If Radical Shi’ites Did Not Exist…
…the West would have had to invent them. Well, of course they did. The modern anti-American wave of Shi’ite fundamentalists first appeared on the scene in Iran as a result of the CIA coup that put the Shah in power there.
The Shah was so determined to Westernize Iran that it was against the law for Muslim women to fully veil themselves in public. The fundamentalist backlash that put Ayatollah Khomeini in power was fueled not only by events in Iran, but by American and European support of and tolerance for the creation of what amounts to an Apartheid state in Palestine. This in the wake of a half century’s occupation by the British, who drew national boundaries where there had been none, including around the powder-keg we refer to now as ‘Iraq.’ During the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States covertly supported our future public-enemy #1, Osama bin Laden. The mujaheddein morphed into al Qaeda before the world’s eyes, making it clear that the basic issue in the Middle East for the past century has been rage-rage against the permutations of European and American imperialism, and fundamentalism rears its ugly head always among people who feel they are under seige, who feel that their essential way of life is being threatened.
Pundits shake their heads and point out sadly all the things the Muslim world is apparently incapable of, incapable of “modernity,” that new vogue term, incapable of democracy, incapable of peaceful self-determination. Well really, who would know? The region has not known a moment’s respite from the onslaught of the West for the past 150 years. There is no telling what the most resource-rich region in the world would be like had it been left alone. Now it seems we will never know. The same goes for Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and much of Asia.
Fundamentalist Shi’ite Islam is ugly as all fundamentalisms are, as ugly as Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism.
But really, these nasty guys are the West’s dream come true. They provide a pretext for a permament occupation of the Middle East, for the gathering of moderate Arab states under the West’s umbrella, for an American-proxy state in Israel, even for the suspension of those annoying civil rights at home. The British Empire perceived the prime piece of real estate which is the Middle East, and petroleum has greased the wheels of capitalism ever since. It turns my stomach to hear young people in the United States say that they want to go to Iraq and ‘fight for my country.’ As always, the poor die to further the interests of the rich. I wish they could see how very much they have in common with the majority of the people in Iraq who are not ideological killers, who want nothing else than a way to decently live.
Now that this bloodbath has been loosed on Iraq, what is to be done? Peace-loving people there are at the mercy of the Americans. The majority of Shiite Muslims in Iraq are not round-the-bend fundamentalists, and I am sure many of them fear what is to become of Iraq if the Americans suddenly leave, as they left Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The war-crazed ideologues in the West are holding all the cards. They are receiving criticism for their stupidity and miscalculation in, once they launched on the foolhardy decision to invade, not placing enough troops to really do the job. But did they want to ‘do the job’? The United States has shown zero interest in supporting democracy anywhere in the world. The last thing it wants is Iraqis deciding their own fate,no matter what the propaganda machine says. So if this was a ‘botched job’ I say it was deliberately botched, and Osama and al Sadr and their comrades serve Western interests quite nicely, thank you.
I have not even mentioned the Saudis, America’s big ally, providing the template for a fundamentalist Islamic state, and loads of suicide terrorists to boot. What are we to make of their close familial ties to Bush and other big-oil guys? Capitalism makes some strange bedfellows, and much effort is expended to keep people from seeing just how strange.
I hear well-intended Americans saying ‘we can’t leave now. Bush brought on this disaster and now we can’t just leave the people of Iraq to a bunch of crazed religious zealots.’ But now or ten years from now, there is no conventional military solution here. The deed is done. What I think is going to happen is a disastrous terrorist attack on the United States and the most horrific possible retaliation. And I don’t honestly know what any of us can do about it. What I do know is that we are fools if we think we can chalk this mess up to ineptitude and miscalculation. I think the New World Order junkies know exactly what they’re doing, and I don’t think it is possible to overestimate the chaos they are willing to loose on the world and the millions they are willing to murder to acheive their aims.
What global answer can be made to people willing and even eager to turn themselves into human bombs to vanquish what they see as the power of Satan loosed upon the earth? I can’t imagine what miraculous transformation would have to take place in the West away from its persistent fantasies of a vast global corporate colony in order to come up with that answer. The only way to militarily destroy these people is to obliterate every last one of them, and I can think of only one way to do that. I’ll leave it unsaid.
Historical reckoning. Historical justice. This is all that will suffice.