Shiites and Sunnis

David Seaton's News Links
Thinking about the Shiites and the Sunnis, I had a little flash of insight that I'd like to cast upon the waters to see if anybody with special knowledge, like Juan Cole, could riff on it.

I understand that Iran, which is 90% Shiite has never been a colony, which makes it unique in the region. The rest of the Middle East was Ottoman or English or French, colonies, protectorates or whatever. In these situation of domination the outsiders availed themselves of the Sunnis as their interposed governing elite, even when they were a minority as in Mesopotamia/Iraq. The Arab Shiites were simply treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water when not actively persecuted: always obsessed with justice and sacrifice and allowed to dissemble their religion if in danger from the Sunnis.

So the Sunni Arabs in the Middle East have always been the clients and executors of some faraway ruler, either in Istanbul, London, Paris or Washington and the Shiites were excluded and left "wild and free".

Thinking about all this I suddenly remembered a summer I spent as kid at a Cheley camp in the Colorado Rockies. We used to go riding in large groups on these trail horses that spent their lives following the horse in front of them. One time we were visiting a "ghost town", which had a large flat field next to it and the counselors thought it would be fun if we played "capture the flag" on horse back. It was dreadful! We were all milling around trying to capture the flag or having captured it trying to escape or to catch the one who had the flag, but the poor horses instead of enjoying a good, free-form gallop, were only desperately trying to find some other horse's bottom to follow. Disaster.

Maybe the Sunni Arabs are like those trail ponies and that is why the rise of the Shiites is putting them into a panic. Perhaps the Shiite Arabs are like "mustangs" with no previous habits of government, unlike the Sunni Arabs who seem to have been the "Sepoys" of the Ottomans. The Shiites have never been anybody's man Friday, so they don't have those "trail pony" reflexes, which, as I learned as a boy, are so hard to shake off. DS

Saint Saddam?

David Seaton's News Links

There are things that beggar belief. Any apologist of the Iraq war, when driven into a corner by the weight of his opponent's arguments, would finally retreat behind, "well, anyway, the Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein, aren't they?" The image of Saddam as a sanguinary, subhuman beast was central to the entire narrative. By dying in a manner straight out some Arab legend told around a Bedouin campfire, a lion among jackals, defiantly praising the Palestinians, his last words the Shahadah, Saddam was allowed to utterly destroy the American raison de guerre. Total incompetence or a move to deepen the split between Sunnis and Shiites leading up to an attack on Iran? Certainly for the neocons the main objective has always been Shiite Iran. However, it's difficult to see the drama of Saddam's hanging as a Zionist conspiracy; how could they know he would die so bravely? Finally, then, who is the loser in this war? Not Saddam Hussein. If death is defeat we are all losers... everybody has to die sooner or later... to enter into Arab folklore, to be sung and honored for generations, after doing almost everything you have ever wanted to do for most of your long life could certainly be considered victory. DS

Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many - New York Times

Abstract: In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe. On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.(...) in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.” “God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.” By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past. “Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”(...) “The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride too.” Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now.”(...) “He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic and director of the online radio station Ammannet.net, said: “If Saddam had media planners, he could not have planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity.” Writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but have looked right past his bloody history as they compare Iraq’s present circumstances with Iraq under Mr. Hussein.(...) “Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed Saddam’s execution?” wrote Hamadeh Faraneh, a columnist for the daily Al Rai. “Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his tormentors, ‘Long live the nation,’ and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered the declaration of faith? His last words expressed his depth and what he died for.”(...) Mr. Safadi, the Jordanian editor, said: “In the public’s perception Saddam was terrible, but those people were worse. That final act has really jeopardized the future of Iraq immensely. And we all know this is a blow to the moderate camp in the Arab world.” READ IT ALL

Tony Blair and Iraq - William Pfaff

David Seaton's News Links
How Bush got into Iraq is complicated, but we are beginning to have some picture. Ignorance plays a large role in all the hypothesis advanced. In the USA very few people have much of an idea or even care very much about the Middle East, except for the Zionists. Those few knowledgeable people who aren't Zionists are accused of being "Arabists" and generally suspected of being "antisemites", (I put antisemitism in quotes because it is getting increasingly difficult to define the term, it's used for everything from desecrating Jewish cemeteries to criticizing Ariel Sharon and Avigdor Lieberman). But Britain has no such excuse of inbred provincialism. The British actually understand something about the Middle East and the Arab world. It's a mystery why Tony Blair signed on so unquestioningly to Bush's agenda. He might have been listened to, perhaps some of the disaster might have been avoided... at least for Britain. Understanding this mystery will surely teach us much about how the world is organized. DS

Abstract: One continues to be baffled by Blair’s unwillingness, even now, with nearly eight thousand British troops in Iraq, to take an independent line that distinguishes British from American and Israeli interests, and that makes use of Britain’s very considerable expertise and long experience in Iraq and in the Middle East to establish a serious British role as confident and knowledgeable partner of Washington, with ideas of its own. The late East German spy chief Markus Wolf was quoted in one of his obituaries as contemptuously commenting on the “sketchy” knowledge possessed by CIA agents about the countries they dealt with. That certainly can be said in spades about the people in the Bush administration who have dealt so disastrously with Iraq. Fifty years ago we were still in the midst of the Suez adventure, widely said to have broken Britain’s will to independence, reducing it to permanent submission to Washington. (The specific cause, Washington’s threat to force devaluation of the pound sterling if Britain did not halt the invasion of Egypt, has recently been described by one iconoclastic economist as a great lost opportunity, since devaluation would have boosted British exports and prevented a post-Suez economic slump.) The Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Nasserite Egypt was a foolhardy anticipation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, since it too rested on the notion that overturning a single man, Colonel Gamal Abdal Nasser, could transform the region: end the crisis in French Algeria, give Israel security, and make Britain once again a Middle Eastern power. In the event, it was better for Britain that the Suez invasion failed, since an effort to re-impose foreign control over the Suez Canal in an Egypt (nominally independent since 1923) that had just seen the departure in 1954 of the last British troops, would eventually have met enormous international resistance. The Egyptian monarchy was toppled by the “Free Officers” in 1953, and the new constitution installed by Colonel Nasser, the inventor of “Arab socialism,” had made him a great regional hero. The Suez invasion would surely have ended in fiasco. Suez can be blamed on the British prime minister of the time, Anthony Eden, who believed that in Nasser he was still fighting Hitler (just as the Israelis today claim to be doing, in the person of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Hitler is no longer an historical personage but an item in the vocabulary of sterile polemics). Eden had an excuse. He was at the time already a seriously sick man, and was also a pure social product of Britain as empire, as well as of pre-war and wartime diplomacy, ill-equipped to understand populist Arab dictators. Blair has no such excuse for ignoring both expert British opinion on Iraq and common sense, so as to trail after George W. Bush, in the latter’s inadvertent and ignorant imitation of Suez, attempting to dominate the Arab Middle East by overthrowing (what was) its most prominent despot. How Bush’s America has needed a confident and self-respecting British government, one that could recognize another Suez when it saw one, and say so. The prime minister’s advice to the Baker-Hamilton Commission on Tuesday – whatever it was -- comes too late. LINK