 coup, the Shah.  The
IslamicRevolution, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, began
the radicalization of Shi'ite politics in the Persian
Gulf.  To punish Iran, the U.S. backed Iraq in the
bloody Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, providing Saddam
with weapons of mass destruction that he used to gas
Iranian troops.  
Over a million people were killed in that war,
almostall of them Shi'ites.  It was fewer than the 3
millionlost in Vietnam but more than the 600,000
killed sofar in the most recent Iraq war.  Saddam,
sitting atop10% of the world's known oil supply,
remained theU.S.'s faithful ally until his
ill-considered invasionof Kuwait in 1990.  Good
puppets must know to stay ontheir strings.  
What does this brief history portend for the eventual
settlement of Iraq and the Middle East?  
Iraq's majority Shi'ite population will eventually
beabsorbed, either in fact or in effect, into Iran,
theworld's largest Shi'ite nation.  Iran, for
obviousreasons, is implacably anti-American.  But the
bitterjoke says it all:  "The U.S war with Iraq is
over. Iran won."  
Similarly, Iraq's 20% Sunni minority will move intoits
natural ambit, Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia.  ButSaudi
Arabia, with 25% of the world's known oilreserves, is
perilously unstable, a ruthlesslyauthoritarian
medieval dictatorship that has onlysurvived with U.S.
backing since 1945.  It isfracturing from religious
tensions betweenfundamentalist Sunnis and secular
modernists and canonly be held together as a police
state practicing ever-increasing repression.  
These are the essential gravitational physics
ofreligion and nationality in the region.  The
troublethis scenario leaves for the U.S. is that there
willbe no "there" there as far as its desire to
maintaincontrol of Persian Gulf oil.  There will be
nogovernment that will sponsor its continuing
occupationof the region.  
This is what the Baker Commission had really hoped
todo:  maintain enough military presence for long
enoughso that a Baghdad government - any government -
could turn its oil leases over to US. companies. 
Bush'sefforts were clearly not leading to any such
solution. The commission's recommendation to include
Iran andSyria in the settlement is an attempt to
co-opt theirsupport for such a solution, to buy them
in bypromising a well- mannered neighbor, a
well-behavedoccupation.  
The additional inducement to the Arab states is
thatBaker is willing to have the U.S. throw over
Israel,to compel it to settle its 60 year war with
thePalestinians.  This is the reason the
Commission'sreport is being savaged by Israel, U.S.
neocons inIsrael's pay, the substantial U.S.-based
Israelilobby, and its legions of obeisant Congressmen,
mediapundits, editors, and think-tank talking heads.  
But Iraq's neighbors will offer little succor to
thebleeding superpower.  More than anything else,
theywant an end to the near century-long western
colonial occupation of the region.  They have
effectively defeated the invaders on the battlefield
in the same way the Viet Cong had.  They needn't
cooperate with them in securing their own enduring
subjugation.  
Ironically, this is exactly the same process
thatplayed out in the U.S. loss in Vietnam.  Like
Iraq,South Vietnam was a political fiction, created by
theU.S. in 1956 to forestall the assumption to power
ofcommunist nationalists who had defeated
thecolonialist French occupiers.  Once the U.S. army
leftVietnam, in 1973, "South" Vietnam quickly ceased
toexist and fell back to its natural
gravitationalstate:  Vietnam.  
As the U.S. implodes in Iraq, its position in
theentire Middle East becomes at risk.  In addition
toSaudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are also
dictatorshipspropped up by decades of U.S. military
and financialsupport.  The Iraq War has radicalized
theirpopulations against the U.S., forcing both to
imposedramatic recisions of civil liberties in order
toquell the uprisings and save their leaders' skins.  
Lebanon, another contrivance of the settlement ofWorld
War I, is in full scale meltdown.  Its war withIsrael
this past summer was a contest between Syriaand Iran
on the one hand and the U.S. on the other,with
Hezzbolah  and Israel acting as proxies. Israel's
(and, indirectly, America's) nose wasbloodied,
exposing, as Iraq has done, the impotence ofthe
western nations' traditional "shock and awe"warfare
against asymmetrical resistance by committed
nationalist insurgents.
Neither Bush's delusional design for democracy inIraq,
nor Baker's fantasized rapprochement in theregion is
going to come to pass.  Bush's 2003 invasionkicked out
from beneath Iraq the strongman supportthat had
allowed it to defy gravity for eight decades. But that
support is gone and cannot be gotten back.  
Long suppressed religious and ethnic
rivalries,together with equally long suppressed
nationalistyearnings, all now unleashed, will wreak
havoc foryears, perhaps decades to come.  When things
finallysettle back to earth, the U.S. will have no
place inthe region.  
This unraveling of the Middle East is simply the
finalplaying out of the same anti-colonialist dynamic
thatshook the world in the aftermath of World War II.
Between 1945 and 1965, more than 100 nations threw
offthe mantle of western colonial domination in wars
ofnational liberation.  Of all the major regions of
theworld, only the Middle East remained subjugated. 
Itis now peeling itself out of what, for the last
60years, has been the American orbit.  
America's own empire will be irreparably harmed. 
Ithas long been based on control of the world's oil
and,through oil, on the dollar as the world's
reservecurrency.  Both of those props are rapidly
failing andwill soon be gone.  Neither Bush's nor
Baker's visioncan halt the decline.  Unfortunately,
gravity isunkind to the impetuous.  Just ask Icarus.  

Robert Freeman writes about economics, history,
andeducation. Email to: robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com
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