Iraq

Until 1920, there was no country known as Iraq. It was created by the carving up of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious forces of the First World War. The civil sectarian war, to split the artificial country created by Britain after World War I, started at the end of the 1991 Gulf War to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein – the only remaining issue is the revenue share formula for the oil revenues – which are in the Shiite south and Kurdish north. The majority of the people went to the polls as Shia, Sunni or Kurds – not as Iraqis. The forces pulling it apart are greater than those trying to glue it together. The British are well entrenched and in coalition control of the south as is America in the north to oversee and supervise the funeral of the new democratic state they thought they gave birth to – unless they reverse course and create three independent states and fulfill the democratic aspirations of the liberated by America and Britain. The alternative, both have again created two new Talibans – they doubled up on their respective mistakes in Afghanistan. The Saudis in the center with their fellow Sunnis, control the biblical antiquities of the old and new testament and the Sunni communities. They are in an uncomfortable alliance with secular Baathists and number one enemy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda led insurgency. Not really a dilemma since the number one representative of al Qaeda in Iraq is Abu Musah al-Zarkqwi, a Jordanian Sunni determined to take out whatever and whoever he can in Jordan, where he had been imprisoned by the Hashimite royal family who are in Jordan after being displaced from Saudi Arabia after World War I, while still having a legitimate claim to their throne there in Mecca -- the holiest of Muslim cities. Tough to beat the intrigue of an Arabian night, especially when one looks up at the moon reflected Middle East clouds that include Israel, Turkey and Iran. Let’s not forget that Shiite Arian Iran was at war with Shiite Arab Iraq run by Secular Sunnis with American support then – just as now. Any wonder America and Iran are at it again?

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad said it despairingly blunt; “It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities….But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operation.” Unfortunately for Bush’s fundamentalist Christian coalition, the fundamentalist Muslim Shiites and Sunnis control two of the three future democratic countries in Iraq today.