BC: PAN ARABIA
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By Kirk Vining ..
OK, you asked the questions, I’ll give you my personal views. First, you have to consider the context of the entire western Muslim world, in both historical and political terms. The region has five major cultural groups, The Arabs, the Berbers, the Kurds, the Persians and the Turks. Three of the groups, the Berbers (Morocco and Tunisia), the Persians (Iran), the Turks live in countries whose territorial integrity has existed for centuries. Another large group, the Kurds, was split among the states above, becoming an ethnic minority group in each country, but that is out of the scope of this discussion, more or less.
But the largest group, the Arabs, are spilt among half a dozen different Arab countries, countries that were created along the lines of how they were divided into colonies by the people who exploited them - the Italians (Libya), the French (Algeria, Syria), the Turks(Iraq, Arabia, Palestine, Jordan) and the British (Egypt, then following WWI and the defeat of the Turks, the British also in turn gained control of Iraq, Arabia, Jordan and Palestine). When it became apparent to the great European powers over the course of the 20th century that they would not retain their empires, a large problem emerged. If the Arabs, given their freedom, coalesced into an Arab nation, the Europeans would have a new, large world-class power on its southern frontier that would control most of the world’s oil and the Suez Canal. Their solution was to create a series of countries and turn them over to be dominated by local tribes, in other words to encourage tribalism over democracy. Tribal leaders could be bribed to be friendly to their interest, and could be supplied with arms or soldiers and air power to give them dominance – the Saud family was given Arabia, the Hashemite family was given Jordan and Iraq, Kuwait was handed over to the emir of that area, Egypt to some other potentate etc, and all claimed the titles of “king” and “prince” over these lands. Following WWII, the US continued the practice thru the CIA, creating a “shah” for Iran. The entire scheme had two purposes – to keep a greater Arabia from forming, and to create sham political structures so US, French and British oil companies could do a nice business with these frauds. Since the decline of the European powers, the US has become the main power which continues to prop up this system. Unfortunately, it is an inherently unstable system that has to be kept propped up by force of arms because ideologies and political forces based in religion, have emerged. There are three countervailing forces: Baathism, Sunni Fundamentalism, and Shiite Fundamentalism.
Two of these forces have had major victories over us, and as a result they have stature and a large following – one, the Shiite Fundamentalists, kicked us out of Iran in the 1970’s. But more important to us now, is the force called Baathism, a fanatical movement founded by Gamel Nasser in Egypt in the 1950’s, whose ideology is the formation of that Arab nation so feared by the Western powers, under a socialist government . The ideology, although socialist, is essentially a Nazi movement for Arabs. It is portrayed as some wacko Iraqi group, but in truth it is a political force in all Arab countries. Their success came when the Baath movements in three of those countries, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, kicked the British’s hand picked kings out. The leader of the movement, Nasser, also wrestled control of the Suez Canal from the British as well. His zenith came when he formed a loose federation of these three countries that was never quite a country called the United Arab Republic. They aligned themselves with the Communists in the Cold War, (over the Israeli question more than anything else) and installed quasi-Marxist socialist governments in all these countries. They could not adopt full-fledged communism, because they were simply too bound by Islam to become atheistic, but they became the dominant “modern” political force in the Arab world.
Over time, Baathism, although retaining its pan-Arab aspirations , succumbed to cults of personality and/or the desire to control vast oil wealth within the borders of the nations it existed in. Men who were more like Mafia overlords, themselves tribalist in nature, came to power, by murder and coup, and the UAR was dissolved. The states of Iraq and Syria became national socialistic in nature, under a series of thugs in Iraq and the Assad family in Syria, while Egypt, who has no natural oil wealth and a huge population to feed. turned to the West when their Soviet benefactors fell. Egypt is now a client state of the US, receiving more foreign economic aid from us than we give to any other country.
Enter Saddam Hussein. Although a cult of personality Nazi thug like the rest of them, Hussein had Nasser’s ambition of a Pan Arab state, and revived the Baathist movement as a force throughout the Arab world. To Baathist Arabs in this part of the world and to Arabs in general, he wears the mantle of Nasser. He played both superpowers against each other at the end of the Cold War, played the US during the Iran crisis’s of the 80s, and exploited his own oil wealth to build an enormous military machine that had a dual purpose – to smash the Fundamentalist movements that opposed him in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and to conquer by force of arms all the Arab countries into a greater Arabia. Eventually, his attempt to conquer Kuwait, which would have given him a stranglehold over the world economy, and his first step towards conquering the Saudis, became his undoing.
Meanwhile the third, and to us the most sinister force, was being forged in the Afghan-Soviet war. While we focused our attention on the Shiite fundamentalist movement in Iran, which was never much more than a regional threat anyway, an obscure Sunni sect called the Wahabbis financed a successful war against the Soviets that help lead to collapse of the Soviet empire, putting them into the geo-political power game when the Soviets disintegrated. Their ideology was not pan-Arabism, it was and is Pan-Islamic. We misjudged them, supplied them with weapons and military training, not realizing the depth of the hatred they had for us and how that hatred worked. 3,000 dead Americans later, we know so much better now.
Their hatred of the Western Powers is not based in old Cold War struggles, it is based in the teachings of Islam. The average American, raised on American jingoism, does not realize that Islam is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful psychological force on this planet at this time.
All of the governments of Muslim countries, whether newer Baathist states, older US puppet states, democratic states like Turkey, were their enemies simply because they did not conform to the laws of the Koran. Their leader preached that much of this was due to the influence of the US and its oil monopolies, and so he declared war on us.
We used their attack to as an excuse to declare on Iraq, but what we are never told is that in essence, we are attempting to defeat all three of these forces, under a blueprint developed by Paul Wolfowitz written in 1998 called The Project for the New American Century, which should have been entitled, Prescription for a New American Disaster. The theory was, if we could just get a hold of Iraq, and kill them until they became our friends, they would become a democratic puppet state that would be a model for the area that would just love us to tears. What was not taken into consideration, was the fact that these three forces checked each other to some extent. We removed this balance of power when we invaded Iraq, and have now destabilized the Islamic world, triggering a civil war that will probably rage for the rest of our lifetimes with unpredictable results.
Which brings us back to the insurgents. You describe them as a single group. They are not. Each one is a member of one of the three fanatical groups above. Bitter enemies hunted by each other before, they have become somewhat united against us, but each knows there will come a day of reckoning when we are gone. Each group, the Baathists, the Shiites, the Sunnis, are composed of fanatics who are willing to die for their cause. They all want to die killing us. The Baathists see us as the capitalist colonialist they have always fought (and who we in fact are). The Sunnis see us as the Infidel defiling Islam with our presence, and the Shiites see us as The Great Satan, defiling their women and culture. Unfortunately, a third and probably non-existent group imagined by Wolfowitz, is the Iraqi democrat, who if he even exists does not feel quite willing to die for democracy yet. If they ever decide to, things might get better.
Like all fanatical movements they will do whatever is necessary to further their cause. They will scheme to kill invaders. They will kill anyone they view as collaborators. Instead of the “thugs” the president refers to them as, these are men who will commit suicide for their cause, and as enemies deserve a certain amount of respect for this, as this is what men motivated by great ideas do, even when they are base ideas like National Socialism, Communism, or any of these ideologies here that are so foreign to us. They are soldiers, and all soldiers willing to die for their cause have a huge chance for success simply because they are willing to do so. We failed to appreaciate this factor in Vietnam, and we now repeat it here.
America suffers from its management class. The same logic used in Vietnam, that war is somehow something that can be “managed” like a business problem, is being applied here, even to a the extent that our war “managers” think they can subcontract it out. It is a ridiculous idea. The only way to fight fanatics is to either find some way to isolate them like we did with the the containment policies of the Cold War (which was the policy that was working with Saddam), buy them off (as we will shortly do in North Korea), or lastly, commit ourselves to Total War. If you look at history, if it is to be war, anything less, whether it is us in Vietnam, the British in India, the Soviets in Afghanistan, fails. If we are not willing to pay the price of Total War, which is a military draft, a command-style economy, a totally committed home front, and a willingness to commit large scale atrocities against civilian populations using an army that executes a war in the way it itself feels fit, then we should not fight it. It is the only way to meet a fanatical enemy. Otherwise the fact that they are willing to die for what they believe in while you are not quite so ready, will be your defeat. Instead, we get War On The Cheap against three different enemies, all fanatics who are willng to fight war without end. Those are your insurgents. It is a prescription for failure. While we should be fighting Total War against al-Queda in Afganistan, our army stands around with its thumb up its ass in Iraq.
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