The U.S. Encouragement of Fanatic Islamism in the Arab World
by GARY LEUPP
A
beautiful essay posted on Medium.com, entitled “A Marine in Syria:
Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence before the Devastation” by Brad
Hoff, draws our attention to what for the warmongers in Washington is a
highly inconvenient truth: the
secular dictatorships in the Middle East the U.S. has sought to destroy
since 9/11 (including most recently that of Libya) have been far more
tolerant towards religious and cultural diversity than the regimes that
have replaced them.
In
particular, the much-vilified Baath Party, which governed Iraq during
the Saddam years and continues to govern Syria, was and is based upon
the principle of secularism (non-religious, relatively religiously
tolerant) rule.
Hoff,
who “served” (as they say) as a Marine in Iraq between 2000 and 2004,
first visited Syria in 2004 in order to study Arabic. He describes his
surprise at how the experience challenged the “false assumptions” about
the Arab world acquired during his “Texas Baptist childhood.” Describing
Damascus in 2004 under Bashar Assad’s Baathist rule he writes:
“What
I actually encountered were mostly unveiled women wearing European
fashions and sporting bright makeup — many of them wearing blue jeans
and tight fitting clothes that would be commonplace in American shopping
malls on a summer day. I saw groups of teenage boys and girls mingling
in trendy cafes late into the night, displaying expensive cell phones.
There were plenty of mosques, but almost every neighborhood had a large
church or two with crosses figured prominently in the Damascus skyline.
As I walked near the walled “old city” section, I was surprised to find
entire streets lined with large stone and marble churches. At night, all
of the crosses atop these churches were lit up — outlined with blue
fluorescent lighting, visible for miles; and in some parts of the
Damascus skyline these blue crosses even outnumbered the green-lit
minarets of mosques.
“Just
as unexpected as the presence of prominent brightly lit churches, were
the number of restaurant bars and alcohol kiosks clustered around the
many city squares. One could get two varieties of Syrian-made beer, or a
few international selections like Heineken or Amstel, with relative
ease. The older central neighborhoods, as well as the more upscale
modern suburbs had a common theme: endless numbers of restaurants filled
with carefree Syrians, partying late into the night with poker cards,
boisterous discussion, alcohol, hookah smoke, and elaborate oriental
pastries and desserts. I got to know local Syrians while frequenting
random restaurants during my first few weeks in Damascus. I came into
contact with people representative of Syria’s ethnically and religiously
diverse urban centers: Christians, Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Druze,
Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, and even a few self-declared Arab
atheists. The characterization of Syrian city life that increasingly
came to my mind during my first, and many subsequent visits and extended
stays, was of Syria a consciously secular society when compared to
other countries in the region.”
Much
of this description might have applied to Baghdad as well, before the
ruinous U.S. invasion of 2003 based on lies and the subsequent
occupation. The latter forcibly disbanded the Baath Party of Iraq.
It destroyed the regime that had appointed a Christian (Tariq Aziz) as
Foreign Minister and Deputy Vice President; refurbished the Baghdad
synagogue; authorized liquor shops and bars; endorsed female education
through the graduate level; supported the Iraq National Symphony
Orchestra and promoted rock ‘n roll radio stations. During the years of
Baath rule in Iraq (1963-2003) mixed marriages between Shiite Muslims,
Sunni Muslims, Christians and others became common; mixed neighborhoods
were the norm; and the regime’s often brutal repressive actions were
largely directed towards activists opposed to secularism and favoring
some form of Islamic rule.
Nowadays
of course, anyone paying attention knows that the worst sort of Shiite
fanatics control one part of Iraq, ethnically cleansing neighborhoods,
driving out Christians and intellectuals, imposing a dress code,
shutting down liquor and video stores, discouraging women from attending
college. Meanwhile the worst sort of Sunni fanatics control Anbar
province and adjoining areas to the north, beheading and crucifying,
enslaving and forcing conversions.
Is it not apparent what even many anti-Baathists are now saying matter-of-factly: Things were better under Saddam Hussein?
There
is no doubt that the Shiite majority population under the old regime
were oppressed in many ways. The Baathists sometimes banned the Shiites’
traditional annual Karbala pilgrimage march, thinking it might produce
violent demonstrations against the regime. Saddam was (perhaps)
responsible for the murder of Ayatollah Mohammed
Mohammed Sadden al-Sadr, revered father of the currently powerful
Muqtada al-Sadr, in 1999. (But for what it’s worth, Saddam condemned the
murder and vowed to hunt down the perpetrators, while calling for
Sunni-Shiite unity).
In
the wake of the U.S. destruction of the Baath Party, the secular Iraqi
national army, and the modern state itself, self-defined representatives
of the Shiite majority assumed power with U.S. support while a broad
section of the Sunni Arab minority (Kurdish Sunnis being a separate
matter) found themselves suddenly unemployed, without income, denied any
significant role in the new order. The Sunnis had held a privileged
position in Iraqi society since the early 1920s when British
colonialists had decided to impose a Sunni king (of the Saudi Hashemite
line) on the arbitrary chunk of real estate they’d carved out of the
defeated Ottoman Empire that they decided to call Iraq. (Meanwhile the
French created Syria, for a time privileging the Alawite minority in
their colony, which helps to explain the power structure in that country
today.)
To
get a sense of the brutality of the British conquest of Iraq, achieved
through the suppression of the Iraqi Revolt (or Great Iraqi Revolution)
of 1920, it is enough to note that between 6,000 and 10,000 Iraqis were
killed and the British seriously considered using mustard gas to
suppress resistance. Winston Churchill positively advocated it at the
time.
From
1921 to 1958, the British-installed monarchy of foreign origin beholden
to Anglo-American imperialism ruled over Iraq, meeting with consistent
opposition from the Shiites and Kurds who represent well over 60% of the
population. In 1958 a group of nationalist military officers led by Abd
al-Karim Qasim seized power. Qasim’s regime angered Washington and
London by withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact (an anti-communist military
alliance of the U.K., Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan supported by the
U.S.); embracing Egypt’s pan-Arabist president Nasser; establishing
cordial ties with the USSR; legalizing the Communist Party of Iraq
(which became the largest communist party in the Middle East) and
demanding a 55% share in the profits of the Anglo-American owned Iraq
Petroleum Company.
In
1959, the U.S. sought to engineer Qasim’s downfall, employing among
others the young Saddam Hussein (then 22), who following a failed
CIA-backed plot to assassinate Qasim fled to Cairo. There he remained in
touch with his CIA patrons until the successful Baathist coup in 1963.
Thereafter Saddam was in charge of the roundup and execution of Iraqi
communists, gradually inching his way towards the presidency of the
country in 1979.
The
U.S. supported the Baathist Party at that time, as the only viable
alternative to the Communists or the Islamists. Yes, it maintained the
friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, and yes, it emphatically
opposed the Israeli settler-state. But the relationship with the
Baathists was useful to Washington—no more so than when, following the
Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iraq invaded its neighbor in an
effort to produce the regime change that the U.S. so deeply craved. Who
having seen them can forget those photos of Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad
in 1983, smiling and shaking hands with Saddam as they discussed U.S.
military aid including the provision of chemical weapons?
The
U.S. had, at the behest of Israel, placed Iraq on its black list of
“terror-sponsoring nations” but the Reagan administration removed it in
1982 to allow for greater trade and military support. When Israel bombed
an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, the U.S. uncharacteristically joined
the entire UN in condemning the aggression.
Of
course, meanwhile, even as it allied itself with the Iraqi Baathists
against the Shiite Islamists of Iran, the U.S. nurtured its closest Arab
ties with Saudi Arabia, homeland of Sunni Islamism. If by
“Islamism” we mean political Islam fired by an insistence on applying
Sharia law, Saudi Arabia is of course the most striking example. While
fearing the rise of Islamism elsewhere (for reasons which are now quite
apparent to many people) Washington wedded itself to the Saudi regime.
This
is an absolute monarchy dedicated to a Salafi version of Islam that
makes no pretensions to any kind of democratic aspirations. There is no
freedom of speech, press, assembly, conscience. The Shiite minority
(maybe 20%) is grudgingly tolerated as a community of second-class
citizens. Religious indoctrination is the crux of education. There are
no open Christians in Saudi Arabia and to convert means death. (The many
Filipinos and other Christians in the country as temporary workers may
worship privately in their homes, but not hold services. Last September
police from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the
Prevention of Vice raided the home of an Indian Christian in Khafji,
arresting 38 attending a prayer meeting and confiscating their bibles.)
Saudi
women have few rights other than those accorded by thousand-year-old
laws; as is well known, they are forbidden to drive or venture out into
society without the company of male relatives and most be covered head
to toe on such occasions. People convicted of crimes are maimed, stoned
to death or beheaded every year. In short, Saudi Arabia is almost
everything the U.S. deplores in the Taliban or ISIL.
But
the U.S. never undertakes to do what it might surely do at the drop of a
hat: issue a devastating condemnation of the country as a human rights
disaster far more egregious than anything seen in modern Iraq—or in
Syria, which Obama seems determined to wreck just as his predecessor
wrecked Baathist Iraq!
The
reason for this is simple. Saudi Arabia with 16% of the world’s proved
oil resources insures the supply of cheap oil to the west and Japan in
return for U.S. military support. (Among the uses of U.S. supplied
weaponry: the suppression of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations in
Shiite-majority Bahrain against the absolute monarchy in 2013, to insure
the Sunni king maintained control over the country that hosts the U.S.
Fifth Fleet and the current Saudi attack on neighboring Yemen to crush
the Shiite-led challenge to the U.S.-backed pro-Saudi, pro-U.S.
dictatorship.)
It
pays to spend some time studying the history of these places—something
U.S. secretaries of state seem uniquely incapable of doing. (Why bother
them with dead facts, after all, while they’re hell-bent on making
history themselves?) But if we do make the effort we realize that the
Baathist movement (which rose to power in Iraq and Syria and has been a
presence in Jordan and Yemen) arose in the 1940s under the leadership of
a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian named Michel Aflaq, who while
deeply respectful of the historical role of Islam in the formation of
Arab culture, opposed the union of the mosque and state and promoted
religious pluralism. This is what Brad Hoff witnessed in Damascus.
Aflaq
partnered with a Syrian Sunni activist, son of a grain merchant, named
Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and with Alawi Shiites associated with the
philosopher and historian Zaki al-Arsuzi. Their Arab Baath Movement,
which became the Arab Baath Party in 1947, was a Pan-Arabist, secular,
modernizing movement—the opposite of fundamentalist Islam. Its
achievements in Iraq include the fact that before the U.S. invasion Iraq
boasted the best national education system in the Arab world, the
highest number of PhDs, and the highest rate of female education. But
the U.S. has crushed Baathism in Iraq. Now it is aiming at the Syrian
variant, and in the process repeating its toxic achievement in Iraq.
That
is to say, the U.S. by attacking precisely those secular forces that
have most opposed the horrors of religious fanaticism—realizing, as they
are best placed to do, its horrific potential—are actually working in
tandem with the fanatics to inflict incomprehensible suffering.
What
if a series of U.S. administrations (influenced to say the least by
Israel and its powerful Lobby) hadn’t come to view Baathism as a greater
enemy than Islamic fanaticism? What if the U.S. occupiers of Iraq had
allowed the party to compete in elections and represent its traditional
constituents? What if, instead of declaring Assad’s regime
“illegitimate” (as though Obama can be any judge of such things)
Washington had stayed out of the Syrian conflict since 2011 altogether?
“What
if” history is a tricky business. We can’t turn back the hand of time
and experimentally do things over again. Still, I think it difficult to
imagine ISIL in its lightning rise to power over much of the Middle
East, frying people alive in cages, crucifying, beheading, burying alive
and enslaving, hacking to bits 3000-year-old artworks and world
heritage monuments, if George W. Bush and his team hadn’t responded to
9/11 with an all-out assault on the most modernizing, secular forces in
the Arab world, in alliance with some of the most backward.
If
the groups of teenage boys and girls Hoff once saw in Damascus
“mingling in trendy cafes late into the night,” wind up crucified,
beheaded, buried alive or merely blown to bits—or even just consigned to
lives of unparalleled oppression—we should know who to thank. If the
ISIL or al-Nusra thugs smash the treasures of the National Museum and
Historical Museum in Damascus, or blow up the glorious ruins of Palmyra,
we should know where to point the finger. Barbaric though such actions
may be, they pale before the horrific crime of the U.S. invasion of this
region twelve years ago. It opened Pandora’s Box, which has unleashed
nothing but death and evil ever since.
GARY LEUPP is
Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary
appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
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