A Deadly Impatience
Phil Brennan
Wednesday September 3, 2003
Don't they just love it? America is in trouble in Iraq and they can use that unhappy fact to bash President Bush, who incurred their wrath for his impudence in being a conservative Republican who defeated a liberal Democrat.
Listen to the Boston Globe, otherwise known as the New York Times North. "THE WAR IS LOST" the Globe reports with scarcely concealed glee, adding "By most measures of what the Bush administration forecast for its adventure in Iraq, it is already a failure. The war was going to make the Middle East a more peaceful place..." etc.- you get the drift.
Not to be outdone, the rabidly anti-war Reuters news agency jubilantly announced "Two years and two wars after the Sept. 11 attacks, George W. Bush's aura of invincibility has faded and his challenge may be to keep his presidency from being more associated with Americans dying in Iraq than with his dramatic pledge at Ground Zero to battle terrorism." Oh joy, oh bliss.
Isn't it great! Americans are dying just about every day and the anti-war media and their Democrat friends can hardly contain their joy over the bad news that flows out of Iraq these days - the good news, and there's lots of that, somehow doesn't make it into print, or on the network news broadcasts.
What all this propaganda - and it's exactly that to which we're being subjected - is aimed at is creating impatience. And in the case of the war on terrorism, or any war for that matter, impatience can be deadly. We - and the media - learned that lesson in Vietnam.
Treated to a daily barrage of casualty figures and stories emphasizing the alleged futility of the war, the nation's impatience with a seemingly endless conflict finally caused us to throw up our hands in frustration and accept defeat in a war we could have won had our leaders had the guts to do what needed to be done, and we'd had the patience to endure.
Like it or not, we are in Iraq, facing a lot of the extreme difficulties and vexatious problems that have plagued that artificial nation for generations. We have two choices: either we stay the course, or we bug out, tails between our legs, and allow that area of the Middle East to descend into the inevitable chaos and savagery that is the common state of affairs there.
Obviously our patriotic media would prefer us to take a powder, thereby proving they were correct in opposing the war to begin with. After all, who needs all that oil - we can use windmills for energy and get around on bicycles.
If we stay, and stay we must, Americans will continue to die and the price for staying will be incredibly expensive. We probably will never achieve our stated aim of introducing democracy to a people who haven't got the vaguest idea of what democracy is all about, and if they did, would no doubt recoil from it. W
e find this concept hard to accept because we continue to cling to the absurd fallacy that all the world's people are just like us, even those who, in the words of a World War One statesman whose name escapes me, insist on "eating each other."
They are not. We are what we are because we are the inheritors of a certain culture and tradition alien to the better part of the world's population - dare I say - of the culture and traditions of Western Christian civilization which stretches all the way back to the Roman empire.
The people of Iraq and their neighbors spring from a far different culture and tradition - and it's world's apart from our own. Seeing them in the light of our own circumstances is a deadly error.
Most Americans know little or nothing about the history of Iraq - a nation cobbled together by the British after WW I from three incompatible provinces of the old Ottoman Empire: the Arab and Persian Shia of the south and south-east, the Sunni Arabs in the middle and south-west, and the Kurds (who are also Sunnis) in the north.
A cobbling which from the beginning spelled chaos.
Wrote The Guardian's Brian Whitaker: "Although the Sunni Arabs were the smallest of the three groups, Britain decided they should be dominant and installed a king from Saudi Arabia to rule the new country. This arrangement was more for the benefit of Britain's relations with Gulf rulers than for the Iraqis themselves; the difficulty of holding Iraq together was one reason why it ended up with such a brutal dictator as Saddam Hussein.
"The underlying religious and ethnic tensions were kept at bay through decades of minority rule. Saddam Hussein suppressed them with utter ruthlessness but also, as the Americans are now learning, with considerable skill."
As UPI's Martin Sieff wrote "The history of Iraq before the 35-year-long night of the Ba'ath Republic descended upon it should have provided ample warning that once the lid was lifted off, those long decades of repression, more years of terrorism, assassination and massacre were only too likely to follow. For they were what had gone before."
The British ruled for 37 years, from 1921 until the lid did blow off in a bloody military coup in 1958, but before that, as Sieff notes, even then it "It was hardly a model of democratic and political propriety ..."
He quotes The late Professor Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics: "Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine and, however pitiful its end, we may now say this was implicit in its beginning."
From 1958 until 1968 there were more than 10 coups and attempted coups, two armed rebellions and a semi-continuous civil war against the Kurds." wrote Kanaan Makiya in "The Republic of Fear."
"The end of empire was as bloody as its beginning," noted Sieff. "The Royal family were first massacred by mutinous troops wildly firing their automatic weapons, then their bodies were mutilated. [Prime Minister] Nuri e-Said, seeking to flee disguised as a woman was recognized in a street crowd and instantly torn limb from limb. The remains of his body were then repeatedly driven over by a small family car until it had been reduced to the consistency of porridge."
Then came Saddam who used brutal repression as a tool to keep Iraq from splintering into pieces.
Now Saddam is gone, and we are learning that the danger of Iraq splitting wide open is an unsettling prospect we are going to have to either accept as inevitable, or deal with by the use of force a la Saddam.
The killing of Ayatollah Hakim, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, has opened the door, some observers warn, to an all-out civil war. A reluctant supporter of the U.S. occupation, Hakim was the top figure in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), the leading Shia political organization. And the Shia, brutally ground down under Saddam's heels, is the largest of the Muslim religious sects in Iraq and just spoiling for a fight.
Whitaker cites a weekly bulletin issued by Kroll Associates last Thursday - the day before the assassination - as warning: "Spectre of ethnic and inter-religious violence looming."
He wrote that the report examined the worsening situation in northern Iraq, where clashes erupted between Kurds and Turkoman tribesmen, leaving at least 12 people dead and highlighted a failed attempt to kill Ayatollah Hakim's uncle in Naja..
"There was a danger, it said, that this could expand to encompass the Arab minority who were transplanted to the region by Saddam to dilute the Kurdish population. "Tensions have been brewing between all three communities over control of the north, especially Kirkuk," the report said. "The Kurds' rush to redressing years of repression at the hands of the old regime has ignited major tensions."
"It might not be quite so bad if these internal conflicts were a self-contained Iraqi matter, but they are not: they affect almost all of Iraq's neighbors," Whitaker wrote, but "the stateless Kurds ... are spread across four countries. Apart from the five million in Iraq, about 15 million live in Turkey, six million in Iran and up to 1.5 million in Syria - and Kurdish assertiveness in Iraq worries all of these nations.
"Turkey is also concerned to protect the two million Turkomans of Iraq from the Kurds. The Turkomans, as their name suggests, speak Turkish and have an affinity with Ankara. If they are seriously threatened Turkey could feel obliged to intervene. To the south, meanwhile, the predominantly Sunni countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states - worry about Shia assertiveness in Iraq. There are already some signs of Saudi attempts to bolster Iraq's Sunnis against the Shia."
Whitaker concludes "The danger here is not just that Iraq will plunge into civil war but that the warring elements will find sponsorship from neighboring countries, with all the attendant risks of a region-wide conflict. "
So there you have it. The whole thing is a horrendous mess. But like it or not, it's now our mess and we have to deal with it. How? Well to begin with, we have, as a nation to get behind President Bush's assertion that we are there to stay as long as is needed. The various warring factions in and outside Iraq simply have to be made to understand that.
What makes it hard to get that point across is that the constant carping of the media and the Democrats gives the terrorists and our other enemies in the region the hope that the Vietnam experience will be repeated and we'll cut and run. That we cannot do.
Our purpose in being there is to achieve stability in a strategically vital region - that is an absolutely essential goal from which we cannot shrink unless we want to see our petroleum-driven economy destroyed.
Whether you were for the war or against it, we now have to accept the fact that we are now there and have to deal with the present reality.
I once wrote that the biggest mistake America could make would be to attempt to build a new Iraq from the top down. The only hope of creating stability is to build from the bottom up. Given the divergence of interests of the population it is simply not possible for a one-size-fits all regime to succeed.
To that I will now add the suggestion that it might be a good idea to see Iraq as it is - at least three separate entities - and act on that realty.
Iraq as a confederation of three independent states - north, middle and south - loosely bound together has a far better chance of surviving, than an Iraq held together by force of arms - and it's becoming increasingly clear that this is the only way to hold it together if we don't accept the reality of the situation.


Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers