THE HISTORY OF GEOPOLITICS IN IRAQ

By
Henry CK Liu
 Part I: Geopolitics in Iraq an old game
The Arabs, a people generally defined by a common Arabic language,
having been awakened with the new faith of Islam by Mohammed, gained
control of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt in AD 640, took Roman
Africa in AD 700 and reached Spain in AD 711, when they overthrew the
Germanic kingdom set up by the West Goths. The Arab realm then stood as
the more advanced third component of a triangulated non-Asian world
culture consisting of Arab, Byzantine and collapsed West Roman roots.

Mesopotamia, a Greek word that means the land between the rivers, the
Tigris and Euphrates, meeting at the cradle of Western civilization, known
today as Iraq, was and is inhabited predominantly by these Arab tribes. Iraq
is an Arabic word that appears in the Koran and has been a geographical
term for the Mesopotamia area throughout the Muslim era. Iraq became a
target of rivalry between the Persian and Ottoman empires, both Islamic, for
almost five centuries beginning around 1500. Shah Ismail, the Safavid ruler
of Persia, put Iraq under Persian occupation in 1508. The Ottoman Sultan
Selim I regained control of Iraq in 1514, after the battle of Jaldiran. In 1529,
Iraq was reoccupied by Persia, but was retaken by the Ottoman Sultan
Suleyman the Magnificent in 1543.

This recurring tug-of-war over Mesopotamia reflected the precarious and

changing military balance between the two Islamic empires on the one hand,
and the administrative difficulty in occupying alien lands on the other.
Neither could decisively defeat the other and achieve permanent military
control over Iraq; nor could either establish effective, lasting administrative
control over the local Arabic population when in possession of it. Since the
rivalry could not be resolved through military means, a political solution was
attempted in the first treaty between the two empires through the Amassia
Treaty of 1555. The treaty endured for 20 years with the region remaining an
Ottoman province until 1623, when it was again occupied by Persia.
However, in 1638, the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV drove the Persians out of
Iraq by capturing Baghdad. In 1639, the Treaty of Zuhab was signed
establishing a peace and defining the border between the two empires.

With this background, conflict between the two Islamic empires was
contained in a frontier zone and manifested in shifting tribal allegiances,
inter-tribal conflicts and avenging raids. In the Treaty of Zuhab, the frontier
zone was over 100 miles wide, between the Zagros Mountains in the east
and the Tigris and Shatt al-Arab rivers in the west. While its role in
containing armed conflict was short-lived, the Treaty of Zuhab was
significant because it became the basis for future treaties and established the
framework for future disputes over legitimate borders. By 1730, the two
empires were again engaged in full-scale war, with the possession of Iraq a
key focus of conflict. A treaty in 1746 between the two empires re-
established the century-old 1639 Zuhab boundaries, affirming them as points
of reference of future negotiations and foci of future conflicts. A common
Islamic culture did not unit the nations of the Middle East any more than a
common Christian culture prevented war among the nations of Europe, a
historical fact that refutes the current doctrine of a clash of religion-based
civilizations that threatens world order. Geopolitics beyond religious bounds
was and remains the controlling factor in world armed conflicts.

Enter the West

By the 19th century, British imperialist expansion in the region had

transformed the Ottoman/Persian power balance and changed the
geopolitical nature of the conflict. During the 17th and 18th centuries,
British imperialist interests had pushed back in succession Portuguese,
Dutch and French commercial and political penetration of the Middle East.
By 1820, Britain had turned the Persian Gulf into a British lake and had
begun to focus its attention on Ottoman Iraq and Persia in its efforts to
protect British India against threats from European imperialist rivalry,
particularly expansionist Czarist Russia, to develop a secure line of
communication and commerce between British India and the Britain Isles
via the Middle East, and to expand commercial markets for British trade in
the region.

This all came to a head as war erupted in Europe. In the course of World
War I, British forces invaded what is now southern Iraq in late 1914 as part
of Britain's offensive against the Ottoman Empire (which later collapsed
after having suffered the misfortune of being on the losing side of the war).
By mid 1914, a stalemate had developed on the Western Front between
Allied forces and those of the Central Powers. Following the initial free-
flowing operations, the opposing sides found themselves facing each other
along a line of defensive trenches that stretched from Switzerland to the
Belgian coast. The effective defense of positional warfare forced
policymakers in both opposing camps to find new ways to prosecute a war
that threatened to drag on without end. Under these circumstances, the need
for an alternative approach was becoming pressing before continuing heavy
casualties without the promise of victory would begin to threaten the internal
security of the opponent governments.

Forcing the Dardanelles

On the Central Powers side, Germany, the ultra-conservative lead member,

was pushed to help Lenin, the detested Bolshevik, to return from exile in
Switzerland through Germany in a sealed train to Russia to lead a
communist revolution that, if successful, would withdraw Russia, a member
of the Allied Nations, from the war between capitalist powers. On the Allied
side, the search for a strategic alternative was encouraged by the pride of the
British in their invincible sea power. With the German High Seas Fleet
contained in the North Sea, the possibility of launching naval attacks on the
enemy was particularly appealing to the British First Lord of the Admiralty,
through the hawkish imperialist persona of Winston Churchill. Eager to use
unmatched British naval resources to maximum advantage against land
powers, Churchill advanced a series of provocative proposals, among them a
sea assault on the Dardanelles, the nearly 50-kilometer-long strait separating
the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara, which at the Narrows was less
than two kilometers wide. The object was to drive an overwhelming naval
force into the Sea of Marmara and capture Constantinople, the capital of the
Ottoman Empire, which on October 29, 1914, had the foolish audacity to
ally itself with Germany and the Central Powers against Britain and the
Allied Nations. For the Ottomans, the alliance with the Central Powers was a
geopolitical natural, since Britain, France and Czarist Russia had been the
Western powers that, in the Crimean War, had most recently taken less-than-
honorable actions to dismember the Ottoman Empire.

The Crimean War (1854-56), like so many of the later Ottoman conflicts
with Europe, was instigated not by the Ottomans but by inter-European
rivalry. Czarist Russia, Westernized by Peter the Great (1682-1725), was
primarily interested in territory as part of a quest for warm-water ports to the
Mediterranean Sea. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Russia had been
gradually annexing Muslim states in Central Asia. By 1854, Russia found
itself edging toward the shores of the Black Sea. Anxious to annex territories
in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and
Walachia (now in modern Moldova and Romania), the Russians forced a
war on the Ottoman Empire on the pretext that the Ottomans had granted
Catholic France, rather than Greek Orthodox Russia, the right to protect
Christian sites in the Holy Land, which the Ottomans then controlled.

The Crimean War was unique in Ottoman history in that the conflict was not
motivated, managed or even influenced by Ottoman policy or interests. The
war was a European conflict fought on Ottoman territory, with Britain and
France allying with the Ottomans in order to protect their own lucrative
economic concessions in the region from Russian infringement. The war
ended badly for the Russians, with unfavorable terms in the Paris Peace of
1856, but the Ottomans as victors fared even worse. From that point onward,
the Ottoman Dominion fell under direct European domination and earned the
derisive label as "the sick man of Europe". The Crimean War marked the
decline in Ottoman morale and self-respect. In 1914, 58 years later, the
former European rivals of Britain and Russia were united in a world war to
once again threaten the Ottoman Empire.

Europeans, for their part, no longer saw, as they had three centuries earlier,
the Ottoman state as an equal force that could manipulate intra-European
rivalry to enhance Ottoman geopolitical advantage, but as a pliant victim that
could be manipulated for larger European geopolitical purposes. This
Eurocentric geopolitics permeated beyond Ottoman territories, throughout
the whole world, especially in the final decades of dynastic China, and in
most of Asia and Africa.

Constantinople (now known as Istanbul), which stands guard on the

Bosphorus, a narrow waterway into the Black Sea, was viewed by Churchill
as being vulnerable to attack by sea. Such naval actions had precedents. In
1807 a small British naval squadron had forced the Narrows only to be
marooned and eventually had to retreat before it could attack Constantinople.
As recently as the Italian-Turkish War of 1911-12, an Italian force had
attacked the Dardanelles and penetrated as far as the defenses of the
Narrows. Now, an invincible British navy would bring these promising naval
operations to successful conclusion. Even before the Ottoman Empire
entered the war on October 13, 1914, the possibility of a joint Greek-Russian
assault on the Dardanelles had been canvassed. Once hostilities began,
Churchill wasted no time ordering a naval bombardment of the forts
guarding the Narrows. This operation, carried out before Britain formally
declared war on the Ottoman Empire, reminded the Ottoman Turks of the
threat to the Dardanelles, and impelled them to seek German help to improve
its defenses, especially by the laying of sea mines in the Narrows.

Churchill first urged a naval attack on the Dardanelles at the meeting of the
British War Council in London on November, 1914, but his brash naval war
plan was rejected. Pre-war studies had indicated that such an operation
would be too risky and for no strategic purpose, since Ottoman forces were
no threat to British interests in the region. The issue was soon brought back
to the fore by the military stalemate on the Western Front. The Ottoman
Turks' advance northwards in the Caucasus caused panicky Czarist Russia to
urgently appeal to her Western allies for counter action to relieve the
pressure. The need turned out to be fleeting since Russian forces were able
to drive the Turkish advances back without help. But these events provided
impetus for Churchill's precarious plan of a naval attack on Ottoman Turkey.
The tempting idea of inducing, with a spectacular British naval victory, the
Balkan states newly separated from Ottoman rule to join the Allies and
attack Austria-Hungary from the southeast, never more than a wishful
illusion, was also part of Churchills grand strategy of naval glory. A
successful naval campaign in the Eastern Mediterranean with minimum
casualties might, moreover, encourage opportunistic Italy to enter the war on
the Allied side. Still, no serious thoughts had been given to any possible use
of tribal Arabs against the Ottoman Turks, for rule over the disunited Arabs
was a war prize to be won from the Ottomans. Britain was not about to
jeopardize her coveted post-war rule of the Middle East by fanning the ugly
spark of Arab nationalism.

Britain's reckless strategic calculations for Arabic territories in the Ottoman

Empire, to be accomplished without Arab participation, were reinforced by
the promise of the limited nature of Churchill's proposed naval action on the
Dardanelles, requiring no need for a sizable land force. Despite the strong
reservations of the commander of the Royal Navy's Eastern Mediterranean
Squadron, Churchill proposed a naval attack in force on the forts guarding
the Narrows, a maneuver supposedly well within the ample range of the
world's unmatched naval superpower up to that time in history. His plan,
expressed with Churchillean grandiloquence, had the irresistible attraction of
not requiring any substantial land forces for its implementation at a time
when military manpower was emerging as the decisive factor on the western
front. Nor would it diminish Britain's position of naval strength in the vital
North Sea against the German fleet, since only surplus older battleships on
the verge of obsolescence would be used against the second-rate Ottoman
military devoid of a navy. The British War Council approved Churchill's
proposal on January 15, 1915. Just as President George W Bush, in 2003,
trapped by overzealous, hawkish neo-conservative advisors who subscribed
to the fantasy that Iraqis would welcome US liberators with flowers and
hugs, sold Congress on the ill-advised invasion of Iraq by claiming not to
need any sizable force to occupy Iraq for long periods, Churchill in 1915
was trapped by his blind faith in the myth of naval power replacing the need
for land troops for imperialist conquest. Churchill forgot that while the
Battle of Trafalgar won by Lord Nelson at sea might have saved Britain from
French invasion, it was the Battle of Waterloo won by Duke Wellington on
land that finally defeated Napoleon.

In 1915, in the sea campaign against the Ottoman Empire as planned by

Churchill, the Royal Navy, supplemented with ships of her French ally, with
a total of 247 floating cannons, was supposed to destroy the Ottoman
defense of 150 land guns positioned over 40 bases along the Narrows, blast
its way through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and then the Narrows
with Nelsonian daring, reducing the defending forts to rubble as it went.
Then, anchoring in the shadow of Constantinople, its sheer invincible
presence and threat of destructive navy cannons trained on Topkapi Palace
would induce panic in the Ottoman court and cow the Ottoman government
into surrender. The flanks of Germany and Austria-Hungary would then be
exposed and with the sea lanes to the Black Sea opened, Czarist Russia
could be supplied with much-needed munitions, and the Czar's rejuvenated
massive armies would steamroller westward into Berlin, breaking the
stalemate on the Western Front. A similar strategy had worked in China in
1840, when, faced with stiff Chinese resistance in the southern coast, the
British fleet steamed north to threaten Peking and forced the Qing court to
negotiate an unequal treaty that yielded, among other war prizes, the British
colony of Hong Kong. The navy campaign on the Dardanelles was to be
Churchill's Trafalgar.

When, with Churchill's urging, the British War Council reversed its earlier
plan to send even the 29th Division to the East Mediterranean campaign; it
was decided to deploy to Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos untested
Dominion troops from Australia and New Zealand. The French government,
meanwhile, had also decided to deploy to Mudros a specially composed
division of new recruits. All these troops were intended as garrison forces
which might occupy the forts (and later Constantinople) after the "shock and
awe" naval bombardments had been successfully completed in short order.
Since an amphibian assault on Gallipoli was not envisaged in the war plans
of the naval campaign through the Dardanelles, this Allied Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force, to be commanded by General Sir Ian Hamilton, was
not adequately manned, nor its troops trained for heavy combat.

By the time Hamilton arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean on March 17,

1915, the slow progress of the naval operations had raised doubts about
Churchill's plan of easy victory by naval means alone. The Ottoman land
bases with 150 guns dispersed over 40 well-protected forts were largely
immune from naval bombardment. In addition to land bases, the strait was
protected by some 610 mines set into deep water in the Narrows. And two
underwater nets against submarines had been set. Pushed by an impatient
Churchill who demanded quick action from London, a heroic attempt to
subdue the forts and incapacitate their guns guarding the intermediate
defenses was made on March 18 by the British fleet with French support,
before the sea mines were cleared by minesweepers whose operation had
been hampered and delayed by effective Ottoman gun fire. The sea assault
proved disastrous when six of the16 capital ships taking part struck mines,
and three sank, carrying 700 sailors to their death. The sea mines remained
insurmountable for the British naval force.

The Disastrous Assault on Gallipoli

Within four days, Hamilton, the supreme commander on the spot, had to
shift the emphasis from a predominantly naval to a land operation, to launch
an amphibious assault on Gallipoli, a 50-mile long peninsula in the European
part of Ottoman Turkey, extending southwestward between the Aegean Sea
and the Dardanelles, to use British troops to disarm the Ottoman guns to let
the British fleet through. The result was the infamous Gallipoli campaign. It
was a change of war plan approved by a desperate Churchill who refused to
admit the failure of his foolhardy faith in naval power and rationalized that
Ottoman resistance to an amphibious landing had nevertheless been greatly
weakened by earlier British naval bombardment. British prestige had to be
preserved with bulldog tenacity. The Gallipoli campaign turned out to be a
military failure costly in human lives. But the damage to British prestige was
decidedly greater.

Just like US President George W Bush's disastrous occupation plans of Iraq,

the disastrous outcome of Gallipoli was predetermined by the strategic error
of not having enough troops available for the task at hand. Hamilton
launched the amphibian invasion campaign with five divisions against a
roughly comparable Ottoman force that enjoyed the advantage of operating
on interior lines. The rough parity was sustained as the campaign progressed
with 13 divisions of the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia)
eventually facing 14 Ottoman divisions. The half-hearted British approach
was dictated by Churchill's faulty premise that the objective could be
attained by the navy with only a small land force, and with London viewing
the Ottoman front as a crazy idea of an overzealous but politically astute
hawk, and as an insignificant side show hardly worth any significant
sacrifice in manpower and resources even after July 1915. This attitude
ensured that the Entente build-up was always too little, too late to secure
more than a foothold on the landing on the narrow peninsula. Hamilton,
saddled with undeserved blame, was replaced by Sir Charles Munro, who
withdrew from the area on January 9, 1916. Just like the desperate British
retreat from Dunkirk in World War II, the evacuation from Gallipoli was
hailed by British propaganda as having been brilliantly executed, albeit the
campaign that should have prevented the need to retreat itself was not.
Wrongheaded leadership on the part of Churchill played a key part in the
Entente failure, and many men, inadequately trained and poorly led, who
nevertheless fought bravely, mostly Dominion troops from Australia and
New Zealand, were sacrificed in futile attacks on strong Ottoman positions.

The Gallipoli campaign had no significant effect on the outcome of the war,
which could only be resolved where the main forces of the opponents
confronted each other on the western front and finally not until the United
States entered the war on the side of the Allied Nations on April 6, 1917.
And the prospect of a Balkan coalition forming to lead a mighty offensive
from the southeast was illusory, if only because of the pitiful state of the
Balkan militias. Moreover, there was no certainty that the Ottoman Turks
would necessarily have capitulated had their capital come under threat from
Allied naval forces. In pursuit of Churchill's hawkish chimera, 120,000
British and 27,000 French troops became casualties in the first months of
landing. For the Ottomans, whose casualties probably numbered as many as
250,000, including 87,000 dead, it was the beginning of a process of national
revival. The Ottoman hero at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, would eventually
become the founding president of the Republic of Turkey, and would later be
bestowed the name Ataturk (meaning Father of the Turks).

The Beginnings of the Jewish State

It was the disaster at Gallipoli that forced the British to accept the idea that
an Arab revolt would be useful against the Ottoman Turks. The British then
disingenuously began promoting Arab nationalism as a device against the
Ottoman Empire, posing as progressive friends who had come to liberate the
Arabs from Ottoman oppression. It was the forerunner of a US policy three
decades later after the Second World War to promote fundamentalist
separatism and bogus democracy as devices against global communism. In
late 1915 in the Anglo-Hejaz treaty, Britain promised that the Middle East
would become an Arab state. In 1916, T E Lawrence, the famous Lawrence
of Arabia, joined Arab forces under Faisal al-Hussein, third son of Hussein
ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
Faisal would later become Faisal I of Iraq. In the same year, the secret
Sykes-Picot treaty between Britain and France divided post-war Middle East
between the two imperialist powers. Britain would protect Egypt and the
newly created state of Saudi Arabia, France would protect the Syrian-
Lebanon state. Palestine would be international, with a new Jewish state
earmarked there in the future.

Geopolitically, to prevent an alliance between the 56,000 Jews in Palestine

and the well-established and influential Jewish population in Germany, the
British, with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 agreed to advocate a Jewish
homeland in Palestine. Insulating infiltration of German influence into the
Middle East through the more liberal German Jews was a factor in British
policy towards Palestine, which quietly favored immigration of Russian and
Slavic Jews into the region. In addition, the possibilities of a pro-British
Jewish state in Palestine to help counter Arab nationalism in the Middle East
were not idle thoughts at No 10, Downing Street. The British never seriously
contemplated effective resistance from Arabs to a Jewish state in Palestine.
Arab nationalism was not a significant consideration in the initial geopolitics
behind the Balfour Declaration. A Jewish state in Palestine under British
Mandate did not conflict with British plans because the British never
intended to give back the Ottoman Arab provinces ,to the Arabs. Still, it took
another world war and a horrifying Holocaust which essentially destroyed
the liberal influence of the German Jews, to finally bring the new Jewish
state into reality.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement

In the late stage of the multi-front, four-year-long First World War, Britain
and France had secretly reached the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, with
the acquiescence of Czarist Russia, to partition the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Dominion between the two Western powers. The secret agreement
spelled out the division of Ottoman Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into
various French and British-administered areas. The agreement conflicted
directly with pledges already given by the British to the Hashemite leader
Hussein ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, who had been persuaded to lead an
Arab revolt in the Hejaz against the Ottoman rulers on the understanding that
the Arabs would eventually receive much of the territory won. The Sykes-
Picot Agreement, the Paris Peace Conference and the Cairo Conference were
examples of the political hegemony of the European imperialist powers,
which shifted borders and annexed territories, inventing dependency through
mandates and protectorates. The British had persuaded the Arabs to rise up
against the Ottoman rulers. The British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir
Henry McMahon, corresponded with the Sharif of Mecca, promising an
independent Arab state in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks. Unaware of
the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, the Sharif of Mecca initiated a revolt
against Ottoman rule in 1916 with the help of British advisers, training and
munitions, and proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz until Mecca fell in
1924 to ibn Saud of Nejd, descendant of the puritanical Wahhabi rulers, who
laid the basis of the present Saudi Arabia kingdom.

Wahhabis are a puritanical Saudi Islamic sect founded by Mohammed ibn-

Abd-al-Wahhab (1699?1792), which regards all other sects as heretical. His
life gave birth to the term "Wahhabi". Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab Najdi
was supported by the British who were looking for dissidents to weaken the
Islamic Caliphate from within itself. The Wahhabis took Mecca with the
help of the British in 1924 and bombarded the Shrine of the Holy Prophet in
Medina which they took in 1931. And in 1932, the Wahhabis founded the
state of Saudi Arabia. By the mid-20th century, Wahhabism had spread
throughout the Arabian Peninsula, and it is the official religion of the Saudi
Arabian kingdom. Oil was struck in Saudi Arabia in 1936 and commercial
production began during the Second World War, in which Saudi Arabia
remained neutral until the end when it became a member of the Allies
against the Axis powers. Oil changed the geopolitical importance of Saudi
Arabia and the Middle East.

The disclosure of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement provided indisputable

evidence of British diplomatic duplicity. The Arabs learned about the
agreement only in 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration, when the new
Soviet Union published diplomatic documents from the Czarist archives.
The secret agreement deprived the Arabs of the right to rule their own
territories, newly won with blood. Most of the Middle East came under
British and French control. The vision of a free and united Arab realm had
been a manipulated illusion perpetrated by Western imperialism. The Sykes-
Picot Agreement set the scene for a century of border conflicts that continue
today. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 legitimized the imperialist
partitions. Britain was entrusted with mandate powers for Iraq and Palestine,
while Syria and Lebanon came under the French mandate. Under Article 22,
the League of Nations stated: "Territories inhabited by peoples unable to
stand themselves would be entrusted to advanced nations until such time as
the local population can handle matters." Peoples unable to stand themselves
were apparently quite able to die for the advanced nations in a war of
imperialist rivalry, the prize for which was the right to dominate these same
people.

Britain Occupies Iraq

By 1917, British occupation of Iraq began. In the aftermath of the war and
the subsequent dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the Fertile Crescent of
ancient Mesopotamia was divided between France and Britain in accordance
with the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty. After the war, Britain was given formal
control of a territory of 171,600 square miles known as Iraq under a League
of Nations mandate, despite widespread popular resentment from the then
local population of 7 million, which has since grown to 25 million. Iraq
inherited 1,472 kilometers of the old Ottoman-Persian border, 700
kilometers of which passes through Kurdistan, a border resulting from
diplomatic intrigue that dated back to the Zuhab settlement in 1639. The
mandate encompasses three former Ottoman wilayas, or administrative
districts: Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, which historically included Kuwait.
The British, being ever conscious of the need for naval bases, carved out
Kuwait as a separate nation, whose legitimacy has never been accepted by
Iraq. Since 1779, the British East India Company, backed by British naval
power, had exercised de facto control over Kuwait.

As World War I ended, Britain and France both sent troops to enforce their
claims and peace conferences subsequently confirmed this wartime division.
Palestine was the exception, becoming part of the British zone and not, as
was originally planned, an international zone. Britain merged the Ottoman
provinces Baghdad, Basra and Mosul into a new state of Iraq, inhabited by
three different groups of people: Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds. Under British
rule, the new Iraqis were subjected to more taxes than under Ottoman rule
and pilfering of Iraqi national wealth occurred on a scale that the Ottoman
Empire never contemplated.

Arabs in southern Iraq, having helped the British against the Ottoman Turks
in World War I, began resistance in 1920 against the British, who failed to
honor their promise to end British occupation after the defeat of the Ottoman
Empire. To crush the Iraqi national liberation movement, Winston Churchill,
as British secretary of state for war, introduced new military tactics with
massive bombing of villages as the original "shock and awe" doctrine,
revived eight decades later by the US military. Churchill ordered the use of
mustard gas against the Iraqi civilian population, stating: "I do not
understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of
using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." Churchill argued that the
military use of gas was a "scientific expedient" and it "should not be
prevented by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly". Whole
villages were bombed and gassed. There was wholesale slaughter of
civilians. Men, women and children fleeing from gassed villages in panic
were mercilessly machine-gunned by low-flying British planes. The Royal
Air Force routinely bombed and used poison gas against the Kurd, Sunni and
Shi'ite tribes without discrimination. President George W Bush was highly
selective when he proclaimed that the world was a better place with Saddam
Hussein removed from power because Saddam used gas on the Iraqi Kurds.
To be consistent, history without a double standard would have to say that
the world would have been a better place had Churchill been removed from
power. According to Churchill, Bush in calling Saddam evil for gassing
Kurdish civilians merely "did not think clearly." Needless to say, no regime
change was imposed on Britain.

Notwithstanding the ruthless British response to Iraqi nationalist resistance

with overwhelming military force, Britain soon was forced to face the
inescapable fact that it would be impossible to effectively control the Arab
country by military means. To avoid heavy casualties to the occupational
force, the British were forced to restrict their control to only critical
neighborhoods in key urban centers. This in turn allowed more attacks of
British occupation forces. Britain then decided to form a pro-British Iraqi
government as a proxy to protect British interests, just as the US is doing
now in Iraq.

The delineation of Iraq's borders was framed by Britain's objective of

securing communication between British India and British Egypt. British
commitment in the Balfour Declaration that the British government "views
with favor" the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine provided the
context for additional political and strategic calculations. Britain aimed at
turning her war-time obligations to her war-time Arab allies into a chain of
proxy states across post-war northern Arabia ruled by branches of the pro-
British House of Hashim under the protection and control of Britain. When it
became clear that Iraq would not have a common border with the newly
established communist Soviet Union, conflict between Britain and France
over Mosul surfaced for lack of a common ideological enemy and was
resolved by Britain's agreeing to grant France 10% of future oil revenue
from the region. In exchange, British-controlled Iraq would be guaranteed
access to water from the upper Tigris in French-controlled areas for use in
the south and for irrigation needed for the cultivation of agricultural produce,
such as tobacco, timber and grain, grown mostly in the north.

An unnatural mismatch between Arabic/Iraqi history and the political

borders imposed by European powers to resolve European rivalry affected
Iraq's relationship with its surrounding neighbors as well as distant Western
powers. Some 12 states were created in the Arabian Peninsula and 22 states
divided the Arab world as a result of World Wars I and II. The borders
between these states were so contested by local tribal inhabitants that peace
had been maintained only by the creation of neutral zones. Justice was
frequently preempted by arbitrary geopolitical decisions imposed by the side
most able to enforce a solution militarily. This militaristic geopolitical game
continues today.

Part II: Geopolitical weeds in the cradle of civilization

The 35-year-old Ba'athist government that the US unwisely chose to topple with the
second Iraq War in April 2003 saw Iraq as playing a key role in providing strategic
depth and vigor in the eastern flank of a re-emerging Arab nation. Iraq, after all, was
the artificial product of Western geopolitical maneuvers in the cradle of civilization
during the age of European imperialism, and Iraq's full geopolitical spectrum has
always included Pan-Arabism beyond narrow state interests.

Pan-Arabism holds that a common Arabic heritage is the natural basis for a cohesive,
strong and prosperous Arabic world. It perceives the division of the Arab world into
22 states as the unhappy and unnatural outcome of deliberate efforts by Western
imperialism to prevent the re-emergence of Arab greatness, a strategic theme stressed
repeatedly by many Arab leaders, including Saddam, who stressed the popular theme
in public statements all through his two decades of power. In a press conference on
November 10, 1980, Saddam said, "[Foreign] powers are still trying in every possible
way to divide these 22 parts into at least another 22 parts."

There is ample evidence that Israeli policy on Arab resistance has picked up this
extension of the old "divide and rule" strategy of the imperialist West. Oded Yinon, an
Israeli foreign policy advisor, in an article in Kivunim, February 1982, singled out
Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for further division. An Israeli
official was quoted in the July 26, 1982 issue of Newsweek: "Ideally, we'd like to see
Iraq disintegrate into a Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni community, each making war on the
other."

The British had successfully practiced the "divide and rule" strategy in British India,
and to perpetuate British influence by fanning the India/Pakistan divide after
independence in 1947. Malaysia and Singapore became two nations as a result of
British decolonization policy. The US has also employed this geopolitical strategy all
over Asia for almost six decades after World War II, with North and South Vietnam,
North and South Korea and China and Taiwan, behind the disingenuous ideological
mask of democracy versus communism, even though neither true democracy nor true
communism were practiced in these artificial political entities divided primarily on the
basis of superpower geopolitics.

In Europe, the case for a divided Germany was based on the geopolitical aim of
weakening Germany's prospect of dominating Europe in the post-war world.

A by-product of World War II was the rise of nationalism in the colonies. The US,
under the leadership of Franklin D Roosevelt, had no trouble getting Congress to
declare war on Japan after the "surprise" attacks on Pearl Harbor, even though the
march toward war between a rising Japan and a US eager to defend its expanding
national interests in the Pacific should be no surprise to anyone, but to convince the
American people to war against Germany, with the pretext of Germany being an ally
of Japan, World War II had to be sold as a good war primarily on the promise of the
spread of democracy through decolonization of European empires.

Churchill and the Iron Curtain

British premier Winston Churchill's resistance to Roosevelt's war-justifying

decolonization commitments was encapsulated in his famous proclamation that Britain
did not fight the war to give the empire away. Churchill, who developed a war-time
fondness for referring to the Allies, which included communist USSR and fascist
Nationalist China, as the Democracies, had wanted to continue the war after the fall of
Nazi Germany to rid the world of communism and to keep the British Empire in the
name of democracy. The fact was that democratic processes were largely suspended
during war time in the Democracies. Churchill had been appointed prime minister by
the king after the failure of the Munich peace process and granted power without a
general election to lead a coalition war-time government.

He had to face and lost the test of democracy in a general election in 1945,
immediately after the end of the European phase of the war. Former premier Margaret
Thatcher wrote in her Path of Power (1995): "Churchill himself would have liked to
continue the National Government at least until Japan had been beaten and, in the light
of the fast-growing threat from the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then." Churchill had
wanted to perpetuate the suspension of democracy in his own country for the purposes
of defending democracy against communism. A similar development is taking place in
the US, where after the attacks of September 11, the Patriot Act was rushed through
Congress to defend democracy from terrorism by wholesale suspension of democracy
at home. Churchill's shameful campaign attempts to compare a future Labour
government in Britain with Nazi Germany by warning that a Labour government
would introduce a Gestapo to enforce socialism backfired, giving Clement Attlee a
landslide victory.

Having been rejected by voters at home even before World War II completely ended
in the Far East part of the British Empire, Churchill, out of office at home, worked on
the US by inventing the concept of an Iron Curtain in his famous speech on March 5,
1946 in little-known Westminster College in Fulton Missouri, president Harry
Truman's home state, and convinced an insecure and paranoid Truman to launch the
Cold War. Later Churchill had to admit publicly that the term "Iron Curtian" was
stolen from a speech by Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Gobbel.

A year later, on March 12, 1947, the Truman Doctrine was proclaimed before a joint
session of Congress. It committed the US to protect Greece and Turkey militarily from
communism by noting that: "The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened
by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by communists ... It is
necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek
nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under
the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be
immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the
entire Middle East."

Geopolitics had been the key consideration behind the US response to terrorist
activities.In the Iron Curtain speech that marked the beginning of the Cold War,
Churchill said: "The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It
is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is
also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you
must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall
below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both
our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long
reproaches of the aftertime."

As Churchill correctly observed, the US became the world sole superpower at the end
of World War II, before the start of the Cold War, not after its end. Churchill with his
own geopolitical agenda played on the American national psyche of not ever wanting
to be an under-achiever. Churchill went on: "It is necessary that constancy of mind,
persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall rule and guide the
conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. We must, and I
believe we shall, prove ourselves equal to this severe requirement."

Grand simplicity of decision was exactly what it was, unnecessarily plunging the
world into five decades of divisive misery and escalating threats of nuclear
annihilation by turning a war-time ally into a peace-time ideological nemesis. It seems
that another grand simplicity of decision is now plunging the world into another half
century of misery by the US finding in Islam a new deadly enemy and by its
declaration that those not with the US in its frenzied broadside of uncontrolled rage
are against it.

Churchill allowed: "I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian
people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal [Josef] Stalin. There is deep sympathy
and goodwill in Britain - and I doubt not here also - toward the peoples of all the
Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in
establishing lasting friendships. It is my duty, however, to place before you certain
facts about the present position in Europe." Then he delivered the punch line: "From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the
continent."

Then the justification for a Cold War against communism: "The safety of the world,
ladies and gentlemen, requires a unity in Europe, from which no nation should be
permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that
the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung.
Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the
Atlantic to fight the wars. In a great number of countries, far from the Russian
frontiers and throughout the world, communist fifth columns are established and work
in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the
communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States
where communism is in its infancy, the communist parties or fifth columns constitute
a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization."

Replace communism with Islam extremism and you have the neo-conservative
argument for widespread regime change as the main tool of the "war on terrorism".
Samuel Huntington was not the first to talk about a clash of civilizations,
notwithstanding that the early Christians practiced communism for centuries before
Rome co-opted the religion. One may also now draw the parallel conclusion that the
safety of the world requires a unity in the Arab nation.

Then Churchill made a pitch for the permanent militarization of peace: "I repulse the
idea that a new war is inevitable - still more that it is imminent. It is because I am sure
that our fortunes are still in our own hands and that we hold the power to save the
future, that I feel the duty to speak out now that I have the occasion and the
opportunity to do so. I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire
is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what
we have to consider here today while time remains, is the permanent prevention of war
and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible
in all countries ... From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the
war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is
nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military
weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We
cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a
trial of strength ... If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealth be added
to that of the United States, with all that such cooperation implies in the air, on the sea,
all over the globe, and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no
quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or
adventure. On the contrary there will be an overwhelming assurance of security."

'Peace through strength'

That was the beginning of Anglo-US unilateralism which has existed since the
beginning of the Cold War. The argument that the enemy respects only strength has
since been repeated by Israel about the Arabs, and the neo-conservatives about Islam
extremists. Peace through strength has been the rallying cry of the Anglo-US alliance
ever since the end of World War II.

Multilateralism, which some critics of US foreign policy have of late accused the US
under the Bush administration of abandoning, is a recent development after the end of
the Cold War. Multilateralism conflicts with the prerogatives of a superpower except
as a legitimizing device of superpower status. Defenders of absolute US sovereignty
espouse a doctrine of US "exceptionalism", arguing that superior US domestic
institutions and law take supremacy over international obligations to lesser states, and
US domestic standards of political legitimacy may require opting out of certain
international initiatives, such as peaceful co-existence for states with difference
political/economic systems or cultural/religious values. It is a fascist argument that
associates military power with moral superiority.

A structural impediment to multilateralism in US foreign policy is a constitutional

separation of powers that grants the executive and legislative branches joint control
over foreign policy. This shared mandate, absent in parliamentary democracies, single-
party polities and theocracies, often complicates domestic confirmation of multilateral
commitments, particularly when the two branches of government are controlled by
opponent political parties. Because the ratification of international treaties or
declaration of war requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the US Senate, minority
political views, particularly extremist ones, frequently can block US participation in
multilateral proposals. The form of democracy practiced in the US gives
disproportionate power to the swing vote, particularly on controversial issues with no
clear majority view, allowing extremism to dictate policy by default. Since the
Watergate scandal of 1974 first weakened the prestige and authority of the presidency,
and during the first post-Cold War decade when threats to national survival were no
longer perceived as imminent, Congress reasserted itself in foreign policy formulation,
making use of its legitimate constitutional prerogatives to compete with the leadership
of executive branch to shape the terms of US global engagement. The attacks on
September 11 revived the perception of clear and present danger to national security
and gave new impetus to presidential leadership. Alas, instead of enlightened
leadership towards a harmonious world, US exceptionalism now emanates from the
office of the president, whose occupant sees multilateralism as a form of weakness.

By labeling all post-World War II populist nationalist movements in former colonies

as communist fifth columns, Churchill gave colonialism a second lease on life after
the good war to end colonialism. A new "democratic" colonialism based on market
capitalism was fashioned out of insipid racist colonialism to play a geopolitical role in
resisting the spread of communism. Local elites were allowed to join exclusive white
clubs as superficial signs of liberal progress. Discrimination shifted from racial to
poverty lines, while race and poverty remained wed among the masses. Colonial
jewels in the British Crown, such as Hong Kong, suddenly were presented as models
of democracy and freedom while a newly benign but still dictatorial colonial rule
continued for another half century. Mercantilism, a term describing a trade regime to
acquire national wealth in the form of gold through the imposition of monopolistic
export of manufactured products onto colonies, was replaced by neo-liberalism, a term
describing a trade regime of deregulated global financial markets to bypass national
economic sovereignty to exploit low wages and failed markets beyond national
borders. Just as mercantilism was the main economic tool of colonialism, neo-
liberalism became the main economic tool of neo-colonialism. Fortunately for the
colonized world, Churchill was removed from power in his home constituency by the
very democracy he tried to exploit as a convenient tool for keeping the empire.
Political colonialism met a timely death in many former colonies, but economic neo-
colonialism lived on through neo-liberalism. For the Middle East, the threat of Arab
nationalism to the British Empire gave the pre-World War II Balfour Declaration a
whole new geopolitical perspective.

Back on November 2, 1917, Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, who virtually

established a family monopoly for the floating of large international loans (The
Crimea War Loan 1856), whose influence Britain needed to help finance World War I,
received a short letter from Arthur Balfour, British foreign minister. The letter stated
that Britain "views with favor" a Jewish homeland in Palestine, provided the religious
and ethnic rights of all sects and groups were upheld. This simple three-paragraph
letter, which came to be known as the Balfour Declaration, was in many ways similar
to the Crimea war, involving a decision by a Western power to give Arabic land in the
Middle East to Jews mostly from Europe and Russia without the participation of the
Arabs. Arab nationalism was not a significant consideration in the initial geopolitics
behind the Balfour Declaration. A Jewish state in Palestine under British mandate did
not conflict with British plans because the British never intended to give back the
Ottoman Arab provinces to the Arabs. With the rise of Arab nationalism after World
War II, Britain began to see geopolitical utility in using the creation of a Westernized
Jewish state as an effective proxy to combat rising Arab nationalism. The local
problem of Palestinian-Israeli conflict was hereafter framed in the context of a new
conflict between Western neo-imperialism and Arab nationalism.

Arab nationalism, and resistance

Post-World War II resistance by Arabs to foreign intervention and domination in their

affairs generally takes two forms that share common diagnosis of the problem but are
diametrically opposed in proposed solutions. The diagnosis is clear: the centuries-long
decline of Arab culture and power invites foreign intervention and domination. The
first form of response to arrest this decline is Arab nationalism. History has shown that
European nationalism was the main vehicle for the rise of the West. While recognizing
the importance of Islam in Arab culture, Arab nationalists feel that Islamic
fundamentalism, as a political ideology, does not fully encompass the modern needs of
the Middle East any more than Christian fundamentalism encompassed the complete
needs of Europe. The reasons in support of this view are complex, weaving around
three obvious strands. The first strand is that the region includes sizable non-Arab and
non-Muslim minorities that must be reckoned with in an inclusive political structure.
The second strand is that there are fundamental differences of religious interpretation
within Islam that would present difficulties, if not insurmountable obstacles, to
religion-based political unification. The history of political developments associated
with the rise of Protestantism in Europe is an object lesson. The third strand is that
Islamic fundamentalism cannot effectively adapt to the rapid changes facing the region
and the world and that resistance to change has been the chief reason for the decline of
Arab culture and power. The history of the rise of the West is inseparably tied to the
steady long-term decline of Christian fundamentalism since the 17th century.

Arab nationalists and Islam fundamentalists are both opposed to Westernization, but
Arab nationalists are committed to Arab modernization through secularization that
would also facilitate Pan-Arab unity. In this sense, Arab nationalism's concept of
modernization is comparatively more progressive than that of US neo-conservatives
who attempt to move a secular modernity in the West back toward revived Judeo-
Christian fundamentalism. Yet while secularization in Christianity decidedly promoted
Western advancement and progress, Islamic fundamentalism has been encouraged by
British imperialism since the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and by US neo-
imperialism since the end of World War II to retard Arab revival. The real target is of
course Arab nationalism.

Nasirism, developed by Gemal Abd al-Nasir of Egypt, had been generally accepted as
the main political manifestation of Arab nationalism, but Ba'athism has evolved as a
more effective political movement in recent decades. In contrast to Nasirism as
espoused in Egypt, which relied more on leadership by personality cult in a
transfiguration of tribal structure, Ba'athists operated with a high level of discipline in
political organization. Although Ba'athist leaders are also inescapably tied to ritualistic
supremacy in the hierarchical tradition of tribal culture, the Ba'ath Party is designed to
continue to function in the event of the leader's sudden demise or ouster. Thus if the
US aim was to remove from power an unruly Ba'athist leader in the person of Saddam
Hussein, the de-Ba'athification program adopted after the 2002 second Iraq war was
counterproductive. Iraq might be governable without Saddam, but it cannot be
governed without the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, at least not without a long period of social
chaos and political instability during which the US occupation regime would face
hostility with extreme prejudice and incur costly payment in blood while it attempts to
fashion a new political landscape out of an unnecessary political vacuum it itself
created. US marginalization of the Ba'ath Party from the Iraqi political arena will set
political stability in Iraq back for decades, with an end game that may very well
require a reconstitution of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party.

Birth of the Ba'athists

The Ba'ath movement was created in Damascus in the 1940s by an Arab Christian
named Michel Aflak and a Sunni Muslim named Salah ad-Din Bitar, both Syrians,
after World War II as a nationalist anti-imperialism movement. In 1953, the
movement crystallized as the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. It reached its operational
zenith in the 1960s when it evolved into a strong expression of Arab revolutionary
nationalism. Aflak remained a leader of the party until his death in 1989. Pan-Arab
unity is at the core of Ba'athist ideology and dominates all other objectives. Ba'athism
advocates a tribal socialist system domestically which emphasizes socio-economic
development for the benefit of greater Arab society. The party's organizational
structure is similar to communist parties, which in turn is similar to the Roman
Catholic Church. The basic organizational unit of the Ba'ath Party is the party cell.
Composed of small membership, party cells function at the urban neighborhood or the
rural village level, where members meet to formulate tactics to implement strategic
party directives. As in communism and Catholicism, this type of organizational
structure particularly thrives during the underground phase of the movement and
cultivates members who are committed, intelligent, moral and principled. At the time
of the first Iraq war in 1991, about 10% of Iraqis, the cream of the population who
effectively ran what was arguably the most socially advanced and secular country in
the region, were estimated to be Ba'ath Party members, many being younger
generation members of conservative anti-Ba'athist parents.

The Ba'ath Party achieved political success first in Syria, but its leaders were exiled in
1961 after Syria's Pan-Arab experiment of a union with Egypt failed. Aflak and others
then relocated to Iraq. In 1963, the Ba'ath Party succeeded in taking power in Iraq, but
it failed to hold power for long due to inexperience in public administration. The party
took power again in 1968 when General Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr staged a coup, with
Saddam Hussein as deputy. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party remained committed to a unified
Arab nation, even though in practice pressing domestic concerns within Iraq
commanded immediate attention. Nonetheless, Iraqi foreign policy under Saddam had
been significantly motivated by Ba'ath ideology.

Aflak saw the dispersed Arab peoples as a single nation the destiny of which rests with
the aspiration of becoming a single state with its own independent role in the world as
a major power. Although persuaded of the importance of secularity, Aflak recognized
the indigenousness of Islam to Arab culture and advocated socialism in a tribal
context. In the 1950s, the Ba'ath Party called for a pluralist democracy and free
elections in Arab countries. Although it is not indifferent to the Palestinian question,
the Ba'ath Party has not taken it up as a primary cause, as it takes the position that the
Palestinian question is only a putrid symptom of the cancer of Arab disunity and that a
strong united Arab nation will be able to solve the local problem of Palestine to
satisfaction. Israel subscribes to a similar view and treats Pan-Arabism as a lethal
enemy to the long-term survival of the Jewish state.

The Ba'ath Party entered into active politics first in post-World War II Syria where
political instability after independence produced frequent changes of government.
Ideology and organization of the party went through changes in response to political
events. The turning point came in 1958, the year of the creation of the United Arab
Republic (UAR) by Egypt and Syria. The Ba'ath Party accepted the dissolution of its
Syrian section as it shared Nasir's views on Arab and international politics. The
breakdown of the UAR in September 1961 set off a long internal crisis in the Ba'ath
Party.

The failure of the UAR caused some senior Ba'ath Party members to reconsider the
pragmatic obstacles to the high ideals of Pan-Arabism. In Syria, those known as
"Regionalists" led by Hafez al-Assad, as opposed to the "Nationalists" who were more
in favor of a more universal Arab line, dominated the Syrian section after the
Regionalists gained power in 1963. Nationalist founders of the Ba'ath Party, including
Aflak, were forced into exile. Two separate Ba'ath headquarters were set up: a
revisionist one in Damascus, the other in Baghdad, where Aflak had found refuge after
the Iraqi Ba'ath Party had risen to power in July 1968, with Saddam in a key position.
In Iraq, Ba'ath Party ideology directed state policy, the clearest illustration being Iraq's
recovery of Kuwait in 1990, which was seen by the party as "a stage of Arab
unification". US opposition to the Iraqi recovery of Kuwait, developed only after it
had communicated to Iraq diplomatically an initial posture of non-interference, was a
delayed geopolitical reaction against a major material advance in Pan-Arabism, with
the reluctant silent acquiescence of many of the Arab Regionalists. The first Gulf war
was financed by and with active logistics support from Saudi Arabia as the wealthy
head of the Regionalist snake.

In Syria, under Article 8 of the constitution, the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party is the
leading party in the state and society. It leads a national progressive Front that works
for uniting the potentials of the Arab masses and placing them at the service of the
objectives of the Arab nation. The party's leadership of the Front is embodied by its
being represented by majority in the Front's establishment. Hence, the chairman of the
Front is the secretary-general of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, and he is the president
of the republic. The Front decides on policy matters of war and peace. It approves the
five-year plans of the state, discusses economic policies, and lays down the plans of
national socialist education, and leads the general political orientation.

Paradoxically, with the party's rise to state power in Syria and Iraq and with policies in
these state governments forced to respond to local needs, Ba'ath ideology began to
decline in influence in the Arab world, contradicting its key political aim of promoting
Pan-Arab nationalism. However, its secular approach along with its socialist ideals
remain driving forces in internal party politics.

Arab fundamentalism

A separate Arabic approach to oppressive foreign domination is the notion that Islam
provides the guiding light for unity, despite theological divergence in the form of
Islamic modernism, reformism, conservatism and fundamentalism. This approach took
on new appeal as religious fundamentalism was encouraged by the US all over the
world as an effective force to combat secular communism. With the threat of global
communism subsiding after the Cold War, a special bond between the opportunistic
US and Islamic fundamentalism lost adhesiveness and the strange bed-fellowship fell
into benign neglect by the sole remaining superpower. With the post-Cold War spread
of the US global neo-liberal economic empire, Islamic fundamentalism, fueled by its
holding of the short end of the economic stick, then turned its wrath toward US neo-
imperialism and neo-liberalism. Continued foreign interference in the Islamic world
poses profound reactive consequences that push all Islamic movements to adjust
political goals with a return to the purity of fundamental Islamic values.

Arab Islamic fundamentalism has been centered in Saudi Arabia, where the state
religion is Wahhabism, an extreme form of Sunni Islam fundamentalism out of which
rose Osama bin Laden, who would become leader of al-Qaeda, meaning "the base" in
Arabic, a guerrilla force sponsored and trained originally by the US in Afghanistan to
oppose the Soviet-backed communist Afghan government. After the Cold War, al-
Qaeda turned its militancy against the US, its erstwhile sponsor. Followers of
Wahhabism are opposed to communism: which they consider a profane ideology
formulated by a German Jew (Karl Marx); Ba'athism: another profane ideology
formulated by an Arab Christian (Aflak): and Pan-Arabism: a secular ideology that
denies both the truth faith and tribal culture. The Saudi Wahhabis believe it is God's
will to reveal the Koran (God's constitution) in Saudi Arabia and god has blessed
Saudi Arabia, the true defender of the faith, with oil riches and tribal social harmony.
Saudi Arabia, for decades a closed society of minimal social contradictions due to its
homogenous tribal culture and as a result of new prosperity brought on by the sudden
quadrupling of oil revenue after the 1973 Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries oil boycott, feels it needs no instruction from the decadent West on
democracy and social reform. The vicissitude of its oil fortune in the 1990s, with oil
prices falling below US$10 per barrel, caused socio-economic stress hitherto
unfamiliar in God's kingdom and led Saudi Wahhabis to blame the infidel US for
interfering with God's will. The rise of Wahhabism in the Muslim world coincided
with the revival of Christian fundamentalism in the US, exacerbating the conflict,
leading some to superficially frame it as a clash of civilizations, obscuring geopolitical
factors.

The US, with its foreign policy under the second Bush administration hijacked by neo-
conservatives supported by Christian fundamentalists, blinded by its fixation on the
need to control Mid East oil and misguided by its dismissal of the relevance of Arabic
history and culture, made the geopolitical error of misidentifying the secular Ba'ath
Party as its target enemy in its "war on a terrorism" waged principally by Wahhabi
extremists, such as al-Qaeda.

Non-Arab Shi'ite Islam fundamentalism, as espoused by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah

Khomeini of Iran, mistrusts both Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic Sunni
fundamentalism as parochial and anti-progressive philosophies to the point of being
obstructionist against true faith and holy justice. This ideological conflict between
Arab nationalism and meta-Arab borderless Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism was a
major cause for the decade-long Iran-Iraq war, in which Saudi Arabia, despite its
opposition to Arab nationalism, provided substantial financial aid to Ba'athist Iraq
because the Saudis, who are fundamentalist Sunnis, consider fundamentalist Shi'itism
a worse enemy than secular Arab nationalism.

The Saudis, like other Regionalists, are not against Arab solidarity. Out of self interest,
they are weary of Arab nationalism in the form of a unified Pan-Arab state. While
both Arab nationalism and all the diverse sects of Islamic fundamentalism oppose
Western political, economic and cultural imperialism and neo-imperialism, there is no
convincing evidence that Arab nationalism is linked to Wahhabi/al-Qaeda, the branch
of terrorism on which the US has focused its global "war on terrorism" after
September 11. Al-Qaeda is opposed to the Ba'ath Party of Iraq and considered Saddam
an evil infidel. In fact, the 2003 toppling of the secular Ba'athist government in Iraq
served to enhance both Sunni and Shi'ite extremist Islamic fundamentalism in the
region.

Britain drawn to Iraqi oil

Oil had emerged as a key strategic consideration in post-World War I British policy on
Iraq as the British navy shifted from coal to oil power. The British rushed troops to
Mosul in 1918 to gain control of the northern oil fields. Britain and France clashed
over Iraq's oil during the Versailles Conference and after, with Britain eventually
taking the lion's share by turning its military occupation into colonial rule. In 1921,
Hashimite Prince Faisal of Hejaz, now southwestern Saudi Arabia, was hand-picked to
rule Iraq by the British following the advice of Gertrude Bell, a Middle East expert
with the British intelligence service who had worked with T E Lawrence (Lawrence of
Arabia). In keeping with British co-optation of the institution of democracy as a
devious tool of neo-colonialism, Faisal was made to win a British-staged one-time
"popular" referendum on his becoming king, with 96% of the votes counted, albeit in
the absence of any opposing alternative or candidate. It was a tribal confirmation
rather than a democratic election. Faisal was declared king of Iraq on August 23, as
the history's only king "elected" by the people. In picking the Hashimite monarchy, the
British had hoped to exploit the temporal legitimacy of the Islamic heritage of the al-
Hashim, who were Sunnis descended from the Prophet Mohammed. As a condition for
bogus independence from direct British control, Iraq had to allow unrestricted Royal
Air Force operation within its borders, give Britain land and resources to maintain
military bases, and "coordinate" foreign policy with the British government to avoid
conflicts with British interests for the next 25 years. The US extracted similar terms
from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after World War II.

The domestic interests of British Iraq were based on assuring water supply,
overcoming land-locked transportation, and protection of oil wells and oil export. The
foreign policy of an independent sovereign Iraq was not independent of similar
domestic needs. The only difference was that the larger geopolitical objective of
enhancing the security of British India was no longer a factor, and that the dissolution
of British dominance over the entire region meant regional interests were now based
on Pan-Arabism, and that for a sovereign Iraq independent of British control, relations
with its Arab and non-Arab neighbors had different realities.

The new Iraqi state, ruled by a British-appointed "elected" Sunni king did not enjoy
easy afterbirth, as Shi'ites in the south, who made up nearly 60% of the population,
and Kurds in the north, who comprised 20% of the population, predominantly Sunnis
with Sufi influence, continued to fight for their separate independence. The Sufi
(woollen robes) are a mystic group responsible for large-scale conversion of Hindus
and Africans into Islam. One founder was Ahmad al-Qadiana, who lived in Cairo in
the eighth century and claimed to be an incarnation of Allah. The schism between
Shi'ites and Sunnis traces back to the early days of Islam over the question of
succession to the caliphate. Shi'ites believe that the person of the caliph should
incorporate not only secular but also religious or divine ideals. They recognize Ali, the
Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, and his descendants to be the legitimate successors
after the Prophet's death.

The Kurdish factor

Although the Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, religious,
nationalistic, tribal, and linguistic differences among them have obstructed their unity,
and in turn prevented them from fulfilling their nationalist and separatist aspirations
from their separate host countries. The history of Kurdish agitation dates back to 1800.
The Kurdish question has remained a persistent problem for governments in the
region, including that of Iraq, with echoes of the Jewish question in Europe.
Throughout the 20th century, Iraq's various governments of different ideological
persuasions had conducted up to 10 military campaigns against Kurdish guerrilla,
some recent ones prior to the two Iraq wars of the past decade, some conducted with
covert US help as part of its tilt toward Iraq in the decade-long Iran-Iraq War in the
1980s. In 1970, Iraq, under Saddam, granted formal autonomy to Iraqi Kurds, making
political concession more extensive than those of previous governments, allowing
Kurdish guerrillas to keep their arms, extend their influence territorially and
permitting access to the media. Kurdish resistance over the decades had qualified as
terrorist attacks on a succession of Iraqi governments by any definition.

Kurds are people who live in a land called Kurdistan, covering southeastern Turkey,
northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, western Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Kurds also
live in central cities of all these countries, as well as in European countries and the US.
Estimates on the number of Kurds vary widely, due to reluctance of many Kurds to
openly assume Kurdish nationality in countries like Turkey and Iraq. Estimates run
between 15 and 25 million, where the majority live in Turkey. Kurds speak Kurdish, a
language of the western Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. The clear
majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but a small group of less than 100,000 living in
Iraq and in small communities scattered in Turkey, Iran and Syria are Yazidis, the so
called "devil worshipers". The Kurdish question illustrates clearly that a common
religious heritage does not prevent ethnic conflicts, as the Sunni Kurds resist the rule
of a Sunni Iraqi government.

Yazidism is a syncretism of Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and

Islamic elements. The Yazidi themselves are thought to be descended from supporters
of the Arabic Umayyad Caliph Yazid I. They themselves believe that they are created
quite separately from the rest of mankind, not even being descended from Adam, and
they have kept themselves strictly segregated from the people among whom they live.
Although scattered and probably numbering fewer than 100,000, they have a well-
organized society, with a chief shaykh as the supreme religious head and an amir, or
prince, as the secular head. The chief divine figure of the Yazidi is Malak
Taus (Peacock Angel), worshipped in the form of a peacock. He rules the universe
with six other angels, but all seven are subordinate to a supreme god, who has had no
direct interest in the universe once he created it. The seven angels are worshipped by
the Yazidi in the form of seven bronze or iron peacock figures called sanjaq, the
largest of which weighs nearly 700 pounds. Yazidi are anti-dualists; they deny the
existence of evil and therefore also reject sin, the devil and hell. The breaking of
divine laws is expiated by way of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, which
allows for progressive purification of the spirit. The Yazidi relate that when the devil
repented of his sin of pride before God, he was pardoned and re-installed in his
previous position as chief of the angels; this myth has earned the Yazidl an undeserved
reputation as devil worshippers, since the devil is no longer a devil once he repented.
Shaykh Adi, the chief Yazidi saint, was a 12th century Muslim mystic believed to
have achieved divinity through metempsychosis, the transmigration of soul from body
to body.

In Kurdistan, Kurds live predominantly in rural areas, and among Kurds there are
some who keep up nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles, with the majority living in
agricultural villages and cities. Agriculture and sheep herding are dominant in the rural
Kurdish economy. Kurds have lived under foreign rulers for centuries, and have never
in their history formed larger states or ruling dynasties. In the 20th century, there were
several serious attempts to create a Kurdistan state. Kurds were promised their own
state after the World War I. This Kurdistan was promised to be established on Turkish
territory. But this promise was never kept for obvious geopolitical reasons.

From 1962 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1975, Iraqi Sunni Kurds fought against a
succession of Sunni Iraqi governments, with funds from Shi'ite Iran based on a
geopolitical agenda. The Kurds gave up fighting as a precondition for a promise of
autonomy by the Iraqi Ba'ath government in 1970, and after a normalization of
relations between Iran and Iraq in 1975. A Kurdish rebellion in Turkey started in
1984, and still persists even when it failed, and keeps the issue of self-determination as
a thorn in the conscience of the world community. A Kurdish rebellion in Iraq started
on the eve of the first Gulf war in 1991 with the encouragement of the US, but was
quickly suppressed by the Iraqi army, forcing one million Kurds to flee to Turkey.
From 1992 to 1996, a zone in northern Iraq was controlled by the United Nation, and
this area was as close as Kurds ever have been to their own state. The region came
back under Iraqi control in 1996 and after that some Kurdish tribal chiefs became
allied with Saddam.

The Kurds have suffered recurring attacks from their various host governments as
punishment for their separatist aspirations. US condemnation of atrocities against
Kurdish separatists has been tempered by changing geopolitical considerations. For
example, the US repeatedly looked the other way over Turkish attacks on the Kurds
because Turkey is a member of NATO. And US moral indignation leveled at Saddam
over his attacks of Iraqi Kurds began only after the official demonization of Saddam,
after Iraq moved to repossess Kuwait. The reason for the Western powers' reluctance
to support the establishment of a Kurdistan rests on its impact on existing regional
stability and balance of power, the geopolitical importance of the region and the fact
that such a development would affect many states in the region. If a Kurdistan was
established in one country, neighboring countries would regard this as a hostile act. In
1991, the US could have taken steps to form a Kurdistan in northern Iraq, but such
moves would never have been accepted by NATO member Turkey.

Iraqi 'independence'

On October 10, 1922, Iraq was forced to enter into a dependent alliance with Britain,
formalizing its protectorate status, with the world's then superpower. Parliamentary
elections were staged in 1925 to mask colonialism with bogus democracy, packing the
Iraqi legislature with reactionary, pro-British local elite Anglophiles. Britain was
granted by Iraqi law the right to maintain military bases in Iraq with the power to veto
Iraqi legislation. The British immediately began privatizing Iraqi national assets and
nurtured the political consolidation of a reactionary land-holding class on the British
Indian model, resistance to which Tariq Ali in his Bush in Babylon: The
Recolonization of Iraq attributes the rise of the Iraqi Communist Party and popular
anti-British Iraqi nationalism. With the ending of the British mandate in 1929,
economic domination and control from London continued through Faisal's pro-British
puppet monarchy and the institution of private property imposed on a tribal culture.
Concessions to search for oil on terms not more equitable than the Dutch purchase of
Manhattan from Native Americans were granted to British companies. A 1930 treaty
declared that colonial Iraq would be granted "independence" in 1932, notwithstanding
that true independence cannot be granted by a foreign occupier, any more than true
sovereignty can be transferred by the current US occupational authority to the US-
appointed interim Iraqi government. Pilfering oil concessions in the north were handed
over to the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), in which US and French
firms were allowed token minority positions to defuse inter-imperialist rivalry, with
the Iraqi monarchal government receiving fixed small yearly royalties to satisfy the
selfish greed of the puppet royalty. IPC acted solely in the interests of the Anglo-
American oil cartel, holding down Iraqi production to maximize the cartel's worldwide
oil profits. IPC operated as a monopoly of Iraq's oil sector until its nationalization in
1972 during the Arab oil boycott.

Iraq was declared an "independent" kingdom on October 3, 1932 with Faisal as king
and admitted to the League of Nations. A year later, Faisal died and was succeeded by
his 21-year-old son, Ghazi. When Ghazi assumed power in 1933, he responded to
nationalist sentiments by changing course from his late father's pro-British policy.
Ghazi denounced British imperialism, purged his government of British lackeys and
claimed Kuwait, even before oil was found there, as a legitimate, integral part of Iraq's
Basra province. By 1936, a Pan-Arab movement took hold in Iraq, with aims of
merging with neighboring Arab states. A treaty of non-aggression was signed with
Saudi Arabia. A mysterious car crash in 1939 cut Ghazi's life and his nationalist
program short.

Throughout the early 1920s, Britain had suppressed rising nationalist currents in Iraq
with relentless force, claiming all the while, as they did in 1914, to be "liberators, not
conquerors" to modernize and democratize a backward nation. With Hindu troops
from the British Empire of India who harbored century-old genetic hatred for
Muslims, Britain sustained control of Iraq amid a violent nationwide wave of revolts
and anti-British fatwas(religious decrees). During the bloodiest six months of
rebellion, some 2,000 British Imperial Indian Regiment soldiers of the Hindu faith
were killed, insulating the British from heavy casualty to their homeland Christian
troops.

After the death of Ghazi in 1939, resistance to British domination continued and in
1941, a four-week long revolt was put down mercilessly by the British with Churchill
as prime minister. British control of Iraq was firmly re-established with the formation
of a new pro-British government, which declared war on the Axis powers in 1943.
After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Iraq joined other Arab states in their
opposition to the new pro-West, mostly European Jewish country imposed on an Arab
region by the victorious West, although the degree of Iraq's commitment to the
struggle against the Jewish state fluctuated with the degree to which its various
governments managed to be independent from Western control or pressure. Iraq
considered the creation of Israel as a symptom of tragic fate of Arab disunity and that
the problem can only be resolved through Pan-Arabism, a view that is shared with
apprehension by many in Israel itself.

Despite British containment of the Iraqi revolt in 1941, British high commissioner
Kinahan Cornwallis refused to send British troops into Baghdad to restore order to put
a stop to the chaotic looting, rioting and violence against the Jewish population in
Baghdad, allowing as many as 600 Jews killed and over 2,000 injured, adding to the
tragic cycle of violence between Arabs and Jews. A replay of condoned anarchy was
perpetrated on the Iraqi nation by US forces after the fall of Baghdad in 2002 in the
name of "catastrophic success", albeit without the massacre of Jews, most having
already migrated to Israel.

After World War II, to appease Iraqi nationalism, the British allowed substantial
increases of oil revenue for Iraq while maintaining British control of Iraqi oil. King
Faisal II assumed the throne at age 26, having been only three years old when his
father died, but democracy was nowhere to be found in Iraq or the Middle East.

Part III: A Poisonous Geopolitical Jungle

While post-World War II Iraq remained safely under British imperialist
control, in neighboring Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh's democratically-
elected nationalist government enacted an oil nationalization bill in 1951.
Responding to a British legal challenge in the World Court against Iran and
taking it up in the United Nations Security Council, Mossadegh traveled to
New York to defend Iran's sovereign right, gaining much support from the
world's nations.
US becomes entangled

Then he went to the Netherlands to defend Iran successfully at The Hague,

which voted in favor of Iran in its international legal dispute with Britain. On
his way home, Mossadegh also paid a visit to Egypt, where he was
enthusiastically received as an anti-imperialism hero. Not surprisingly,
Mossadegh was toppled a year later by a military coup engineered by the
Central Intelligence Agency. The event signaled the emergence of the US as
the leading external actor in the Middle East on behalf of neo-imperialism, in
effect replacing Britain's traditional imperialist role in the region.
Furthermore, the Shah of Iran was now indebted to the US for his throne.

In its January 1952 issue, Time Magazine, hardly a liberal publication and a
leader of the anti-communist press, nominated Mohammed Mossadegh as
Man of the Year. The Time essay read in part:

"There were millions inside and outside of Iran whom Mossadegh

symbolized and spoke for, and whose fanatical state of mind he had helped
to create. They would rather see their own nations fall apart than continue
their present relations with the West. Communism encouraged this state of
mind, and stood to profit hugely from it. But communism did not create it.
The split between the West and the non-communist East was a peril all its
own to world order, quite apart from communism. Through 1951, the
communist threat to the world continued; but nothing new was added - and
little subtracted. The news of 1951 was this other danger in the Near and
Middle East. In the center of that spreading web of news was Mohammed
Mossadegh. The West's military strength to resist communism grew in 1951.
But Mossadegh's challenge could not be met by force. For all its power, the
West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless
country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own
goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that
moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh.
In Iran, in Egypt, in a dozen other countries, when people asked: 'Who are
you? What are you doing here?' The East would be in turmoil until the West
achieved enough moral clarity to construct a just and fruitful policy toward
the East."
As Time saw it, communism was producing a dual effect. It fanned anti-
imperialism in the colonies while it created pressure in the West to placate
Third World nationalism to keep it from going communist. On March 8,
1951, the day after Ali Razmara, Iran's pro-Western premier, was
assassinated, Mossadegh submitted to the Iranian majlis (parliament) his
proposal to nationalize Iran's oil. Within weeks, a popular wave of anti-
imperialist sentiment swept him into the premiership. The British-owned
Anglo-Iranian Oil Co had been paying Iran much less than it did the British
government. Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a leading Shi'ite
fundamentalist cleric who had been fighting the infidel British in Iraq and
Iran, played a key role in the nationalization of oil in Iran. His followers had
assassinated Razmara.

The Iranian crisis inspired Egypt, which followed with an announcement that
it was abrogating its 1936 unequal treaty with Britain. The Egyptian
government demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Egyptian soil
and an end to British occupation of the Suez Canal. When Britain refused,
Egypt exploded with anti-British riots, hoping that the US, which had
opposed British use of force in Iran, would take the same line in Egypt. The
Times essay reported that "the US, however, backed the British, and the
troops stayed. But now they could only stay in Egypt as an armed occupation
of enemy territory. Throughout the East, that kind of occupation may soon
cost more than it is worth."

The Time essay went on:

"The word 'American' no longer has a good sound in that part of the world.
To catch the Jewish vote in the US, president Harry S Truman in 1946
demanded that the British admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine, in
violation of British promises to the Arabs. Since then, the Arab nations
surrounding Israel have regarded that state as a US creation, and the US,
therefore, as an enemy. The Israeli-Arab war created nearly a million Arab
refugees, who have been huddled for three years in wretched camps. These
refugees, for whom neither the US nor Israel would assume the slightest
responsibility, keep alive the hatred of US perfidy. No enmity for the Arabs,
no selfish national design motivated the clumsy US support of Israel. The
American crime was not to help the Jews, but to help them at the expense of
the Arabs. Today, the Arab world fears and expects a further Israeli
expansion. The Arabs are well aware that Alben Barkley, vice president of
the US, tours his country making speeches for the half-billion-dollar Israeli
bond issue, the largest ever offered to the US public. Nobody, they note
bitterly, is raising that kind of money for them."

As the Time essay warned, winning the hearts and minds of the Arabs away
from communism was made hopelessly difficult by US policy on Israel. As a
pro-Republican publication, the position taken by Time was not exactly
bipartisan, as the Jewish vote at the time was predominantly Democratic.
Still, the warning was prescient. In pro-West Iraq, both Shi'ites and Kurds
sought political influence through the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) as well
as the Ba'ath Socialist Party in its early stage as a dissident organization after
World War II. Between 1949 and 1955, Kurds and Shi'ites comprised 31.3%
and 46.9%, respectively, of the central committee membership in the ICP.
This explained partly why the US was less than sympathetic to Shi'ite and
Kurdish separatist aspirations all through the Cold War. US hostility toward
Iraqi Shi'ites would escalate after the Shi'ite Islamic Revolution in Iran in
1979. Today, despite the claim of aiming to spread democracy in the Middle
East, geopolitics will not permit US-occupied Iraq to accept the democratic
principle of majority rule that will give political control to the Shi'ite
majority.

By 1954, political instability continued in pro-West Iraq as the US tried to

substitute fast-waning British dominance by creating the Baghdad Pact
which was formed on February 4, 1955 as part of the US global collective
security system to prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle East. Members
of the pact included Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Shah-ruled Iran and Britain, with
the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) participating. It
was hoped that Syria and Jordan would also join to complete the anti-
communist arc of pro-West countries in the region. A single voice of
resistance came from Egypt. Rising Arab nationalism and popular opposition
to imperialism in the entire region, ignited by regular passionate broadcasts
of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, caused Syria to reject the
Baghdad Pact. Even the young anglophile King Hussein of Jordan, who later
would transform into a US puppet, had to bow to the will of his people when
they took to the streets in large numbers to denounce the pact.

An Anti-Communist Pact is Born

The Baghdad Pact, known also as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)
or the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), was one of the least
effective Cold War security alliances created by the US. Modeled after
NATO, CENTO aimed at containing Soviet expansion by creating a
defensive line of anti-communist states along the southwestern frontier of
the USSR. The Middle East and South and Southeast Asia were politically
volatile regions during the 1960s with the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, the
North-South Korea confrontation and the Indo-Pakistan wars. The US, with
its main geopolitical aim of containing communist expansion, tried to
befriend all warring parties in both regions to prevent any tilt toward the
Soviet Union. Members of CENTO, an anti-communist treaty organization,
saw no compelling purpose to get directly involved in either the Arab-Israel
or the Indo-Pakistan dispute, where communist infiltration was not obvious.
In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan tried unsuccessfully to get assistance
through CENTO in its wars with India. The Baghdad Pact trapped the US
into supporting corrupt, unpopular and undemocratic regimes in Iraq, Iran
and Pakistan. US support for Israel was an insurmountable obstacle to the
development of improved relations between the US and Arab nations,
including members of CENTO. More importantly, the alliance did little to
prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the area. Non-member states in
the Middle East, feeling threatened by CENTO, turned to the Soviets,
especially Egypt and Syria, even though they remained hostile to
communism domestically. The pact lasted nominally until the Iranian
Revolution of 1979.

Egypt recognized the People's Republic of China in 1956, becoming the first
Arab and African nation to establish official diplomatic relations with the
communist country that the US had placed on the top of its forbidden list.
Egypt's decision on China defied US policy of containment of new China
through diplomatic isolation. As a penalty, the US withdrew on July 19,
1956, its loan offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, and Britain and the
World Bank followed suit immediately. In response, Nasser nationalized the
Suez Canal on July 26, 1956. The Soviet Union then offered an aid program
to Egypt, including a loan to finance the Aswan High Dam.

Crisis over the Suez

Anthony Eden, then British prime minister, characterized the Egyptian

nationalization of the canal as "theft", and US secretary of state John Forster
Dulles declared that Nasser would have to be made to "disgorge" it. The
French and British depended critically on the canal for transporting oil, and
they felt that Nasser had become a symbol of nationalist threat to their
remaining interests in the Middle East and Africa. Eden wanted to launch a
military response immediately, but the British military was not ready. Both
France and Britain froze Egyptian assets within their jurisdictions and
prepared for war in earnest. Egypt promised to compensate the stockholders
of the Suez Canal Company and to guarantee right of canal access to all
ships, making it difficult for France and Britain to rally international support
to regain the canal by force. The Soviet Union, the East European bloc and
non-aligned Third World countries generally supported Egypt's struggle with
imperialism. President Dwight D Eisenhower distanced the US from British
positions and stated that while the US opposed the nationalization of the
canal, it was against any use of force. Britain, France and Israel then united
secretly in what was to become known as the tripartite collusion. Israel opted
to participate in the Anglo-French plans against Egypt to impress the
imperialist West that the Jewish state could play a useful geopolitical role
against Arab nationalism.

Secret arrangements were made for Israel to make the initial invasion of
Egypt and overtake one side of the Suez Canal. The British and French
attempted to follow the Israeli invasion with high-pressure diplomacy, but
being unsuccessful, sent troops to occupy the canal. However, the action on
the part of the tripartite collusion was not viewed with favor by the US or the
USSR since military intervention to enhance isolated national interests
challenged a world order of superpower geopolitical predominance in the
region. Regional conflicts must not be allowed to conflict with the
geopolitical pattern of superpower competition for the hearts and minds of
the unaligned.

Responding to superpower pressure, the tripartite troops were withdrawn

from the Canal Zone in December under the direction of the United Nations.
A United Nations Emergency Force was then stationed in the Gaza Strip and
at Sharm el-Sheikh and on the Sinai border in December 1956 and stayed for
more that a decade until the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt kept the canal and
reparations were paid by Egypt under the supervision of the World Bank.
Overall, the actions of the tripartite collusion were not considered beneficial
to the campaign to spread democracy in the Cold War context because they
pushed Nasser and Egypt further towards the USSR. The war over the canal
also laid the groundwork for the Six-Day War in 1967 due to a lack of a
peace settlement following the 1956 war, in which Egypt suffered a military
defeat but scored a political victory.

Britain's disastrous behavior in the Suez crisis of 1956 exposed its thinly-
disguised, last-gasp imperialist fixation disguised as anti-communism. Israel,
led by David Ben-Gurion's hawkish faction with a pro-West, militant
confrontational policy, with Golda Meir replacing the moderate Moshe
Sharett as foreign minister, invaded Egypt on October 29, 1956. Sharett's
policies with regard to neighboring Arab states were characterized by vision
and pragmatism, but this form of diplomacy was never given a chance by the
hardliners, who were mostly fixated in the belief that "Arabs respect only the
language of force", as Winston Churchill had said about the Russians.
Sharett, albeit an ardent Zionist, attempted to develop policies based on
constructive engagement, rather than belligerence and dehumanization, with
neighboring Arab states. Sharett believed that Israel could have a special role
to play in the developing nations of the world, including the Arab countries.
Sharett was among the few in the Middle East who recognized that terror
and counter-terror between Palestinians and Israelis would lead to an endless
cycle of violence, which if not controlled by enlightened political leadership,
would become a way of life that would eventually destroy both peoples. His
political and diplomatic wisdom was always portrayed by the Israeli
mainstream as "weak and cowardly".

By contrast, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" doctrine of Zionism

that sought to expel the Arabs of Palestine by force has dominated the Israeli
political scene to this day. Jabotinsky viewed Zionism as a colonial
enterprise, in the same vein as British colonization of America or Australia,
with Arabs as Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. Israel was to
accomplish with militant Zionism what British imperialism, weakened by
what Zionists viewed as the British disease of liberalism, failed to
accomplish in the Middle East, which is to totally and permanently
emasculate a once-proud Arab nation.

While the US opposed Anglo-French military intervention to undo Egyptian

nationalization of the Suez Canal, US military strategy in the region was
made explicit on January 5, 1957 by a presidential message to Congress
known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, to provide military assistance to
countries in the region, include the employment of US armed forces, to
oppose international communism. Israel saw anti-communism in the Middle
East as God's gift to the new Jewish nation on Arab land and became a
fervent supporter of the Eisenhower Doctrine, with wholesale
marginalization of the Israeli left and moderates in Israeli politics. Instead of
moving in the direction of the Switzerland model, as a neutral oasis in a sea
of rising Arabic nationalism against "divide and rule" imperialism,
contributing to the development of the region for the benefit of all, Israel
presented itself as an outpost of European imperialism and US neo-
imperialism, setting itself up as a hostile garrison state in a region where
Jews are outnumbered by 50 to one.

Unless Israeli policy changes with a new self image and political destiny, its
continued existence as a hostile nation among Arabs is not sustainable any
more than neo-imperialism is sustainable in the Third World. Throughout
history, the Jews have contributed greatly to the prosperity of their various
adopted countries. There is no reason why they cannot do so in the Middle
East, their ancestral home, except for a short-sighted, more-than-clever-by-
half posture of catering to Western imperialism by claiming to be the sole
European democracy in the Middle East that deserves US support. If Israel
wants to stay in the Middle East, there is no escaping the need to be a
genuine Middle East nation, throwing its lot in with those of other Middle
East nations, rather than setting itself apart as a European transplant.

King al-Shareif al-Hussein of Saudi Arabia lived for a tribal dream of ruling
Syria. According to some historians, such as Avi Shlaim and Simha Falpan,
the dream for a Hashmite-controlled Great Syria was an obsession for both
father and son. When this dream proved elusive, his son, King Abdullah,
sought alliance with the Zionist movement to achieve his father's dream.
This tribal dream was exploited by the Zionist leadership to drive a wedge
between the neighboring Arab states. Ironically, the Arab countries whose
armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948 did so partly to keep King
Abdullah from gaining control of the Palestinian portion of Palestine, which
had been allotted to Palestinian Arabs by UN General Assembly Resolution
181. According to historian Falpan, during a meeting with King Abdullah at
Shunah, Jordan, which took place soon after Husni al-Zaim's coup in Syria,
Moshe Sharett wrote in the spring of 1949 that the king told him that "the
idea of Great Syria ... [is] one of the principles of the Arab revolt that I have
been serving all my life."

Falpan also wrote that the tactic of misleading Abdullah with Syria was
strongly endorsed by Yigal Yadin, the Israeli chief of staff. In a consultation
between the Israeli Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense on April 12,
1949, Yidin reported: "Abdullah is more interested in Great Syria than in
Palestine. This is in his blood, this is his political and military outlook and he
is ready to sell out all the Palestinians in this aim. We have to know how to
play this card to achieve our aim ... We should not support the plan of Great
Syria but we should divert Abdullah toward this plan." This kind of tactical
geopolitical scheming cannot overcome the strategic geopolitical blunder of
an Israel denying the need to come to terms with the realization that for
Israel to survive, it needs to accept the reality that it must become a bona
fide Middle East nation, not an extension of New York, and that its
acceptance by Arabs rests on its developing a genuine posture of fraternal
friendship, not hostile opportunistic geopolitical calculations.

Israel's Independence

On May 15, 1948, the Israel war of independence officially began with the
declaration of Israel as a Jewish state simultaneously with British withdrawal
from Palestine. But Israeli military action started a month earlier. As the
British prepared to evacuate, the Israelis invaded and occupied most of the
Arab cities in Palestine in the spring of 1948 to fill a military vacuum.
Tiberias was occupied on April 19, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the
Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8,
Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli
military historian of the 1948 war, admitted that every skirmish ended in a
massacre of Arabs, a deliberate policy to induce Arabs to flee Palestine en
mass. The massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, committed by commandos of
the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin, was part of that policy. Begin wrote:
"Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of 'Irgun
butchery', were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives.
This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede.
The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be
overestimated." The propaganda campaign of Deir Yassin to induce panic on
Arabs was so effective that the incident became embarrassingly detrimental
to Israel's international image; so much so that Israeli historians have since
felt compelled to deny if not the facts, at least the policy intent, blaming the
massacre on the nature of war.

Egypt, Syria and Jordan, newly independent and still weak from century-
long colonial oppression, formed an ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-led
coalition army of 20,000 to move into Palestine on the side of the
Palestinians against Israel's 60,000 well-equipped, seasoned and well-led
troops fresh from fighting under British command in World War II. The
bloody war lasted a year until April 3, 1949 when Israel and the Arab states
agreed to an armistice. Israel gained about 50% more territory than was
originally allotted to it by the UN partition plan. The war created over
780,000 Palestinian refugees who were forcefully evicted from Jewish-held
areas. Gaza fell under the jurisdiction of Egypt. The West Bank of Jordan
was occupied by Jordan and later annexed, consistent with secret agreements
made with the Zionist leadership prior to the initiation of hostilities.

Bloody End to Monarchy in Iraq

In post-World War II Iraq, Nuri Said, 14 times prime minister who always
took orders dutifully from his masters in London, having come down hard on
Iraqi nationalists, kept Iraq from active opposition to the creation of Israel
and hitched Iraq to the 1955 Baghdad Pact, a US instigated anti-communist
security agreement binding Iraq to Britain, Turkey, Shah-ruled Iran and
Pakistan, finally signed his own political death warrant and that of the
puppet monarchy he served by supporting the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli
invasion of Egypt. Reactionary pan-Arabism took a step forward under
British guidance in 1958 when on February 12, a pro-West federation
between Jordan and Iraq, called the Arab Union of Jordan and Iraq, was
formed with a common premier. Within five months, on July 14, 1958, a
successful military coup by the Free Officers led by General Abd al-Karim
Qasim overthrew the Said government. The three main components in the
Iraqi army, Nasirrites, communists and Ba'athists, united and dethroned the
puppet king, executed all members of the royal family for treason and even
denied them of Islamic burial rites for sins against the holy. Nuri Said
himself was caught two days later, trying to escape from Baghdad dressed as
a woman, by a mob which tore him apart with their bare hands and left his
mutilated body to be flattened by passing vehicular traffic. Collaborators
with the West were cut into pieces and "burnt like lambs". Public statues of
the treasonous monarch were torn down in street demonstrations so large in
numbers and so euphoric in passion that the new Revolutionary Council had
to proclaim a curfew to keep order. Based on that history, neither the current
US-installed President Ghazi al-Yawir, a Sunni Muslim tribal chief, nor his
US-appointed prime minister, Iyad Allawi, a long-time US operative, nor
other members of the US-appointed interim Iraqi government, has any
reason to sleep well. Already, several ministers of the Allawi cabinet have
failed to physically survive their interim political appointments.

The Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq and the Communist Party of Iraq
(CPI) were the two major political parties in post-World War II Iraq. The
two parties initially shared some characteristics, but irreconcilable
ideological rivalry soon developed due to contradiction between egalitarian
communism and hierarchical tribal culture and the internationalist support to
the CPI provided by a non-Arab foreign power in the form of the Soviet
Union, within the context of USSR state interests. The state-to-state
relationship between Ba'athist Iraq and the USSR based on geopolitics
affected the domestic strategy of the CPI and vice versa. The growing ranks
of the Ba'athists were upset by communist internationalist criticism of Arab
nationalism, which prioritizes Arab unity and the power politics aspirations
of the Arab nation over universal social justice.

A new government of Iraq was proclaimed by General Abd-al-Karim Qasim

on July 15, 1958 and the pro-West Arab Union with Jordan was immediately
declared dissolved. Iraq then worked for close relations with the United Arab
Republic, which had been established by a union of Egypt and Syria earlier
that year. As events developed, the Ba'ath Party in Syria was forced to
dissolve in 1958. In 1959, Iraq formally withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. A
year later, Iraq again made claims on Kuwait as an integral part of its Basra
province, while Kuwait formally received its independence as a separate
nation from Britain. On June 25, 1961, Qasim officially called for "the return
of Kuwait to the Iraqi homeland". In September, Qasim rejected efforts to
establish political autonomy for Kurds in northern Iraq and launched a major
military campaign against Kurdish separatists. These issues of Kuwait
recovery and Kurdish separatism predated the Saddam Hussein government
by three decades, hardly credible pretexts for Bush's war for regime change
in Iraq.

In time, a power struggle ensued between Iraqi communists and the US-
backed Ba'athist faction under Qasim, who had bought Western support for
his government by not interfering with the Western control of Iraq's oil
production. Qasim had tolerated Iraqi communists as a force against the
Ba'athists in his government. Soon, the Ba'athists began to receive backing
from US anti-communist policy. To retain US support, Qasim turned on the
Iraqi communists. During the turmoil, communist casualties suffered from
the US-trained Iraqi government internal security forces numbered over
5,000. An attempted anti-communist coup against Qasim was nevertheless
launched on March 8, 1959 by Ba'athist Colonel Abd al-Wahhab al-
Shawwaf. Backed by conservative units of the army, Shawwaf alleged that
the Qasim government was dominated by communists. The coup failed. In
October 1959, the Ba'athists led by al-Shawwaf made an unsuccessful
attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam Hussein, who would become
president in 1979, was a member of the assassination squad. After having
been shot in the unsuccessful coup attempt, Saddam fled to Syria, then to
Egypt, where he studied law at Cairo University. The Iraqi Ba'athists and the
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) shared a common interest in getting
rid of the Soviet-tilting Qasim.

On February 8, 1963, the Qasim government was overthrown, with the help
of the CIA, by a group of young officers who were sympathizers though not
members of the Ba'ath Party. Qasim himself was executed by firing squad
the following day. Two days later, on February 11, the US recognized the
new Ba'athist government on the basis of its anti-communism.

Author Said K Aburish (Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge) who

worked with Saddam in the 1970s, claimed that the CIA's role in the coup
against Qasim was "substantial". CIA agents were in touch with army
officers who helped in the coup, operated an electronic command center in
Kuwait to guide the anti-Qasim forces, and supplied the conspirators with
lists of people to be killed to paralyze the government. The coup plotters
repaid the CIA with access to Soviet-made jets and tanks the US military
was keen on acquiring.
The Ba'athists, never having ruled any country, lacked experience in 1963 in
managing the government apparatus left by British colonial rule. They
focused their energy instead on eliminating communists in public office.
Since many professionals and public administrators were leftists, the anti-
communist campaign rendered the government inoperative. The Ba'athist
government fell in November 1963 after only nine months in office, having
been unable to end violent political feuding that spilled over onto the streets
that in no small way was stirred up by CIA covert action, but not before
another 3,000 leftists were killed, as reported in John K Cooley's The
Shifting Sands of Arab Communism. Not a single word from Western
human-rights groups about these mass killings, let alone the US State
Department or the White House, which four decades later listed the Iraqi gas
attack on Kurdish villagers among its list of pretexts to invade Iraq. The
double standard was based entirely on geopolitics. The collapsed Ba'athist
government was succeeded by a pro-West government of right-wing
technocrats, with CIA help.

Abd al-Salam Arif, a colonel at the time of the 1958 coup, and a rival of
Qasim, became the new president, and he took steps to exclude Ba'athists
from his government and brought in Nasirrite nationalists, which
immediately put him on the wrong side of the US. On April 13, 1966, Arif
was killed in a helicopter crash of unknown causes, and was replaced by his
brother, Abd al-Rahman Arif. Iraqi relations with Western powers worsened
following the Six Day War which began on June 5, 1967. Iraq gave token
assistance to the frontline Arab states in the Six-Day War with Israel.
Believing as most in the Arab world did that the US provided direct military
support to Israel during the Six-Day War, Iraq broke diplomatic relations
with Washington in protest.

On July 17, 1968, a Ba'athist coup ousted Abd al-Rahman Arif. General
Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became president and Saddam Hussein was named
vice president. By 1968, Saddam had moved up the Ba'ath Party ranks and
wiped out the last pockets of communist resistance in the south and north.
With the domestic threat from communists under control, Iraq improved
relations with the Soviet Union as geopolitical leverage against the West. As
a matter of policy throughout its history, the Communist Party of the USSR
repeatedly sacrificed its sister parties in other countries to enhance the
geopolitical interests of the USSR as a state, consistent with Josef Stalin's
policy of socialism in one country. Global communism as an extremist
movement directed from Moscow was mostly a figment of US paranoid
imagination.

Ba'athist Ideology Takes Root

Since 1968, Iraqi politics has been a one-party system dominated by the
Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq. Ba'athist ideology combines elements of
Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism and tribal socialism. Its slogan is "Unity,
Freedom, Socialism" - unity among Arabs, freedom from Western
imperialism and socialism with Arabic characteristics. Prior to 1958,
Ba'athist parties in many Arab countries were dissident political
organizations struggling for recognition and popular support. Members were
imprisoned by many host governments and party organs were driven
underground. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party operated clandestinely against the pro-
West Iraqi government while it competed for followers with the Iraqi
Communist Party. This background shaped the characteristic and culture of
the party. Tariq Aziz, top ranking Ba'athist and vice president of Iraq in
charge of foreign relations, wrote in 1980 on the party's clandestine
revolutionary heritage: "The Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party is not a
conventional political organization, but is composed of cells of valiant
revolutionaries ... They are experts in secret organization. They are
organizers of demonstrations, strikes and armed revolutions."

The decision by the US occupation authorities to marginalize the Ba'ath

Party from Iraqi politics after the last year's invasion was a strategic as well
as a tactical error, for not only was it strategically counterproductive to
destroy the only secular political organization against Islamic fundamental
extremism, it was also tactically foolish because the Ba'athist cells have been
trained to go underground to easily survive official persecution to create
insurmountable problems for the US-imposed governing authority.

The record of governance of the Iraqi Ba'ath government had been

undeniably impressive. The secularization policies gave rise to an
intellectual elite, including many female professionals in all fields.
"Teaching the woman means teaching the family," was a battle cry. Literacy
was increased dramatically with free universal education. Party slogans such
as "Knowledge is light, ignorance darkness", and "The campaign for literary
is a holy jihad", were promoted. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party was a political
organization of clandestinity and ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists throughout its
history might deviate from strict interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab
unity, freedom from foreign domination and tribal socialism, yet Ba'athist
doctrine generally set guidelines for Iraqi policy formulation, such as
geopolitical non-alignment, pan-Arabism and domestic accommodation with
diverse religious and ethnic groups. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as distinct from
Ba'athism in the Arab world in general, were directed toward specific Iraqi
needs and problems, keeping Iraq from extreme pan-Arabism.

In 1970, after decades of unrest, the Iraqi government, barely two years
under Ba'ath leadership, agreed to form an autonomous Kurdish region,
letting Kurds into the cabinet. In 1971, borders with Jordan were closed as a
protest to Jordan's attempt to curb the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In
1972, Bakr nationalized Iraq's oil industry. US, British and Dutch oil
corporations lost their holdings, including the 25% share of the Iraq
Petroleum Company that had been owned by US-based Exxon and Mobil.
The Soviet Union, and later France, provided technical aid and capital to
Iraq's oil industry. In April 1972, in response to rising US hostility, Iraq
signed a 15-year friendship pact with the Soviet Union and agreed to
cooperate in political, economic and military affairs. The Soviets supplied
Iraq with arms.

During the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, a rapprochement
between the Iraqi communists and the Ba'athists came about from the Iraqi
government's increasing reliance on the USSR in the face of domestic and
foreign pressures. With US urging, the Shah of Iran claimed the Shatt al-
Arab waterway in 1969 and seized three strategic islands in the Arabian Gulf
in 1971, reducing Iraq to a landlocked position. Kurdish guerrilla and
terrorist activities in northern Iraq were sponsored by Iran and the US.
British/US hostility over Iraqi nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum
Company in 1972 and to Iraq's role in the 1973 Arab War with Israel forced
Iraq to tilt further towards the USSR. Clashes between government forces
and Kurdish separatist groups began in March 1974 only after the Kurds
received military aid from the US through Shah-ruled Iran. In 1975, a
settlement of border disputes was reached with Iran to stop inciting and
aiding Kurdish separatists.

Central to Saddam's vision had always been to unite the Arab world. When
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat broke ranks with Arab solidarity by signing
the 1978 treaty with Israel, Saddam saw it as an opportunity for Iraq to play
a leading role in pan-Arab affairs. He was instrumental in convening an Arab
summit in Baghdad that denounced Sadat's betrayal of Arab solidarity
through a separate political reconciliation with Israel. The summit imposed
economic sanctions on Egypt that lacked effectiveness due to Arab disunity.
On June 16, 1979, Bakr was stripped of all positions and put under house
arrest. Saddam became the new president, followed by a massive purge
within the Ba'ath Party.

While outsiders were not privy to the real causes of Iraqi political
developments, one factor was a split over a proposed union with Syria,
where Regional Ba'athists predominated. Saddam gained control of the Iraqi
Ba'ath Party with an adherence to pan-Arabism. National elections were held
on June 20, 1980. An analysis by Amazia Baram, "The June 1980 Elections
to the National Assembly in Iraq: An Experiment in Controlled Democracy",
in Orient (September 1981) shows that 75% of those elected were Ba'athists,
7% women, over 50% with higher education, 40% Shi'ites and 12% Kurds.
Democracy had come to Iraq two decades before the 2002 Iraqi War to
spread democracy in the Middle East.

Revolution in Iran, a Hostage Crisis and a War

Early in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran took place that was to have
serious geopolitical consequences for Iraq. Strong Shi'ite fundamentalist
opposition against the Shah in Iran accelerated in the late 1970s as the
country came close to civil war. The opposition was lead by Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived in exile in Iraq and later in France. On
January 16, 1979, the unpopular Shah was forced to flee Iran. Shapour
Bakhtiar, a liberal, as new prime minister with the help of the Supreme
Army Council, could not control the agitated country overflowing with
theocratic activism. Khomeini returned to an Iran engulfed with religious
passion on the first day of February in 1979. Ten days later, Bakhtiar went
into hiding, eventually to find exile in Paris. On April 1, after a landslide
victory in a national referendum on an Islamic Republic for Iran, Khomeini
declared an Islamic republic with a new constitution reflecting the ideals of
Islamic government. To the chagrin of US propagandists, democracy
reflective of the will of the people again turned anti-US. Khomeini became
supreme spiritual leader (valy-e-faqih) of Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic students stormed the US Embassy, taking 66

people, the majority US citizens, as hostages. It was an event that dealt a
fatal blow to the re-election efforts of president Jimmy Carter and
contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan, with historic consequences to
US domestic politics and foreign policy, turning the US decidedly to the
extreme right. For Saddam, the Iranian revolution made him an instant
darling of Washington.

Unrest among Kurds in northern Iraq intensified, inspired by unrest

following the events in Iran, taking advantage of the Iraqi government's
preoccupation with renewed religious animosities between Shi'ites and
Sunnis in southern Iraq linked to the rise of Shi'ite fundamentalism in Iran.
Relations between the two neighboring countries, never good, deteriorated
rapidly. On September 17, 1980, the agreement on Iraqi/Iranian borders from
1975 was declared null and void by Iraq, which claimed the whole Shatt el-
Arab, a small, but important and rich area. Iraq claimed territories inhabited
by Arabs (the southwestern oil-producing province of Iran called
Khouzestan), as well as Iraq's right over Shatt el-Arab, which the Iranians
call Arvandroud.

When Iranian students took the hostages at the US Embassy, it was at first
not at all clear whom they represented or what they hoped to achieve. In fact,
a similar mob had briefly done the same thing nine months earlier, holding
the US ambassador hostage for a few hours before Khomeini ordered him
released. But this time Khomeini, in response to persistent US hostility, saw
political utility in this potent symbol, and issued a statement in support of the
action against the US "den of spies". The students vowed not to release the
hostages until the US returned the Shah to Iran for trial, along with the
billions he had stolen from the Iranian people and kept in overseas banks.

Taking on the safe return of the hostages as his personal responsibility,

Carter, a committed born-again Christian, tried to pursue a peaceful
resolution by gradually building pressure on Iran through economic
sanctions. He ordered an embargo on Iranian oil export on November 11.
Rejecting the option of immediate military action recommended by his
hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew Brezezinski, as too risky to the
lives of the hostages, Carter escalated tensions by freezing Iranian assets in
the US. While secretary of state Cyrus Vance led official diplomatic efforts,
Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, spent thousands of hours working
secret channels at the disposal of the office of the president to end the crisis.
For the first few months, the US public rallied around Carter, who had
clearly made freeing the hostages his top priority. As fall turned into winter
and then spring, and negotiations failed to produce a deal or even any visible
signs of resolution, frustrated US public opinion demanded stronger action.
Time was turning against Carter's non-military approach.

Finally, with the Iranians showing no signs of ever releasing all the hostages,
Carter, desperate, approved a high-risk rescue operation on April 11, 1980
designated as "Desert One" that had been under contingency planning for
months. Despite the fact that the odds against its success were forbiddingly
high, Carter ordered the mission and was disappointed when he received
reports that the rescue mission by Delta Force, code named Eagle Claw, had
had to be aborted in midstream due to three of the six deployed helicopters
malfunctioning under desert conditions. During the withdrawal, another
helicopter crashed into a C-130 transport plane while taking off, killing eight
elite commando servicemen and wounding three more, without ever
engaging Iranian opposition fire.

The next morning, gleeful Iranians broadcast to the whole world live
footages of the smoking remains of the failed US rescue mission on Iraqi
soil, a stark symbol of superpower impotence, if not incompetence. Having
opposed Desert One from the start, Vance, who had been kept out of the
rescue loop, resigned in protest out of principle.

Finally, in September, with the Iran-Iraq war in full steam in favor of Iraq,
Khomeini's government decided it was time to end the hostage matter.
Despite rumors that Carter might pull an "October Surprise", a term coined
by Republican vice presidential candidate George H W Bush, to get the
hostages home before election day, negotiations dragged on for months,
even after Reagan's landslide victory on the first Tuesday of November.

The rumored "October Surprise" might have been the US hope that Saddam
would act as a US proxy to punish Iran and topple Khomeini with a quick
victory before the US election. Believing Iran to be too weak both politically
and militarily to resist, and emboldened by the certainty that US weapon
systems afforded to the Shah of Iran had been drastically degraded under
Khomeini, Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980
with quiet encouragement from the US less than two month before the US
presidential election, in which Carter's failure to bring the crisis of US
hostages held by Iran to a satisfactory close had become a key election issue.
Iraq won some initial battles, but a supposedly weak Iranian military
managed to achieve surprising defensive successes and halted Iraqi advance
by October, despite US help to Iraq in providing classified information on
US weapon systems delivered to Iran during the Shah era. While the start of
the Iran-Iraq War did not rescue Carter from election defeat, it did force Iran
to start negotiating to end the hostage crisis.

An extraordinary story was filed a decade later in the April 15, 1991 New
York Times by Gary Sick, Carter's national security council staff responsible
for Iran, detailing a three-way bidding contest for the release of the hostages
between Iran and a clueless Carter administration, and the Reagan campaign
headed by William Casey (who was to become Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director later under Reagan) through arms dealer/CIA operative
Jamshid Hashemi, who had close contacts in Iranian revolutionary circles.
The Reagan campaign was dealing with Iranian operatives to ensure that no
deal would be reached before the US election, lest Carter should gain
political advantage from a pre-election hostage release. The Reagan people
were topping escalating offers made to Iran by the Carter people to induce
the Iranians to hold off any deal with Carter. After long negotiations in
which Reagan forces agreed to unfreeze Iranian assets, transfer money, as
well as military equipment to Iran for the release of US hostages, should
their man win the election, the hostages in the US Embassy were released on
the inauguration of a victorious Reagan on January 20, 1981. The Reagan
victory was partly paid for by the US hostages having their freedom delayed
for months. The principle of "the foreign enemy of my domestic opponent is
my ally" entered US politics.

The Iran-Iraq War would go on for most of the decade for its own
geopolitical reasons, with the US tilting quietly towards Iraq. Still, the
Reagan administration secretly sold arms to a hostile Iran all through its
bloody war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988, and diverted the proceeds to the
Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the democratically-elected leftist
Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The arms sales had a dual goal:
appeasing a hostile Iran, which had influence with militant groups that were
holding several US hostages in Lebanon, and funding an anti-communist
guerrilla war in democratic Nicaragua. Both actions were in direct violation
of specific acts of Congress which prohibited the sale of weapons to Iran, as
well as in violation of United Nations sanctions against Iran. The rule of law
and the spread of democracy fell victim to US geopolitical exceptionalism.
Israel's Preemptive Strike in Iraq

On June 7, 1981, during a period in which US-Iraq relations was at an all-

time high, and US and European companies were carrying on highly
lucrative trade deals with an Iraq flushed with Saudi money to finance the
drawn-out Iraq-Iran war, Israeli F-15 bombers and F-16 fighters bombed and
destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor 18 miles south of Baghdad, on
orders from Menachem Begin, who said he believed the reactor was
designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. It was the world's first
air strike against a nuclear plant. The billion-dollar 70-megawatt uranium-
powered reactor, paid for with Saudi funds, was near completion, but had not
been stocked with nuclear fuel so there was no danger of radiation leak,
according to the French contractor which sold the reaction to Iraq under an
international non-proliferation regime. The French also maintained that the
Osirak reactor was not capable of producing plutonium for bombs. IAEA
(International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards promised independent
regular inspections and French technicians were required to be present for
five to 10 years following initial operation. It would not have been possible
for Iraq to make an undetected fuel conversion or to misuse the fuel
supplied. General Yehoshua Saguy, head of the intelligence division of the
Israel Defense Force prior to the air strike, argued for continuing to try to
find a non-military solution to the threat within the five to 10 years he felt
Israel still had before Iraq would have its first nuclear weapons. (Ilan
Peleg, Begin's Foreign Policy, 1977-1983, Israel's Move To The Right - New
York: Greenwood Press, 1987. p 187.) Begin ordered the Osirak reactor
bombed because he feared that his party would lose the next election, and he
did not believe the opposition party would have the toughness to preempt
production of the first Iraqi nuclear bomb. Begin told a close political
advisor, "I know there is an election coming. If they [Labor] win, I will lose
my chance to save the Jewish people." (p 365.) The Israeli fear of nuclear
attack from neighboring Arab countries is strategically unjustified. A nuclear
attack on Israel would also kill Arabs on a massive scale in the area. Five
decades of Cold War superpower nuclear deterrence has established firmly
the effectiveness of the principle of mutual massive destruction (MAD). The
best insurance against an Arab nuclear attack on Israel is to stop the forced
evacuation of Palestinian Arabs from Israel. The Arabs want the land
occupied by Israel back to enjoy, not destroy it with radiation.

Harvard nuclear physics professor Richard Wilson, who visited the reactor
after the attack, argued that preemption is a dangerous game. The world
faces unprecedented threats from terrorism. If they involve weapons of mass
destruction, many people argue that we cannot wait until there is a specific
threat, but must consider preemptive strikes. But we must be careful. Non-
technical commentators often start with technically incorrect premises, and
build up a case for preemptive strikes that is as dangerous as it is incorrect.
Wilson visited the nuclear research reactor in Iraq on December 29, 1982
and visually inspected the reactor (which had been only partially damaged)
and its surrounding equipment. To collect enough plutonium using Osirak
would have taken decades, not years. French nuclear reactor engineer Yves
Girard was aware of the carelessness of the Canadians in supplying a heavy
water reactor to India, and the French in selling the Dimona reactor to Israel
without insisting on any international safeguards to prevent military
application. In 1975, Girard refused to help to supply a heavy water
moderated reactor to Iraq. Instead, the Osirak reactor was moderated by light
water, and therefore deliberately unsuited to making plutonium for bombs.
The day after the bombing, Begin incorrectly described Osirak with
misleading specifications of the Israeli Dimona reactor.

The chairman of the Board of Governors of the IAEA, Bertrand

Goldschmidt, was reportedly livid about the Israeli bombing, as were many
other experts. While as a French Jew who had worked on the Manhattan
project, he had especial sympathy for Israel, he was concerned that Israel had
damaged attempts by the international community, with the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to control the nuclear genie which had been let
out of the bottle in 1945 by the US.

The Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor infuriated the Iraqis. They had
followed international rules openly and accepted international inspections,
and yet were bombed by a country which allowed no inspections of its own
nuclear plants. Wilson reported that Iraqi fast-track for bomb development
began in July 1981, after the Israeli bombing. The preemptive strike seemed
to have had the opposite effect to that intended. Worse still, Israeli and US
intelligence deluded themselves into thinking that once bombed, the threat of
Iraqi bomb-making was over. The Iraqi bomb program became generally
known in 1991, and a number of experts wrote about it in the Israeli journal
New Outlook. The general consensus was that the Israel had no justification
in bombing Osirak.

Iraq, the rogue regime, swallowed the attack stoically. Yet the incident
radicalized Iraqi politics. One shudders to think what the US would have
done if one of its nuclear power plants operating under NPT rules had been
attacked. Yet this precedent of bombing an Iraqi nuclear power plant built
under an operative international non-proliferation regime by a Western
power had been set in the name of proliferation preemption, giving
justification and impetus to secret nuclear programs that are much more
difficult to monitor.

With the widespread acknowledgement by many experts that the

components for assembling a nuclear device can easily be purchased in the
open market for around $2 million, or a fully-assembled device for $20
million, the claim of US Vice President Dick Cheney in his acceptance
speech in the Republican Convention in New York in late August this year
that the illicit global nuclear proliferation network had been effectively shut
down by Bush's "war on terrorism" sounded like a pitch to sell the Brooklyn
Bridge to a gullible public. An iron rule of terrorism is what goes around,
comes around from geopolitical blowback. One cannot exterminate terrorism
any more than mosquitoes, except by reordering the ecosystem. Until the
inequities of the socio-political ecosystem are eliminated, terrorism will
continue to exist.

On the state level, one glaring lesson from the second Iraq War is that non-
possession of nuclear weapons has become an open invitation to enemy
invasion. Every government now will realize it is its sovereign responsibility
to avail itself of nuclear capability for the defense of the nation, because the
absence of nuclear capability has been turned into negative proof of intent to
acquire such capability, which in turn provides the justification of reckless
preemptive attack, undeterred by nuclear retaliation on the attacker. Nuclear
proliferation will continue until all nuclear powers pledge themselves to the
doctrine of no-first-use and the doctrine of no military force against non-
nuclear nations.

An Iranian counter-offensive in 1982, aided by fresh US arms from the Iran-

Contra deal, reclaimed much of the territory lost to Iraq during the early
phase of the war. On November 26, 1983, Reagan signed a secret order
instructing the US government to do "whatever was necessary and legal" to
ensure that Iraq was not defeated in its war with Iran. At this time, the
Reagan administration openly acknowledged its awareness that Iraq was in
possession of weapons of mass destruction and that chemical weapons were
used almost daily against Iranian forces (Washington Post December 30,
2002), but for geopolitical reasons chose to avoid making an issue out of
these intelligence reports. In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, as secretary
of defense, was sent by Reagan to Iraq to meet with Saddam to offer
whatever assistance might be required. In November 1984, Reagan restored
full diplomatic status to Iraq after meeting in Washington with Iraqi deputy
prime minister Tariq Aziz.

The New York Times reported on August 29, 2002 that from 1982 to 1988,
the US Defense Intelligence Agency provided detailed information to Iraq
on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and
bomb damage assessments.

In March 1986, the US and Britain blocked all UN Security Council

resolutions condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons, and on March 21
the US was the only country refusing to sign a Security Council statement
condemning Iraq's use of these weapons. The US Department of Commerce
licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989,
including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. In May 1986, the
US approved shipment of weapons-grade botulin poison to Iraq. In late
1987, Iraq began using chemical agents against Kurdish separatists in
northern Iraq.

Four major battles were fought in the Iran-Iraq war from April to August
1988, in which the Iraqis effectively used chemical weapons to defeat the
Iranians. Nerve gas and blister agents such as mustard gas were used, in
violation of the Geneva Accords of 1925. By this time, the US Defense
Intelligence Agency was heavily involved with Saddam's military in battle-
plan assistance, intelligence gathering and post-battle debriefing. In the last
major battle of the war, 65,000 Iranians were killed, many with poison gas.

Part IV: The burden of being a superpower

Iraq Rebuilds, with a little US help
A ceasefire agreement between Iraq and Iran was signed on August 20,
1988. Iraq then rebuilt its military capability with bank credits and
technology from Western Europe and the United States, financed mostly by
Saudi Arabia. Five days after the ceasefire, Saddam Hussein sent planes and
helicopters to northern Iraq to begin massive chemical attacks against Kurd
separatists. In September 1988 the US Department of Commerce again
approved shipment of weapons-grade anthrax and botulinum to Iraq for use
in domestic security operations. In that month assistant secretary of
state Richard Murphy said: "The US-Iraqi relationship is ... important to our
long-term political and economic objectives." That December, Dow
Chemical sold US$1.5 million in pesticides to Iraq, despite knowledge that
these would be used in chemical weapons domestically. Brutal actions
against Kurdish separatists were undertaken in 1988 in northern Iraq, where
Ali Hassan al-Majid was accused of ordering the gas attack against civilians
that killed about 5,000. It took six years and a change in geopolitical
conditions before the US shed crocodile's tears for the tragedy.

The US legally and illegally helped build Saddam's military into the most
powerful war machine in the Middle East outside of Israel. The US supplied
chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq
was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied
intelligence and battle-planning information to Iraq when those battle plans
included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The US blocked
UN censure of Iraq's use of chemical weapons. The US continued to supply
the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at
a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill
Kurdish separatists. The US did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union
and later Russia was the largest weapons supplier, but Britain, France and
Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology. All
sold weapons to both sides of the war.

Iraq Searches for Identity

Since 1958, when the last persistently pro-West Iraqi government in
Baghdad was overthrown, and diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq
formally broken nine years later, first-hand knowledge of Iraq and of the
successive regimes that had since governed it has been unavailable to senior
officials in Washington, whose fixation on global anti-communism left them
with little interest on subtleties. The US had largely operated in a policy
vacuum without the support of full understanding of Iraq, of its people and
most importantly of the concerns that motivated its leaders. Much of US
policy on Iraq has been based on advice from biased Iraqi exiles,
opportunistic academics and self-serving pro-Israel partisans.

Notwithstanding Washington's penchant to demonize its latest enemies, Iraqi

leaders, at least those not having been imposed by foreign powers, not unlike
independent leaders anywhere else, are motivated and constrained in their
policy deliberation by their perception of popular aspirations which are
shaped by a nation's collective self-image, history and cultural tradition. The
self-image of the Arabic people is one of a long victimized people, most
recently at the hands of Western imperialism and historically of Christian
bias, persecuted for their Arabic ethnicity and Islamic heritage. Iraq, like all
Middle East nations, aspires to be finally free of foreign intervention in its
domestic affairs, to enjoy a high standard of living in peace and harmony
consistent with its oil riches as God's gift. These national aspirations have
been shaped by a history of wounded national pride, of betrayal by foreign
allies who exploited inter-tribal rivalry, of evolving nationalism, of ethnic,
religious and linguistic tension, and of demographic pressure from an
increasingly youthful and impatient population. In Iraq, as in many other
countries in the region, more than half of the population of 25 million is
under the age of 25 who have not accumulated any assets that would provide
incentive to be politically conservative.

Besides history, Iraqi politics is influenced by its location and geography,

climate and the availability of water, which in many ways is more critical
than oil. The scarcity of water in the Middle East, heightened by rapid
urbanization and industrialization, has placed more importance on Iraq's two
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Even with the ascendance of oil as a
source of wealth, agriculture relying on renewable water remains the main
source of employment. These factors have influenced settlement patterns,
tribalism, resource utilization and the development of diverse regional
economics. For example, the fact that these two rivers flood between April
and June, too late for winter crops and too early for summer crops, means
that agriculture depends on irrigation, which has been under central
government control since the creation of the Iraq state, implemented with the
cooperation of diverse ethnic, religious and tribal groups. Water was able to
unite the Iraqi population more than oil. Baghdad, located in the center of the
country, lies in the transitional zone between north and south where the
Tigris becomes navigable and large-scale irrigation possible. The capital city
is a historical center of trade and communication.

The present boundaries of Iraq, undefined until 1926, were drawn in the 20th
century by European political and economic interests with little regard for
indigenous demographic patterns. There is a tension between the Iraqi state,
representing the central authority within its borders, and the Iraqi nation, a
tribal society divided by religious schism. As Faisal, the first Hashimite king
of Iraq, lamented in the early 1930s: "I say in my heart full of sadness that
there is not yet in Iraq an Iraqi people." This is the root argument of pan-
Arabism in Iraqi politics. The history of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party
reflects the evolution of modern Middle East politics, in that it has departed
from formal ideology of its original founders to adopt pragmatic measures to
solve real problems within an Arabic/Islamic world view. The war with Iran,
the most costly and bloody conflict not involving a Western power directly
since World War II, and the Iraqi incorporation of Kuwait, were not mere
conflicts over borders, or access to the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The Iran-
Iraq war was a clash between extremist Islamic fundamentalism espoused by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran and the pan-Arab nationalism of the
Ba'athists, both in and out of Iraq.

The irreconcilability of the two opposing ideologies is based on Iranian

rejection of limiting radical Islamic fundamentalism within one country, and
Ba'athist resistance to a world Islamic revolution, manifesting in Iraq as
resistance to Iranian incitement of the large Shi'ite population in Iraq, many
of whom are of Iranian descent. The incorporation of Kuwait was a
fulfillment of pan-Arab nationalism.

Iraq, situating on the eastern flank of the Arab world, is sandwiched between
two historical formidable non-Arab powers which have survived as the
modern states of Turkey and Iran, with whom Iraq shares ethnic groups.
Propinquity translates into vulnerability. In a speech on November 5, 1980,
Saddam said: "Turkey once imposed on us the Turkish language and culture
... They used to take turns on Iraq. Turkey goes and Iran comes; Iran goes
and Turkey comes. All this under the guise of Islam. Enough ... We are
Iraqis and are part of the Arab homeland and the Arab nation. Iraq belongs to
us." He was using the term Iraq the way it was used in the Koran, denoting
all of Mesopotamia in a pan-Arab context, not the modern state of Iraq,
whose borders were delineated by British imperialism.

It has been suggested that the US deliberately lured Saddam into Kuwait in
order to attack an increasingly intransigent Iraq. Saddam's meeting with US
ambassador April Glaspie is usually cited as evidence. The records of that
meeting indicate that Glaspie did not discourage Saddam, let alone warn him
about his highly visible massing of troops along the Kuwait border. But the
real purpose was not related to Iraqi aggression or intransigence. It was to
exploit the contradiction between Arab regionalism and pan-Arabism to
strengthen US control of the region. Saddam told the US that he expected
just reward for Iraq's role in helping the US contain a hostile and extremist
Iran, in a war that had cost 60,000 Iraqi lives in one single battle, a price
Saddam claimed the US would be unable to shoulder itself, given the nature
of US society. Iraq was left with a foreign debt of more than $40 billion
after the Iraq-Iran War, and needed higher oil prices of around $40 per barrel
to help pay this debt. Kuwait was deliberately keeping oil prices low to
destroy Iraq's economy. Glaspie responded that there were people from oil
states within the US who would also want to see higher oil prices.

A transcript excerpt of the meeting between Saddam and Glaspie, on July

25, 1990 (eight days before the August 2, 1990, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait),
released by British journalists, reads as follows:

July 25, 1990 - Presidential Palace - Baghdad.

Ambassador Glaspie: I have direct instructions from President Bush [Sr] to

improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your
quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with
Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years and admire your
extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know you need funds. We
understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to
rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed massive
numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our
business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against
Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I
have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship - not
confrontation - regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so
very close to Kuwait's borders?

Saddam Hussein: As you know, for years now I have made every effort to
reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in
two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief
chance. (pause) When we [the Iraqis] meet [with the Kuwaitis] and we see
there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a
solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.

Ambassador Glaspie: What solutions would be acceptable?

Saddam Hussein: If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al-Arab - our
strategic goal in our war with Iran - we will make concessions [to the
Kuwaitis]. But if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt
and the whole of Iraq [ie, in Saddam's view, including Kuwait] then we will
give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of
Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States' opinion
on this?

Ambassador Glaspie: We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts,

such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of state James] Baker has
directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that
the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

<> While pledging US neutrality on Arab-Arab conflicts, thus not

discouraging Iraq from moving against Kuwait, the US at the same time
gave Kuwait, through then defense secretary Dick Cheney, assurances that it
would defend it against an attack from Iraq, emboldening Kuwait to refuse to
negotiate.

The US goes to war in the Gulf

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Four days later, on
August 6, the United Nations imposed heavy sanctions on Iraq, on request
from the US. Simultaneously, after consulting with US secretary of defense
Cheney, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the head of the Arab regionalist snake,
invited US troops on to Saudi soil. The unhappy fate of Kuwait had led the
Saudi king to seek protection from the US against the march of pan-
Arabism. Iraq's transgression was not so much to repossess Kuwait as an
integral part of Iraq, but that it claimed Kuwait as the first step on the march
toward pan-Arabism. If Iraq were to be allowed to keep Kuwait on the basis
of pan-Arabism, the survival of the Arab regionalist states will be directly
threatened.

President George H W Bush quickly announced that the US would launch a

"wholly defensive" mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia, and
US troops moved into Saudi Arabia on August 7, 1990. Those who thought
simplistically that the US moved troops into Saudi Arabia to protect Saudi
oil were missing the point. At the time, Iraq was selling a higher percentage
of its oil to the US than Saudi Arabia, and there was no reason to expect Iraq
to change its oil export strategy. The Iraqi purpose in repossessing Kuwait
oil was to sell it, not to hoard it. Yet the idea of a war to protect oil supply
enjoyed wide automatic support in US politics, more than obscure
geopolitical calculations, especially when greed and power have been
celebrated in US society as moral positives since the 1970s. Under the cover
of protection of oil supply, the US moved troops into Saudi Arabia to stop
the march of pan-Arabism. It was a fateful development, as the al-Qaeda
pretext for the attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, 11 years later was
centered on demands for the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia. The
unintended consequences of geopolitical stratagem was being expressed
through the iron law of terrorism of what goes around, comes around, known
generally as the blowback effect, a term coined by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA).

On September 25, the UN imposed an interdiction on air traffic to and from

Iraq. On November 29, the US got its UN war resolution. John Pilger
reported in The Guardian that this was achieved through a campaign of
bribery, blackmail and threats. In 1990, Egypt was the most indebted country
in Africa. Secretary of state James Baker bribed president Hosni Mubarak
with $14 billion in "debt forgiveness" in exchange for Egypt withholding
opposition to the pending war on Iraq. Washington gave President Hafez al-
Assad the green light to wipe out all opposition to Syrian rule in Lebanon,
plus a billion dollars' worth of arms. Iran was bribed with a US promise to
drop its opposition to World Bank loans. Bribing the Soviet Union was
especially urgent, as Moscow was close to pulling off a deal that would
allow Saddam to extricate himself from Kuwait peacefully. However, with
its wrecked economy, the Soviet Union was easy prey. Bush sent the Saudi
foreign minister to Moscow to offer a billion dollars before the Russian
winter set in to compensate for Soviet investment in Iraq. Mikhail
Gorbachev, with life-threatening political problems of his own at home,
quickly agreed to the war resolution, and another $3 billion from other Gulf
oil states was wired to the Soviet government to secure outstanding Iraqi
debts to the USSR.

The votes of the non-permanent members of the Security Council were

crucial. Zaire, occupying the rotating chair, was offered undisclosed "debt
forgiveness" and military equipment in return for silencing Security Council
members during the attack. Only Cuba and Yemen held out. Minutes after
Yemen voted against the resolution to attack Iraq, a senior US diplomat
characterized the vote to the Yemeni ambassador as the most expensive "no"
vote he ever cast. Within three days, a US aid program of $70 million to one
of the world's poorest countries was suspended. Yemen suddenly had
problems with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and
800,000 Yemeni workers were abruptly expelled from Saudi Arabia.

On January 16, 1991, the United States led an international coalition from
US bases in Saudi Arabia to invade occupied Kuwait and Iraq. The US
established a broad-based international coalition to confront Iraq militarily
and diplomatically to defend the international principle of non-aggression.
The coalition consisted of Afghanistan*, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain,
Bangladesh*, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia*, Denmark, Egypt, France,
Germany*, Greece, Hungary, Honduras*, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger*, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland,
Portugal, Qatar, Romania*, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea*, Spain,
Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the
United States (countries marked with * were non-combatants.) The coalition
included all Arab regionalist states, such as Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, the UAE,
Morocco, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and above all, Saudi Arabia. To crush pan-
Arabism by exploiting its conflict with Arab regionalism was the
geopolitical purpose for the US attack on Iraq. The war was financed by
countries which were unable to send troops. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the
rich regionalists, were the main financial donors. More than $53 billion was
pledged and received.

Exhaustive remote-controlled precision bombings were followed by

blitzkrieg movements of ground troops. Tens of thousands of Iraqis troops
were killed by smart-bomb air strikes, never having even come within sight
of the enemy, and most of the military infrastructure was destroyed together
with much of the civilian infrastructure. On March 3, a ceasefire was reached
between US-led coalition forces and Iraq. By April, Iraq suppressed
rebellions in the south by Shi'ites, and in the north by Kurds. Millions of
Kurds fled to Turkey and Iran. US, British and French troops moved into
northern Iraq to set up refugee camps and to protect the Kurds. In May, Iraq
was presented with an international claim for compensation of $100 billion,
which dwarfed the $23 billion reparation imposed on Germany after World
War I that was considered incredibly excessive and as contributing to the
rise of Nazism in the defeated nation. But the government of Saddam
survived, while the Iraqi population suffered a decade of sanctions that
caused the death of 2 million people, 800,000 of whom were children. While
pan-Arabism was dealt a setback, the suffering of the Arab people in Iraq
boosted Arab solidarity in the region.

Bush Sr and his national security adviser explained their decision on "Why
we didn't remove Saddam" in an interview with Time (March 2, 1998):

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither
the US nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi
state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head
of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an
occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing
objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep", and would have
incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was
probably impossible. We had been unable to find [Manuel] Noriega in
Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy
Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have
collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.
Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously
trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world.
Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the UN's mandate,
would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression
we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the US could
conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would
have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome."
<> Essentially the same argument was repeated in their book, A World
Transformed.

And off to war again ...

Yet a decade later, in response to terrorist attacks of September 11, the

second Bush administration launched a regime-changing invasion of Iraq, on
a number of drummed-up pretexts that in hindsight proved to be
unsubstantiated, ranging from preemptive strike against weapons of mass
destruction to spread of democracy, to humanitarian intervention. It is a
misnomer to characterize current US policy as preemptive defense. It is more
accurate to call it presumptive defense. A legitimate government far away
from the US with no credible threat capability against the US was toppled by
military force not because it actually possessed weapons of mass destruction
that could be used against the US, but that it was presumed to have
possessed or at least would seek to possess them in character with its alleged
evil constitution as defined by US short-term geopolitical consideration.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration dove who spoke of

"regime change" in Iraq for at least 18 months prior to actual beginning of
the second war on Iraq, said as the war drew near that the US might not seek
to remove Saddam if he would abandoned his weapons of mass destruction.
It was the latest in a series of comments by Powell that seemed to back away
from the White House goal of deposing the Iraqi president, which remained
as steadfast Bush administration policy. "We think the Iraqi people would be
a lot better off with a different leader, a different regime," Powell told the
UN Security Council. "But the principal offence here is weapons of mass
destruction, and that's what this resolution is working on. The major issue
before us is disarmament. All we are interested in is getting rid of those
weapons of mass destruction." But George W Bush said on October 7 that he
was "not willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein".
Earlier he had told the public: "This man tried to kill my daddy!"

The record shows that Powell, the good cop as opposed to Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld the bad cop, was also an early proponent of the regime-
change policy. He told the House International Relations Committee on
March 7, 2001, that the administration was considering such a policy. In
February, he told the same committee that "regime change" was policy, and
the US "might have to do it alone". He began backing away in an October 2
interview with USA Today's editorial board. Should Iraq be fully disarmed,
he said, "Then, in effect, you have a different kind of regime no matter who's
in Baghdad." On ABC, Powell put it this way: "Either Iraq cooperates, and
we get this disarmament done through peaceful means; or they do not
cooperate, and we will use other means to get the job done."

The US asserted that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and could be
close to making nuclear arms. Congress had given Bush authority to use
military force, after coordinating with the UN to see whether inspections
could be made to work. The Security Council maneuver that the US had
expected to be smooth sailing turned into a five-week round-robin of talks
and a pitched battle of wills with France. The fracas gave rise to criticism by
many countries that the US had pressed its case against Iraq too hard, not
only straining international law but also causing anxiety about how
Washington would play its role as the lone superpower, now faced with the
new threat of global terrorism.

President Jacques Chirac of France, traveling in the Middle East, demanded

postponing authorizing war against Iraq until after UN weapons inspectors
had completed their work. The US was not eager to compromise, but both
Washington and Paris recognized that a rift between them could be very
damaging and that there were important advantages to widening support for
any American action taken against Iraq.

Bush administration officials characterized the protracted talks as an

example of UN vacillation. Bush raised question on the UN's relevance.
Powell told NBC that he expected the UN Security Council to enact a
resolution setting strong guidelines for inspection teams to be sent back into
Iraq. But, he added, "The issue right now is not even how tough an
inspection regime is or isn't. The question is will Saddam and the Iraqi
regime cooperate - really, really cooperate - and let the inspections do their
job. All we are interested in is getting rid of those weapons of mass
destruction." Rumsfeld began talking about the "New Europe" of former
Soviet satellites as against the irrelevant "Old Europe" of France and
Germany in the new world order.

On February 5, 2003, Powell presented "proof" to the United Nations

Security Council that Iraq still produced and held weapons for mass
destruction. Western non-affiliated inspectors to Iraq later declared Powell's
proof on mass destruction to be a "lie", while the US officially attributed the
untruths to intelligence failure.

Investigative journalist Bob Woodward of Watergate fame provided in his

sensational book, Plan of Attack, the first detailed, behind-the-scenes
account of how and why the president decided to wage war in Iraq based on
conversations with 75 of the key decision-makers, including Bush himself.
The president permitted Woodward to quote him directly. Others spoke on
the condition that Woodward not identify them as sources. Woodward
reports that just five days after September 11, Bush indicated to National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that while he had to do Afghanistan first,
he was also determined to do something about Saddam. "There's some
pressure to go after Saddam Hussein," Woodward quoted Rumsfeld as
hearing the president saying: "This is an opportunity to take out Saddam
Hussein, perhaps. We should consider it." And Woodward quoted the
president saying to Condi Rice head-to-head: "We won't do Iraq now. But it
is a question we're gonna have to return to."

Woodward wrote that "there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before
Thanksgiving, November 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11." This is part
of this secret history. Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, took
Rumsfeld aside, "collared him physically, and took him into a little
cubbyhole room and closed the door and said: 'What have you got in terms
of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I
want you to keep it secret'." Woodward wrote immediately after that,
Rumsfeld told General Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq
and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
Woodward detailed when and how the decision to invade Iraq was made, but
he shed no light on why.

Now what's the plan?

The Bush administration went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how
easy the postwar situation would be: it thought the reconstruction would be
self-financing, that US forces could draw on a lasting well of gratitude for
liberating Iraq from tyranny, and that the US could occupy the country with
a small force structure and even draw US forces down significantly within a
few months. This illusion is reflected in US policy on force structure. After
the Cold War, because of defense budget reduction and popular opposition
in the host countries, the US was forced to gradually reduce its troops
stationed overseas. US troops abroad had shrunk to 247,000 people before
the second Iraq War in April 2002. In 1968, during the height of the Vietnam
War, army strength reached 1,570,000; navy 723,600; marine 307,300; and
air force 904,900. In 2002, army strength had dropped to 486,500, navy
385,000, marine 173,700 and air force 368,300. The air force, together with
navy carrier-based planes, has become the dominant arm of the US military.

At the conclusion of offensive military operations in Iraq, the US Army

announced its plan to set up four military bases in occupied territory. Up to
now it still has more than 140,000 troops stationed in Iraq and it is expected
to keep a considerable scale of forces there for a long time to come. The US
occupation authority repeatedly singled out inadequate troop numbers as the
main difficulty in carrying out its mission. The US force structure is
designed to win short limited wars with smart weapons, but is clearly
inadequate for extended occupation of the long list of countries in which US
foreign policy aims to effectuate regime changes.

Bush has adopted the "transformationalist" agenda embraced by Rice, who

in August 2003 set out US ambitions to remake the Middle East along neo-
conservative lines by using US military power to impose democracy and free
markets on an Islamic tribal culture. It is a policy for political transformation
of Arab countries deemed vital to victory in the "war on terrorism". Yet this
policy is at odds with the force structure of the US military, which has been
designed to prevail in short intense conflicts, not long drawn-out
occupations.

Since the events of September 11, the US has looked on Islamic terrorism
and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the greatest threats to
its national security, thinking the main threat to be coming from the
"unstable arc-shaped region" encompassing the coastal areas of the
Caribbean Sea, Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, South
Asia and the Korean Peninsula. The US Defense Department has drastically
adjusted the disposition of its overseas troops around this "unstable arc-
shaped region" in an attempt to cope effectively with a global "preventive"
war.

Advance disposition is a deployment concept of positioning in advance a

considerable amount of weapons, equipment and supplies in overseas bases,
doing the defense and garrison work with very small forces. When a sudden
crisis erupts, US forces will be sent by quick transport to the crisis region
and, by relying on the advance installed weapons, equipment and supply,
quickly generate combat effectiveness in the crisis region and carry out
technologically intensive operational tasks. Currently, US forces have
deployed equipment and materials for two army divisions in Europe and four
marine expeditionary brigades each in Norway, Guam, Diego Garcia and the
Atlantic. In addition, US forces have 12 mobile advance-storage ships in the
Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions. This strategy does not take into
account the massive troop requirement for pacification of occupied lands
after an externally imposed regime change. In imposing this new Pax
Americana by widespread regime changes, the US will need to maintain a 3-
million-man army. What the neo-conservative hawks at the Bush White
House fail to realize is that the very "rogue nations" on which they aim to
impose regime changes, have been acting as ironic proxies for the US, albeit
unruly in US eyes, in maintaining the rat-tat world order the US has won
from winning the Cold War. The dismantling of this world order, however
imperfect in US eyes, will threaten the world's sole remaining superpower
more than any rogue nation does.

Bush has repeatedly drawn comparisons between the occupation of Iraq to

that of post-World War II Germany and Japan, drawing comfort from the
alleged success of democratization of these two former enemies. The post-
World War II occupation of Germany was a huge and diverse undertaking
spanning almost 11 years, conducted in conjunction with three other
members of the wartime alliance and involving in various degrees a good
number of US governmental departments and agencies. The occupation was
for the US Army a mission second only in scope and significance to the war
itself.

On V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, General Dwight D Eisenhower had 61 US

divisions, 1,622,000 men, in Germany, and a total Allied force in Europe
numbering 3,077,000. When the shooting ended, the divisions in the field
became occupation troops, charged with maintaining law and order and
establishing the Allied military presence in the Western occupied part of the
defeated nation. This was a military occupation, the object of which was to
control the population and stifle resistance by putting troops into every part
of the occupied nation. Divisions were spread out across the countryside,
sometimes over great stretches of territory. The 78th Infantry Division, for
instance, for a time after V-E day, was responsible for an area of 3,600
square miles, almost twice the size of the state of Delaware, and the 70th
Infantry Division for 2,500 square miles. Battalions were deployed
separately, and the company was widely viewed as the ideal unit for
independent deployment because billets were easy to find and the hauls from
the billets to guard posts and checkpoints would not be excessively long.
Frequently single platoons and squads were deployed at substantial distances
from their company headquarters. There is no indication that the US Defense
Department has any such plans or intentions for the occupation of rogue
states facing regime change. Iraq with an area of 437,072 square kilometers
(168,800 square miles) will take more than 100 divisions to carry out the
type of occupation the US devised for Germany. Some 70,000 US troops are
assigned to Germany, although the army's 1st Infantry Division and 1st
Armored Division are currently in Iraq, leaving about 40,000 US Army
troops, the equivalent of two divisions, in Germany.

The Allied occupation of Germany is approaching its sixth decade, and in

the eyes of many Germans it has not yet ended. Foreign armies are still
based on German soil and Europe's largest and most prosperous
"democracy" still does not have a constitution and a peace treaty putting a
formal end to World War II. If the German model is applied to Iraq, there
may never be a formal end to the war in Iraq. Because there is no formal
peace treaty between Germany and the Allies headed by the US, German
sovereignty is compromised. On October 20, 1985, John Kornblum of the
US State Department told Germany's provisional Reichskanzler Wolfgang
Gerhard Geunter Ebel: "Until we have a peace treaty, Germany is a colony
of the United States." Ebel headed the provisional government that claims to
be the legal successor to the Second German Reich, which was replaced by
Adolf Hitler's illegal Third Reich (1933-45).

In Japan, the US did not engage in any regime change after the war, but built
on the existing political culture and regime, including the retaining of the
imperial house. Japan has been a successful economy, at least up to the end
of the Cold War, but not a particularly successful democracy, with a one-
party political system not much different than any communist government. It
has also not been a responsible regional citizen, betraying attitudes and
policies, especially in respect to its past brutal subjugation of its Asian
neighbors that are shameful and geopolitically destabilizing. John Dower
argues in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake
of World War II that the origins of these shortcomings can be traced to US
occupation policy. US occupation arrived in 1945 full of New Deal statist
zeal and determined to transform Japanese politics and society in its liberal
image. Cold War geopolitics quickly curbed this reform zeal. The
occupation did purge the military and effectively removed militarists from
the Japanese political establishment. But military dictatorships that lose wars
tend to lose their innate legitimacy, credibility and power, as Napoleon III
found out after the Franco-Prussian war and the Argentine military junta
discovered after the Falkland War of 1982 with Britain. Otherwise, Japanese
leaders of the prewar and wartime political, business and bureaucratic
establishment who had initially been purged and imprisoned were quickly
rehabilitated by the US occupation. Leftists and trade union leaders that the
US occupation had initially liberated from jail were returned to jail. On the
other end of the political spectrum, some of those implicated in Japan's
wartime government later served in high positions in post-war governments.
Nobusuke Kishi, a prominent member of General Hideki Tojo's wartime
cabinet, after a brief jail sentence, became Japan's prime minister a mere
decade after the war. Some 100,000 US troops are still in East Asia,
including 46,000 in Japan and 37,000 in South Korea.

The Iraq invasion has caused a split within the US political right between the
conservatives and neo-conservatives. Conservatives have become
increasingly vocal against the decision to invade once the initial Pavlovian
conditioning reflex of rallying around the flag in times of war subsided. Neo-
conservative hawks continue to insist that the invasion decision was right
even if it had been based on the wrong reasons and flawed intelligence.
Francis Fukuyama, famed conservative author of the End of History , in an
essay titled "Shattered illusions" that first appeared in The Australian on
June 29, 2004, since repeated in greater length in The National Interest, a US
conservative publication, questioned "the confidence [of neo-conservatives]
that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on
from there to democratize the broader Middle East". He put forth the
argument that "these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past
generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and
how social planners could never control behavior or deal with unanticipated
consequences. If the US cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in
Washington, DC, how in the world does it expect to bring democracy to a
part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-
American to boot?"

Fukuyama disputes Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer,

who has noted how wrong people were after World War II in asserting that
Japan could not democratize, echoing an argument made by Middle East
scholar Bernard Lewis, who has at several junctures suggested that
pessimism about the prospects for a democratic Iraq betrays lack of respect
for Arabs. Fukuyama expresses his disbelief that "democracies can be
created anywhere and everywhere through simple political will". He pointed
out that the overall record of US involvement in approximately 18 nation-
building projects between its conquest of the Philippines in 1899 and the
current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq is not a pretty one. The cases of
unambiguous success - Germany, Japan and South Korea - were all cases
where US forces came and then stayed indefinitely. According to Fukuyama,
in Germany and Japan, the US was not nation-building at all, but only re-
legitimating societies that had very powerful states. In all of the other cases,
the US either left nothing behind in terms of self-sustaining institutions, or
else made things worse by creating a modern army and police but no lasting
rule of law. Fukuyama asserts that "US dominance is clear cut only along
two dimensions of national power, the cultural realm and the ability to fight
and win intensive conventional wars. Americans have no particular taste or
facility for nation-building; we want exit strategies rather than empires."
Fukuyama's insightful observation about the absence of US will for global
nation-building is supported by recent reforms of US force structure.

Building an Economic Empire

US force structure is now designed to support an economic empire, not a

political empire. The venue for building this economic empire is neo-liberal
globalized trade, not military occupation. A geopolitical system has been
quietly fashioned out of market fundamentalism to protect this economic
empire, with the deceptive slogan of a crusade for democracy, the same way
Winston Churchill tried to protect the British economic empire with bogus
democracy and market capitalism after having sucked up all the capital from
the colonies. The British Empire evolved during the age of waning
monarchal absolutism. It was launched to enhance the authority of the
Crown by shipping off political dissidents, such as the unruly separatist
Scots, to build an empire for the Crown. It was a political empire that
transformed into an economic empire only after the Industrial Revolution.
The debates in parliament over colonialism were peppered with arguments
that the colonies were fruits of monarchal chimera and bottomless pits of
economic loss to be shouldered by the aristocracy to prevent them from
challenging royal dominance. An economic empire is governed by civilian
financial institutions, not military occupation. This explains why US
overseas military engagement must be accompanied by quick, workable exit
strategies. Wall Street support for the occupation of Iraq is near non-existent.
The unexpectedly endless occupation, euphemistically referred to as
"catastrophic success" has been Bush's gravest tactic error.

Strategically, Bush also failed to recognize that the invasion and occupation
of Iraq as a long-range policy to oppose pan-Arabism will incur the near
term price of massive escalation of terrorism. A war against pan-Arabism is
a war for terrorism, not on terrorism. Although few in Washington
understand this, or are willing to say it if they understood, the invasion of
Iraq unwittingly launched a war on pan-Arabism, which would bring about
many battles with terrorism. The US may win some battles with terrorism,
but the odds of it winning its "war on terrorism" have been reduced with its
war on pan-Arabism. Even accepting Bush's declaration that the US after the
invasion of Iraq is safer, though still not safe, the price for this controversial
claim is a US certainly not freer domestically.

Just as the Arab-Israel War of 1973 restructured the world economy by

lifting the market price of oil to $30 a barrel, the invasion of Iraq has ushered
in an era of oil above $50, changing the economic calculations of all
participants in the global economy. With the US in essence owning most if
not all of the world's oil as long as oil is mainly denominated in dollars, a fiat
currency the US can print at will with no immediate penalty that has
assumed the status of the main reserve currency for trade based on
geopolitical factors, a monetary phenomenon known as dollar hegemony, the
impact of higher oil prices translates into a sudden expansion of the
economy in dollar terms. The same amount of oil now is worth more dollars.
Oil inflation, unlike wage inflation, is not a growth stimulant, draining
consumer demand from the overcapacity that technological progress has
presented to the economy. Oil profits stagnate for lack of investment
opportunities because of low consumer demand. It is an inflation that drains
money from consumers to the owners of oil who cannot recycle the money
through consumption. It produces a shift of economic power from the oil
consuming economies to the oil producing and ultimately to the dollar
economy. Within the dollar economy (which extends beyond the political
borders of the US) higher oil prices produce a shift of economic power from
consumer to those who own oil reserves. It leads to a further step toward the
top-heavy inverse pyramid structure of wealth distribution in the US
economic empire. Unfortunately, inverse pyramids are inherently unstable.

Since September 11, it has been reported that Bush views himself as doing
God's work. So did Osama bin Laden after the quartering of US troops in
Saudi Arabia, so did Khomeini in overthrowing the Shah. Where was it
written that God approved of the global spread of democracy by US
invasions? Was the moral authority of the Ten Commandments derived from
popular vote? The fact is, God, assuming he exists, is on everyone's side.
Bush must know he is paying a high price globally for his unilateral policies
and his administration's hounding tone. Judging from overseas reports, Bush
may now be the most unpopular US leader ever around the world. Anti-US
sentiment has grown so intense that few foreign leaders can cooperate with
Bush, on Iraq or any other issue, without taking a severe hit domestically in
their own popularity.
The leader of the sole superpower in a world order of sovereign nations is by
default also the leader of the world, who cannot lead without the support of
all the people of the world. But if Bush should win a second term because of
inept Democratic campaigning, or the absence of a clear alternative vision
from the challenger, his mandate will be not merely to lead the US out of a
false-start quagmire, but to lead the world out of a destructive path of
geopolitical insanity, and join the ranks of great statesmen in history. There
are those who unrealistically reject the US because they despair over the
prospect of the US ever acting progressively as portrayed by its own high-
minded self-image. The cruel reality is that the narrow national interests of
the US often collide with the ideals of that image. There is much complaint,
justified repeatedly by solid evidence, about the government lying to the
public. Yet the reality is that US policies basically reflect US public opinion
and at times unwittingly at the expense of US long-range national interests.

If US policies are frequently aggressively reactionary, it is because such

disposition is part of the American character. Bush's popularity with
Americans rests on his authentic American character. Yet there are two sides
to that character, made visible by the screen persona of John Wayne: the
tough big guy who champions the defenseless little guys. The US has
evolved into a superpower in the course of two World Wars and will remain
one for the foreseeable future. As such it has earned the privileges associated
with the instinctive prerogative of a tough big guy. But the complete
American character requires the US to champion the defenseless little guys
of the world. The US has a rendezvous with destiny as the forward-looking
leader of the world rather the backward-wishing occupier of the world.