IRAQ AND America’s COMING NIGHTMARE

[Sophist]

IRAQ AND America’s COMING NIGHTMARE

By: Said S. Samatar

November 6,2006

 

Editor’s Note:

 

The US invasion of Iraq is one of the most covered and most painfully debated subjects of the 21st Century. It is a question that has created deep divisions within both the right and the left circles. In the right, for example, F. Fukiyama, the author of “The End of History,” has made complete ideological switch over from his neo-conservative position to a position that agrees more with the liberal interpretation of the Iraq fiasco. On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens, founder of America’s premier leftist magazine, “The Nation,” the defender of the Palestinian question in the West and author of “The Contrarian,” is today in the same circle as ultra conservatives as David Horowitz and Ann Coulter. It appears that very few people in the West correctly understood Iraqi history and how much its people, or sections of its society at least, would resist an invasion by a western county prior to the now infamous, over-spent “awe and shock.”

 

Professor Said Samatar, a regular contributor to WardheerNews, however correctly and rightly predicted in this insightful piece that he wrote at the wake of America’s highly publicized “awe and shock” war against Iraq, that a) America's venture in Iraq will end in an American tragedy b) the American fiasco in Iraq will cost the Republican party their political dominance. The first has happened, the second may happen tomorrow.

 

The current debate about the Iraq war is not any more how to win, but when to “cut and run.” It is indeed this current fate of a total reversal of American policy that exonerates professor Samatar’s by far one of the best assessments of the Iraq question. His minor off-the mark prediction of a complete defiance of Sadam Hussein is excusable if one attributes such and un-compromising defiance to the overall Iraq society.

 

This piece undoubtedly put Professor Samatar in rare camp of scholars and intelectuals where only a handful have correctly diagnosed what could come out of the US invasion of Iraq; and it makse a good read in light of tomorrow’s election where Iraq is to the entire election.

 

 

IRAQ AND America’s COMING NIGHTMARE

By Professor Said S. Samatar

 

America is poised to unleash, within hours, an apocalyptic firestorm of combined land, air and naval assault on Iraq. The attack signals the opening of a campaign that will probably go down as history’s most needless war. It will also turn out, initially, to be the easiest, shortest and the lightest in casualty war America has ever fought. General Tommy Franks, commander of the allied expeditionary force whose troops are amassed within a striking distance of Iraq, will have his tanks moving faster than George Patton’s, surely to make Baghdad his within a matter of days. Saddam’s ramshackle divisions, ill-equipped, demoralized and depleted in ranks, are unlikely to stand and fight before the awesome show of allied firepower. On the contrary, in quick order they will surrender en masse to the Americans, or run like rats from a sinking ship. Not that the Iraqi soldiers are a patsy lot, but only that they have little will and less incentive to fight for a dictator who has butchered over the years friends and family members by the thousands.

 

For his part, Mr. Hussein will neither surrender, nor fly into exile nor allow himself to be captured alive. He will be dead long before Franks reaches the banks of the Tigris-Euphrates River, probably by the hands of his body guards who will, once they realize the dice turning against him, cast lots over who among them will have the honor of dispatching him. As Saddam himself once put it morbidly, “not a sliver of his body will be found,” which shall have been neatly cut up into tiny portions and taken apiece to adorn the living parlors of Iraqi society houses as valued trophies.

 

The newly liberated Iraqi people will take to the streets by the thousands in instantaneous jubilation; General Franks, who will be feted as the champion of their freedom, will enter in triumphal march; his hands will grow sore from the kisses of worshiping masses as the city of Baghdad echoes with massive rejoicings. The General will occupy Saddam’s chair at the Republican Palace, no doubt to be infected with an itching sense of being a latter-day Douglas McArthur, just as McArthur at the surrender of Japan entertained notions of himself as a latter-day Caesar. But Iraq is not Japan, and the General’s – and America’s – nightmare will begin the morning after.

 

The Mesopotamian soil, from the Sumerian epoch to the present, has tended to spawn a peculiar brand of unruly souls Unlike Japan, Iraq resists orderly government; its people are not a coherent nation but a patchwork of conflicting tribal and sectarian antagonists settled in sharply divided villages that have been at each other’s throat since Nebuchadnezzar times.

 

Among Arabs the Iraqis have a reputation as being matchless in ferocity, sanguinary in internecine killings and legendary for being ungovernable. Consider the likely concatenation of these challenges: on the day after allied occupation of Iraq, the new MacArthur will have to rush Special Forces to Saddam’s home districts to prevent a bloodbath of revenge killings on the fallen dictator’s kith and kin; simultaneously allied contingents will have to be dispatched post haste to the south to stop the two Shiite factions, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Hakim’s pro-Iranian brigades and their opponents from engulfing the Marsh Arabs in an orgy of intra-ideological genocidal slaughter; meanwhile allied troops must be deployed, a rather unenviable task, in the bazaars, alleys and byways of Baghdad to forestall an indiscriminate massacre of the long-privileged-Sunni minority by the ages-aggrieved Shiite majority who nourish unspeakable hatred for their erstwhile Sunni oppressors.

 

Then there are the Kurds of the north, who are part of a nation without a state, whose members, some forty million strong, are scattered among four countries–Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The Kurds have long yearned to unify their dismembered nation and, in the fluidity of changing regimes and in the new freedom from the threat of extinction by Saddam, may seek to fight for a nation-state. A unified Kurdistan will not only mean the end of Iraq as a country but will also seriously undermine the territorial integrity of Turkey, America’s indispensable ally in the region. There is nothing that prompts the Turks to go ballistic more than the thought of a re-constructed Kurdistan. General Franks will have to deploy a considerable force in northern Iraq to quash the rise of any nascent pan-Kurdish nationalism.

 

The General’s likely troubles are far from being totally accounted for. Al-Qaeda operatives, taking advantage of the ferment in a new Iraq on the throes of reconstituting itself, are all but certain to infiltrate the country in droves and, striking an alliance with remnants of Saddam loyalists, will engage the “new liberators” in bouts of urban warfare with no visible enemies to combat and no targets to hit, but only the ghoulish (a fittingly Arabic word) exercise of street fights against ragtag hit-and-runners slinking into dark alleys, when fired upon, only to re-emerge with deadly sniper fire on the hapless Americans in their cumbersome fatigues(remember Mogadishu?). American body bags will pile up.

 

Far from inspiring in the Middle East a new era of peace and prosperity, America’s occupation of Baghdad, the cultural capital of the Arab world, will stir an unparalleled anti-Americanism. As America comes more and more to be seen an occupying great Satan rather than a redeeming liberator, Islamic sensibilities throughout the world will be further inflamed against the U.S in particular, and against the West in general. U. S. prestige will sink to new lows in the entire Middle East. A plague of terrorism against American interests is bound to break out all over, at home and abroad. Meanwhile a message to the huddled mass of Democrats mournfully wringing their hands about the emergence of a Republican dictatorship in America: Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Iraq will do away with this problem for you!

 

Professor Siad Samatar

Dept. of History

Rugers University

New Jersey, USA

[Captain Xalane]

Sophist,This is the greatest analysis i have come across in regards to the Iraq war.There was another analysis that some amercian Lt.Colonel wrote,it was on military.com,i just checked it and couldn't find it.Thanks Sophist.Well done.