What did you think of the Iran-Iraq War? Did it bother you? Did it please you? Did it please you to know that for eight years the two most aggressive Muslim states were using up money, men, and materiel fighting each other? Did it please you to know that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. lent $60 billion to Iraq in order to shore up the Sunni despotism (“Ba’athism”) there in its fight with Shi’a Iran? Are you sorry that war ended?
What would you think if within Iraq Sunnis and Shi’a fought? Would this displease you? Would you be worried that in this or that area, while fighting for their lives, the local Arabs in, say, Anbar Province, somehow were — as Bush and Cheney direly warn us — to have time to create a little Al-Qaeda empire? Would it also have to fight the Shi’a, or would they give it a pass? Or would this new terrible terrorist training ground, that we are trying to avoid, be created rather in the territories where the Shi’a control?
But wait — don’t the Shi’a involved in terrorism already control an entire country, called Iran? Why would it be so very important to “stop the terrorists over there” [in Iraq] because “otherwise they will follow us over here” [in the United States], when they have already followed us over here? They need very little space in which to plan subway bombings — a flat in south London will do, or an apartment overlooking Prinsengracht, or in Alcala de Henares. No, the worry over Iraq becoming a “terrorist center” is absurd; they will all be fighting one another, and soaking up that money, that men, that materiel, that attention.
But the Administration can’t admit that. It is wedded to its “Iraq the Model” notion. Just the other day Cheney announced that “even if it had been known” that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would still have supported the invasion of Iraq. Why? In order to help one group of Muslims get out from under another group of Muslims? In order to ensure the transfer of power from the Sunnis to the Shi’a, which became inevitable as soon as the Sunni despotism of Saddam Hussein was undone?
Why?
The Iran-Iraq War was a good thing for Infidels. The proxy war in the Yemen between Nasser’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia was a good thing for Infidels. The threats to the assorted regimes in the Muslim world, which local despots usually manage to deflect outward toward Infidels (Israel, the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, the Pope, anyone or anything at all that smacks of the Infidels), when they are directed at the local regimes, with bombs going off, and security headaches everywhere, are a good thing — for us, for the Infidels, not for the locals.
And that’s all we should care about. Dividing, demoralizing, weakening the Camp of Islam. It can be done. In Iraq it requires only that we stop being there. In other places — such as with the so-called “Palestinians” — it requires only that we permanently shut off the Jizyah of foreign aid, and force them to go to their fellow Arabs for money, money that those fellow Arabs have so much of (ten trillion dollars since 1973). It requires that we force other Arab and Muslim states, similarly, to ask for handouts from Kuwait, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Qatar — and whether the handouts are given, or not given, it doesn’t matter: resentments on both sides will grow and grow, just as in Iran many people are furious with the government for what they see as “wasting” Iran’s money, their money, on Hizballah and on the “Palestinians.”
Ethnic, sectarian, and economic divisions are there, waiting to be exploited. Waiting to be observed by Infidels who, especially in Western Europe, need the kind of spectacle such violence will provide. Do you know what is now going on in Abu Ghraib, since the Iraqis took over? Do you know how desperate the inmates are for the Americans to return? And do you know how the Shi’a militias will behave once the Americans are no longer around? Of course you do. And you don’t find yourself terribly anxious about this prospect, do you?
The Administration is obstinate and stupid, almost unhinged. It must be forced out of Iraq, coute que coute. It must not be allowed to deprive us, the inabitants of Infidel world, of the real fruits of our victory, the fruits that were made inevitable by the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime — and the Administration must be persuaded somehow to stop trying to prevent what it should welcome.