generalspeaking

That Perpetual Tinderbox

"We saw Ferraris and Bentleys being driven by students at the American University of Iraq in Suleimaniyah, and at the only five-star hotel in Erbil, the car park was filled with new BMWs and Range Rovers. The few international restaurants in Erbil cost approximately $90 per person for a meal with a beer. The city's shopping centres carry international brands, all of which we noticed are priced at least 40% higher than the international standard; and shop managers claimed inventory flies off the shelves."
Russian investment firm Renaissance Capital

From the precincts of Kurdistan to the cities of Iraq like Mosul that have succumbed to the terrorist invasion of fanatics from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, now hovering dangerously close to Baghdad, it is as though a cosmopolitan Western-style city of European provenance is installed in proximity to Medieval-era city-states, at war with one another with each government treacherously plotting against the other, where bloodshed is the order of the day, while in the former business interests and social harmony prevail.

As Iraq and Syria appear to be imploding, the ill-done-by Kurds appear to be on the cusp of finally achieving their dream of geographic statehood, using the interruption in what passes for orderly life between Iraqi and Syrian Muslim sects where the minority Sunni or Shiite feels it is their divine right to command the lives of the majority Sunni or Shiite communities which artificially-imposed colonial-era borders had historically ordered to be recognized as sovereign states in a region where ethnicity, tribalism, and religious sectarian hostilities created 'natural' borders.

Those 'natural' and exclusive borders appear to be miraculously, at bloody great sacrifice, to be re-aligning themselves, and those countries of European construct appear to be set to disappear along with the history that created them. Throughout all of the agitation and morose relationships, the miseries and attempts to half-heartedly live in some kind of amicable ignoring one of the other's presence, the Kurds have established their priorities and their plans for their future, distancing themselves from the conflict between sects.

While Syria and Iraq implode, and perhaps eventually take Lebanon and even Jordan with them on the journey to border oblivion, Kurdistan is settling in nicely, with all its established infrastructure, social system, judicial system, police and military and economic plenitude through agreeable trade and determined advance into the future. The American attempt to bring democracy to a region for which it is unrecognizable in the European model hasn't been quite a success, given the trillions spent and the lives lost; a reflection of the failure of imperial colonization.

President George W. Bush's Iraq adventure on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction that Britain enthusiastically endorsed led to the removal of a brutal tyrant who kept the Shia and the Sunnis from each other's throats. The feckless invasion of 2003 several years on saw an outbreak of
incendiary atrocities leaving tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, as night after night marauding Shia or Sunni militias entered the confines of Sunni or Shia communities to wreak historic vengeance on the 'apostates' of Islam.

Then a new president decided that America had sacrificed and suffered sufficiently with little to show for it, and revoked its presence in Iraq leaving behind a billion-dollar U.S. embassy staffed by a staggering 5,500 American diplomats/CIA agents. With the departure of British and American troops Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reversed Sadden Hussein's order of priorities through imposing Shia rule on Sunni citizens, and deliberately excluding them from government, the military and employment opportunities.

The Iraq of Saddam Hussein had nothing whatever to do with al-Qaeda; his removal left a vacuum that they were eager to fill, and they did, enthusiastically. Through Maliki's deliberate, insulting alienation of Iraq's Sunni population, and his side-lining of the Kurds, the stage was set for the ISIS triumph with Iraq finally taking the enforced plunge into a tripartite division; one tranche for the Shiites, another for the Sunnis, and the last for the deserving Kurds.

In fact, foreign intervention in the affairs of the Middle East, though fairly constant and unnervingly troublesome in outcome, merely represented a sideshow in the main attraction of Islamic dysfunction, tribal antipathies and ethnic grudges. The volatile mixture was bound to erupt, and the Arab Spring, so welcomed with pleasant anticipation by outside onlookers when it should have been dreaded with a little bit of insight, finally set the theatre ablaze with action and reaction.

Labels: Iraq, Islamism, Middle East, Syria, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 18, 2014