YEARS OF GROWING IRONY - As the West dithers, Iraq is inevitably left open to violence |
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K.P. Nayar | ||
Of the many ironies of recent history,
this one surely justifies its description of “supreme”. Last weekend, as
Sunni militants, describing themselves colourfully as the “Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant” or ISIL for short, captured thousands of
kilometres of strategic land in Iraq and threatened to march on the
capital of Baghdad, Barack Obama’s defence secretary, Chuck Hagel,
ordered to sail into the Persian Gulf a giant American aircraft carrier.
The supreme irony in Hagel’s order is that
the aircraft carrier’s name has a special resonance with the ongoing
events in Iraq which have the potential to transform that entire region
forever with consequences for India which ought to be taken more
seriously in New Delhi than they appear to be. The name of the ship in question is USS George H.W. Bush.
Until not long ago, few experts on the Gulf or Levant lost their sleep
over ISIL. But last weekend, its fighters forced official Washington to
stay awake.
The United States of America’s secretary
of state, John Kerry, was kept busy on the phone to the Iraqi foreign
minister, Hoshyar Zebari, among others. President Obama interrupted his
vacation in California. He struggled to stay on course with the promise
that got him into the White House and won for him the Nobel peace prize:
a break with his predecessor’s penchant to put his country’s boots on
the ground against anyone he thought was not “with us”, and therefore,
“against us”.
But Hagel had the most unenviable task of
all: to create an illusion that by moving USS George H.W. Bush — along
with a guided-missile cruiser and a guided-missile destroyer — into
striking distance of Iraq, the Pentagon’s military might could scare
away the steely and determined ISIL fighters.
In reality, Washington is making
contingency plans for the evacuation of Americans from the Gulf region
if Baghdad does fall to militants. Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon
press secretary, said as much when he explained that Hagel’s “order
will provide the commander-in-chief additional flexibility should
military options be required to protect American lives, citizens and
interests in Iraq”. Ironically, on Sunday the tide turned and brought
unexpected relief to Washington — only because of understanding from the
most unlikely of sources of succour for the Americans, namely Iran,
ruled by ayatollahs, whom successive occupants of the White House have loved to hate.
Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki,
whom the Americans put in power only to watch helplessly as he grew too
big for his boots for Washington’s liking, may yet survive the ISIL
onslaught, but with help from Tehran. Iran’s help for the beleaguered
Maliki government has come as Obama fears to tread in messy Baghdad. Yet
the supreme irony of all will be if the aircraft carrier named after a
president — along with his son-successor, the names of both men
indelibly tied to the recent history of Iraq — is tasked to supervise an
evacuation from the Gulf.
The
Bushes, Herbert Walker and ‘Dubya’ or ‘W’, his son, the 41st and 43rd
presidents of the US, falsely promised the world an Iraq free from an
aggressive dictator and liberation from an “axis of evil”. After
untold suffering lasting more than a decade, what the world is watching
is the prospect of Americans turning tail and leaving the entire region
within the grasp of terrorists far, far worse than Saddam Hussein.
Watching from New Delhi, it ought to be of utmost concern.
The ironies in Iraq do not end there. In
this centenary year of World War I, several books on the Great War have
hit the stores in the West. One of them, Enemy on the Euphrates: The British Occupation of Iraq and the Great Arab Revolt 1914-1921,
published last month, stands out. It is easy to mistakenly assume from
the title chosen by its author, Ian Rutledge, the distinguished
economist, that the book is about Saddam or about men like Muqtada
al-Sadr, the cleric-politician who openly confronted the Americans or
even about Maliki, who undermines Washington in an underhand style.
But Enemy on the Euphrates is a
reminder that nothing has changed in the oil-rich part of the Arab world
in a century and that the more things appeared to change, the more they
have remained the same. Familiar to all those who have followed the
events since Dubya’s invasion of Iraq is a rallying cry by Muqtada al-Sadr’s “Mahdi army” which had the US on edge in 2004: “Just give the order, Muqtada, and we will repeat the 1920 revolution.” This
call by the Mahdi army to empower Shias and fight the Western presence
in Iraq has earned the nearly successful Shia uprising against the
British in 1920 a special place in Iraq’s current political folklore.
For those who know little about the dramatic and historic events between
the start of World War I and 1921, which changed the course of Arab
history in Iraq and nearby, Rutledge’s scholarly work is a valuable
education.
For the people of what is now known to us
as Iraq and neighbouring areas, World War I did not end in 1918. The
embers of conflict were merely suppressed from growing by the use of
massive force by the then colonial powers, mainly Britain. Mosul nearly
became Britain’s Waterloo in the 1920 revolt which Iraqis are glorifying
today. So when Mosul fell into the hands of ISIL last week, history was
not repeating itself, history was running its course after it was
unnaturally interrupted by outside forces 94 years ago.
The dramatis personae in Rutledge’s
narrative make for eerie reading. An oil company by the name of
Anglo-Persian played a big role in the events in Mosul and its
surrounding areas in the post-World War I period. In its current avatar
that company now goes by the name of BP. Among other key players amid
the potential oil fields in Mosul — and in nearby Basra, where the
oilfields were already under British control — were Royal Dutch and
Royal Shell. Britain spared no effort to suppress a revolt by ragtag
tribesmen who only wished to preserve their nomadic ways and bedouin lifestyle. The colonial powers, on the other hand, were seeking to control the oil then as they are doing now.
If Indians who lived under colonialism smirk on reading that these tribesmen were called budhoos
by the British, the smirk ought to be condoned. There was no joy last
week in reading that Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, fell into ISIL
hands, but it certainly showed that the tribes which continue to
inhabit the plains of Iraq are no budhoos. Not then, not now. It
required genius of some sort to bring together deadly enemies, Shias and
Sunnis, in a common fight to drive out British occupation. A less
charitable explanation is that the British were so hated by the local
people that they were willing to temporarily sink differences that are
part of their DNA even to this day.
What lies ahead? Rutledge recalls all
sorts of promises of convenience made by the British to assorted sheikhs
and their followers. The Whitehall then roped in other big powers and
convinced them to follow in tow. Behind the backs of Arab tribes, the
same land in nearby Palestine was at the same time being promised to
Jews. History will not absolve those who made those promises unless they
are fulfilled through a political process or the use of force as in
Iraq now is inevitable.
The latest events are a rueful reminder of
the maxim about fooling some people for some time but not all the
people all the time. The British finally vanquished the tribesmen only
because of the advantage of the Royal Air Force. Today the Americans are
talking of using drones to contain the ISIL. The best illustration of
how complex the situation is and how unpredictable the outcome promises
to be is this: in Iraq, the ISIL is fighting to overthrow the prime
minister, Nouri al-Maliki, while in Syria they want to see the back of
the president, Bashar al-Assad. The Americans and the British and the
rest of the West want Maliki to stay in power and Assad to vacate his
office. If anyone can rationalize this contradiction, they may find the
seeds of a solution there.
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The prophecy is more than seeing into the future. For the prophecy sees without the element of time. For the prophecy sees things as they were, as they are, and as they always shall be.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Irony of Ironies: George Bush and the Antichrist
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