Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores the dhimmi blindness of the current Iraqi nation-building policy, and asks some questions of policymakers:
“The Iraqi authorities say that they have arrested the leaders of three terror networks operating around Baghdad, two of which were headed by an interior ministry official.” — From this news item
How many others have burrowed within the government? And into the army, which is now being trained by the Americans? Americans are allowing into that “Iraqi” army “Iraqis” — i.e. Sunnis (of differing loyalties), Shi’a (of differing camps — roughly, those of SCIRI, Da’wa, and Moqtada Al-Sadr), and Kurds — whom the Americans can scarcely distinguish from one another. Nor can the Americans be much good at detecing any of the telltale signs that should arouse suspicions. Of course, even other “Iraqis” — i.e. Shi’a Arabs or Kurds or even Sunnis, the least likely to be helpful — might not always be able to detect them either, or if able to detect them, necessarily to point things out to the Americans. Nor can anyone be certain who, even within their own groups, has his chief loyalty to Islam, or to a particular brand of Islam, and not to the supposedly emerging nation-state. Even the Kurds, for example, have not been free from a group, Ansar al-Islam, more Muslim than Kurd in its desire to do in the Americans and all who collaborate with them. And there are Shi’a who, sharing the general Shi’a distaste for the American Infidels, cannot pretend to hide that distaste and totemporarily reconcile themselves to that American presence, so that those foreign Infidels can be kept around a bit longer, usefully employed killing (and being killed by) the main and permanent enemy of Shi’a dominance, the Sunnis, and as those same Americans will also continue to train Shi’a (who need that military training and experience far more than the Sunnis, who ran the army under Saddam Hussein), and are also hoping that the Americans will generously arm what they keep referring to as the “Iraqi” army. The Shi’a, who make up the bulk of that army and have even managed to replace the formerly almost entirely Sunni officer corps, know better.
The American military has not merely been asked to help a country. It has been asked to create a country where none exists, and none has existed since its modern creation, out of three former Ottoman vilayets, in the early 1920s by Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell. Ever since the betrayal of promises made to the Kurds after World War I, they have smarted and yearned to be free of the Arabs. Sometimes the Arab mistreatment has been endurable, sometimes not. More recently, with the massacre of 182,000 Kurds by Arabs — not. And the Shi’a, under whose southern lands the major oil deposits lie (now that the oil in Kurdish areas has been so long exploited), have suffered from poverty. They are on the whole shorter, scrawnier, and always poorer than the self-assured Sunnis, who believe that they as the better Muslims, the real Muslims, have a perfect right to continue to rule over all non-Arabs (those Kurds) and non-Sunni Arabs as well.
It is wrong, it is cruel, to continue to have the American military take on a task that neither they, nor anyone else from the outside, can conceivably perform. Sooner or later the Shi’a and the Sunni will have to come to terms, and the Arabs and the Kurds will have to come to terms — or not. It can be done after another year of fantastic expense and worry have passed for Americans. It can come after another year when, because of the perceived folly and expense and worry of continuing to remain in Iraq, Americans will fall away from the idea that anything much should be done about not “terror” but about the larger menace of Islam. That menace derives from an ideology. That ideology is borne by carriers who, right now, have settled deep within what they themselves, those carriers, describe as the lands still unsubmissive to Islam, and hence the Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War. And there, deep behind what they regard as enemy lines, through Da’wa and demographic conquest, and a mass campaign of disinformation about what Islam teaches, and what Muslims if they are good Muslims must believe, and about the history of Muslim conquest of non-Muslim lands and the subjugation of non-Muslim peoples, they advance the goals of the global jihad.
This has been quite a feat, for it requires hiding from billions of Infidels what is really in plain sight, and cannot be hid: the precise passages, of which there are over a hundred, in the Qur’an, or the stories in the Hadith, or the details from the life of Muhammad (the Sira), that simply are, in most cases, just a click away. And it requires inveigling people, journalists and politicians, into never looking into, or never referring, to these passages and these doctrines that are so central to Islam. Yet those doctrines are clear: the world is divided between Believer and Infidel, and the duty of the Believer is not to be friendly with, not ever to accept as an equal, the Infidel, but to wage constant war on him by whatever means prove effective and are available (“wealth,” “pen,speech” and demography are all weapons in that war), in order that Islam spreads across the globe, until Islam dominates and Muslims rule everywhere.
Meanwhile we dither and spend a fortune and become preoccupied with the task of creating “Iraq” and making it into a functioning, “democratic” nation-state. The soldiers in Iraq who parrot and may believe the party line all talk of how they are there to “make a difference.” But there is no real “difference ” they can conceivably make, except to weaken by their continued presence America’s own commitment to fighting the worldwide Jihad, and to strengthen, presumably, the Shi’a by continuing to use their own lives and weaponry to suppress the Sunnis. Yet the Sunnis, no matter how they may calm down temporarily, will never accept the loss of rule in Iraq. Not this year, not next, not ever.
One has to ask, yet again, not about who knew what and who misled whom, but the real questions that now matter:
1. Just how does “democracy” in Iraq necessarily weaken the role of Islam in Iraq? Particularly in light of the Sharia provision in the Iraqi “democratic” Constitution.
2. How does Iraq, if Shi’a-ruled, become a Model for all the Sunni-Arab-ruled countries, that will be enraged at the loss of Sunni power?
3. How will the continued attempt to build this Iraq — more schoolrooms, hospitals, electricity grids, water-treatment plans, soccer balls, candy, and so on — how does all this help the United States to limit or reverse, in collaboration with those in Europe who are awakening to their home-grown menace, the islamization of Europe? For the longer the Americans stay in Iraq, they cannot of course dare to even asymptotically approach the truth about Islam, for fear of offending someone among their “allies” in Iraq.
4. Why would the Sunni-Shi’a fissure, if it were to develop and grow into open hostility, and perhaps to attract men, materiel, and the attention of outside powers, chiefly those two main beneficiaries of the downfall of Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, not be to the advantage of the United States and all other Infidels? Was the Iran-Iraq War a good thing from our point of view, or a bad thing?
5. Why would the attempt of the Kurds to establish an independent state not be a good thing, if it serves to inspire other non-Arab Muslim peoples, such as the Berbers in North Africa, to begin to sense that the manipulation or exploitation of Islam as a vehicle for an Arab supremacist ideology, need not be tolerated by those non-Arab Muslims, at least not in quite the same way as before? Why should not the world’s attention, the attention of Muslims and Infidels alike, not be focused by such a development? Finally, a group of non-Arab Muslims would be throwing off the Arab yoke — so that the entire question of Islam as an ideology of Arab supremacism would be put permanently in front of everyone.
Answers welcomed in the comments field.