How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq (Juan Cole)

[Wordie]

Solely by virtue of a rather rudimentary knowledge of the ME, gleaned primarily through a number of Muslim friends I had at the university, and much reading since, I myself was able to predict this unwelcome but probable outcome of the invasion of Iraq, and that the principle beneficiary of all the billions we poured into the region, and all the American lives lost, would be Iran. Juan Cole knows a lot more of the details, and explains it much better than I could. Oh yeah, and you know all the info we got about how it was the Sunni's fundamentalist beliefs that were causing the problems in Iraq? Guess what? It's just not that simple.

This article is from Robert Scheer's new site, truthdig, started after he was recently fired from the LAT (check it out, it's a great site):

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_bush_created_a_theocracy_in_iraq/

The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid.

Shiite religious leaders and parties, in particular, have crucially shaped the new Iraq in each of its three political phases. The first was during the period of direct American rule, largely by Paul Bremer. The second comprised the months of interim government, when Iyad Allawi was prime minister. The third stretches from the formation of an elected government, with Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, to today.

In the first phase, expatriate Shiite parties returned to the country to emerge as major players, to the consternation of a confused and clueless “Coalition Provisional Authority.”

The oldest of these was the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s as a Shiite answer to mass parties such as the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Dawa means the call, as in the imperative to spread the faith. Dawa Party leaders in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed of a Shiite paradise to rival the workers’ paradise of the Marxists, with a state ruled by Islamic law, where a “consultative council” somehow selected by the community would make further regulations in accordance with the Koran. The Dawa Party organized covert cells throughout the Shiite south. In 1980, in the wake of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party cracked down hard on Dawa, executing many of its leaders, attacking its party workers and making membership in the party a crime punishable by death. The upper echelons of the Baath were dominated by Sunni Arabs who disliked religious Shiites, considering them backward and Iran-oriented rather than progressive and Arab. In the same year, 1980, Saddam invaded Iran, beginning a bloody eight-year-long war with his Shiite neighbor.

[bigtree]

1. kick

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Kick

[izzie]

3. If you made this story short maybe Bush would read it?

Looks plain to me that it is a world wide movement to make a religion rule these people. The leaders are sure not going to give up power easy and we sure are not going to force it on them. If and when these people wish to have a say in how they are ruled they will do it. My God even in this country we have people who want the Bible to rule us. This is one battle that is hard to fight and we will all be dead and the fight will be going on. After all having God give you power to rule has been around since History has been put down. Zealots and reason hardly mix. Their are more free countries now than right after WW2 so maybe we can always hope.

[Wordie]

4. I'm afraid that Bush doesn't read, does he? ...and it's a bit too late,

anyway. :(

And over and above that, the point of all this may be that one cannot Western-style beliefs and values about democracy on others anyway. Whatever we in the West may believe. Democracy is something, imo, that can only arise from a people, not be imposed upon them, by it's very definition. We may have set our cause way back, in fact, as now "democracy" will be associated in the minds of so many in the ME with violence and chaos, as opposed to the security and relative peace of the tribal theocratic system.