|
WASHINGTON, July
10 (UPI) -- The war in Baghdad took a turn for the
worse Sunday as masked gunmen pulled at least 40
Sunni Arabs from their houses, cafes, and cars and
executed them in cold blood. Iraq's President Jalal
Talabani said it brought the country to a "dangerous
edge." I thought it was already there.
The slaughter took place in a neighborhood called
Jihad. The raid is believed to be retaliation by
extremist Shiite groups, according to reports from
Baghdad. Any Sunni who had the misfortune to be in
the environs was killed on the spot, reported
witnesses. Units of the newly U.S.-trained Iraqi
security forces stood by without intervening. Their
silence and failure to intervene speaks volumes
about the future of Iraq and just how much trust can
be placed in these nascent security forces.
President George W. Bush likes to say that "as Iraqi
forces stand up, American forces will stand down."
Given that track record, U.S. forces may end up
being in Iraq far longer than anyone hoped, least of
all, the troops themselves. In fact, if we are to
learn anything from history, President Richard Nixon
used to say the same about the war in Southeast
Asia: "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger
the rate of American withdrawal can become greater."
And with each new such incident the reality of an
all-out civil war hangs over the heads of all
Iraqis. Perhaps the answer to Iraq's ills lies in an
intriguing article by Ralph Peters, a retired Lt.
Col., titled, "How a better Middle East would look,"
that was published in the June 2006 issue of Armed
Forces Journal.
Peters claims that "International borders are never
completely just." But, claims the author, "the
degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom
frontiers force together or separate makes an
enormous difference -- often the difference between
freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the
rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war."
Therefore, the retired military officer puts forward
an idea -- more like a wish list of how to fix all
the greater Middle East's woes. Of course a number
of countries that stand to loose some territory,
such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan and
might not immediately agree with Peters' plan to
redraw the lines in the sand initially traced by
Mssrs.
Sykes and Picot in the closing days of World War I.
Peters says these borders were "most arbitrary and
distorted," which he claims were "drawn by
self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient
trouble defining their own frontiers)."
Peters remains a realist, thankfully. He writes: "No
adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make
every minority in the Middle East happy." But he
makes a case for the creation of new states, to
house the Kurds, Baluchis and Arab Shiites.
"As for those who refuse to think the unthinkable,"
declaring that boundaries must not change and that's
that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never
stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have
never been static," says Peters.
"Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000
years of history: Ethnic cleansing works," adds the
retired army officer. Look at the former Yugoslavia.
Peters starts off with "the border issue most
sensitive to American readers, Israel." The Jewish
state needs "to return to its pre-1967 border if it
hopes to ever live in peace."
Then he comes to Iraq -- "A Frankenstein's monster
of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts." He
adds, "the U.S. and its coalition partners missed a
glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice
after Baghdad's fall."
According to Peters, "Iraq should have been divided
into three smaller states." He says the United
States "failed from cowardice and lack of vision,
bullying Iraq's Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi
government -- which they do wistfully as a quid pro
quo for our good will."
He correctly states that should a free plebiscite be
held, "make no mistake. Nearly 100 percent of Iraq's
Kurds would vote for independence."
Ditto for the Kurds of Turkey, "who have endured
decades of violent military oppression and a
decades-long demotion to mountain Turks in an effort
to eradicate their identity." While the plight of
the Kurds in Turkey "has eased somewhat over the
past decade, the repression recently intensified
again and the eastern fifth of Turkey should be
viewed as occupied territory." Peters sees the Kurds
of Syria and Iran, rushing to join in forming an
independent Kurdistan if they could.
In the new Middle East according to Peters, "Iraq's
three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state
that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria
that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented
Greater Lebanon:
Phoenecia reborn."
The Shiites in the south of old Iraq would form the
basis of "an Arab Shia State rimming much of the
Persian Gulf." The great looser would be Saudi
Arabia, which Peters would have broken up into parts
for the Arab Shiite State, some parts to Yemen and
other parts for the creation of a "super Islamic
Vatican."
Peters sees Saudi Arabia as "A root cause of the
broad stagnation in the Muslim world," and the way
the Saudi royal family treats "Mecca and Medina as
their fiefdom."
"Imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might
become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating
council representative of the world's major Muslim
schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred State --
a sort of Muslim super-Vatican -- where the future
of a great faith might be debated rather than merely
decreed."
"Correcting borders to reflect the will of the
people may be impossible, for now. But given time --
and the inevitable attendant bloodshed -- new and
natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more
than once."
In the meantime Babylon continues to bleed.
UPI
Top |
® 