SO, THE U.S. FIX FOR IRAQ & THE MIDDLE EAST IS……..?



 

 

…Iraq Oil Fields......the big prize in Iraq

 

President Obama is trying to fix a hole in the Iraqi dike with a "Band-Aid" of US military advisors.

It is becoming clear that all of those middle east countries, whose borders were previously drawn centuries ago by outside empires, these countries appear to be going back to their historical identities. 

In the past, when the French and the British empires were the then "super powers", they were the ones that haphazardly drew the middle east's borders for their own political and financial gain.  In addition, many times these outside empires also installed or designated the families or dictators that would run the countries.  As little as 15 years ago, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, they all had dictators.

But today, due to the wars that started in earnest with the two US, Bush’s going into Iraq, these borders are now trying to change based on their regional religious beliefs, not on the arbitrary lines previously imposed by foreign powers.

As a case in point, the idea of partitioning Iraq, that everyone laughed at when Vice President Joe Biden came up with the suggestion, that idea is now being seriously considered.  Biden’s idea was that within Iraq today, you could literally draw lines that divide Iraq into three separate religious regions or states.  These three separate regions would be for the Shia, Sunni or Kurdish religions.  (There are smaller areas for Christians and Jews, but these are mainly small areas within the larger Iraqi cities.)

Of course, there are the exceptions to mid-east divisions solely by religions. The Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), they have withstood mostly because of massive patronage or nepotism.  Many of these countries have also reformed just enough, to prevent their own wars and revolutions such as what is going on today in Syria and Iraq.

President Obama is seriously walking a tightrope for what is going on today in Iraq.  The jihadist group that originated in Syria that the Washington Post has referred to as ISIS, this is shorthand for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This is now how most nations have been referring to the terrorist group.  And yes, ISIS is also an official United Nation’s designated terrorist group.

The negative key here is that this group, is also considered more radical and brutal than al Qaeda, (and it has some al Qaeda factions within its own members), but this group is also mostly composed of Sunni’s. 

In fact, there is a disgusting video showing some ISIS members executing captured Iraqi Shia truck drivers.  The truck drivers had said they were Sunni, but when asked questions about their praying habits, they obviously  didn’t have the right answers for the ISIS.

But I digress….

The situation is, that due to new communication technologies that have caused such a shrinking global world economy, the old borders drawn by the empires are being proven unsustainable. This previous "order" continued to exist due to extreme suppression and superpower patronage, which produced extreme opposition movements. This obviously could not last. The two countries with the most significant sectarian divides, in which their minority Sunni groups were the rulers, these were Iraq and Syria, and they became the most vulnerable. 

In fact, it was the crackdown by the Syrian dictator Assad on the Arab Spring demonstrators asking for a democratic government, that started the war in Syria, that has now migrated into Iraq.

But the reality is, what originally started the upheaval in the middle east was the US invasion of Iraq.  The US occupation in both Iraq and Afghanistan needlessly expanded the sectarian identities, rather than building a national acceptance of each religion.  Due to the US military “surge” in Iraq, with the help of an imaginative General Petraeus, there was a short, “bright and shiny moment on the hill”, in Iraq.  But with the terrible follow-on management of President Maliki’s Shiite government in Baghdad, even the Shia military did not want to fight for Maliki.  At the first sight of the ISIS terrorists, most of the Shia military took off their uniforms and abandoned their posts.  (There were actual pictures of empty Iraqi uniforms on the fields as they ran from the ISIS terrorist units.)

The Sunni’s under President Saddam Hussain did enough killing of Shiites to keep them wary of the Sunni’s for decades.  Even though Washington has urged the current Baghdad government to be inclusive of the Sunni’s, that isn’t going to happen under the Shia, Maliki.  Obama has hinted that the best outcome would be a new Iraqi government with a broad coalition of Shia's, Sunni's and Kurds.  That’s probably true, but it’s also unlikely.  With ISIS continuing to gain and hold more ground, they alone could eventually cause the middle east to finally explode into unfathomable and devastating proportions.

So what’s next for Iraq and the greater Middle East is a very open and potentially dangerous question. 

Copyright G.Ater  2014