Thoughts on the future in Iraq
As we wait to see whether the Congress can get out of its rhetorical way and actually do something to force Bush to back away from his escalation policy in Iraq, I am struck by many different thoughts and impressions of the mess we have made.
The civil war in Iraq continues to gain force. New views of the multi-layered political religious, ethnic, clan bases of the strife come into view even from here via our poor media feeds. Now I am understanding how insufficient the terms Shia, Sunni and others so frequently used to sum up the situation in our media and government are. Each of these groups that I might otherwise think to be fairly unitary are actually composed of internally conflicted religious and clan based divisions now apparently at war even against their nominal brothers in arms.
Over the last weekend we had the reports of the large battle with the "Soldiers of Heaven", a splinter group of Shia who were reported to be preparing to assault other Shia in nearby Najaf. According to a BBC sketch, this group held some end of time beliefs involving the reappearance of some religious figure from over a thousand years ago(smells a bit like some of the craziness among Christian loonies over interpretations of the last book in the New Testament, Revelations). The exact rationale for the assualt by these Soldiers of Heaven on their brother Shia is unclear to me.
Nevertheless, I sense a jungle of religious conflicts that we can hardly perceive. Perhaps we if inflame and arm some of the many sects of Christianity so commonplace in the US and then put them into a social environment with much chaos and little countervaling threat of force from a government, we could envision some small part of what might be true in Iraq.
The recent surge in violent rhetoric out of the White House directed at Iran has brought my gaze up to the regional perspective. Somehow I have a hard time imagining the Sunni powers in the region, like Saudi Arabia, standing by while a Shia dominated puppet government in the Green Zone works with US troops to suppress the Sunni minority in Iraq's western provinces and in greater Baghdad. This of course is one of the intents of the new Bush policy. Couple this up with the natural conflict between the Sunni conservative countries (Saudi Arabia in the lead) and Shia Iran multiplied by the ethnic frictions between Arab and Persian......
You can see where this line of thinking is headed. Pile on top of these incendiary potentials the temptation of the Bushites to try to distract the US from Iraq by rousing up the thuggish spector of nuclear tipped President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. What a mess.
It is hard for me to imagine how all of this will be resolved. It is only clear that we have created an enormous mess in Iraq, now spreading about the region. Nothing good will come of this and most assuredly many more people will die and the law of unintended consequences will be demonstrated on a grandiose scale.
The civil war in Iraq continues to gain force. New views of the multi-layered political religious, ethnic, clan bases of the strife come into view even from here via our poor media feeds. Now I am understanding how insufficient the terms Shia, Sunni and others so frequently used to sum up the situation in our media and government are. Each of these groups that I might otherwise think to be fairly unitary are actually composed of internally conflicted religious and clan based divisions now apparently at war even against their nominal brothers in arms.
Over the last weekend we had the reports of the large battle with the "Soldiers of Heaven", a splinter group of Shia who were reported to be preparing to assault other Shia in nearby Najaf. According to a BBC sketch, this group held some end of time beliefs involving the reappearance of some religious figure from over a thousand years ago(smells a bit like some of the craziness among Christian loonies over interpretations of the last book in the New Testament, Revelations). The exact rationale for the assualt by these Soldiers of Heaven on their brother Shia is unclear to me.
Nevertheless, I sense a jungle of religious conflicts that we can hardly perceive. Perhaps we if inflame and arm some of the many sects of Christianity so commonplace in the US and then put them into a social environment with much chaos and little countervaling threat of force from a government, we could envision some small part of what might be true in Iraq.
The recent surge in violent rhetoric out of the White House directed at Iran has brought my gaze up to the regional perspective. Somehow I have a hard time imagining the Sunni powers in the region, like Saudi Arabia, standing by while a Shia dominated puppet government in the Green Zone works with US troops to suppress the Sunni minority in Iraq's western provinces and in greater Baghdad. This of course is one of the intents of the new Bush policy. Couple this up with the natural conflict between the Sunni conservative countries (Saudi Arabia in the lead) and Shia Iran multiplied by the ethnic frictions between Arab and Persian......
You can see where this line of thinking is headed. Pile on top of these incendiary potentials the temptation of the Bushites to try to distract the US from Iraq by rousing up the thuggish spector of nuclear tipped President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. What a mess.
It is hard for me to imagine how all of this will be resolved. It is only clear that we have created an enormous mess in Iraq, now spreading about the region. Nothing good will come of this and most assuredly many more people will die and the law of unintended consequences will be demonstrated on a grandiose scale.
Labels: politics
