Beyond the Media Hype: Iraq

A stony plain west of the Euphrates inhabited by a few pastoral bedouins covers almost two-fifths of Iraq, which overall is about the size of California. Rolling upland between the upper Tigris and Euphrates is also largely desert. Highlands in the northeast provide Kurds with some grazing and cultivation but three quarters of all Iraqis live on an alluvial plain from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf through marshland from where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. Crops are increasingly limited south of Baghdad by salinity from river-born and windblown sand.

Three-quarters of Iraqis are Arabs, most others are Kurds. Most sources say two thirds of Iraqis are Shia, one third Sunni. But some claim there’s a Sunni majority. Kurds (17% of the population) are mainly secular Sunnis as are most Turkmen (around 5%). What is disputed is how many Iraqi Arabs are Shia or Sunni.

Christianity was brought to Iraq in the first century by the Apostle Thomas and Christians were in 1950 as much as 10% of the population. Many have fled and there are fewer than 1% now. The majority of Jews also fled after riots in 1967 when Israel captured Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The forces at work in Iraq now have deep roots in the past. Centuries of battles between Persian and Eastern Roman empires that exhausted both paved the way for the Arab-Muslim conquest and the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate to be established in Baghdad in the 8th century. It soon dominated the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, and Baghdad became the leading city of the entire Arab and Muslim world. It was for five centuries Islam’s center of learning.

That glorious age came to an end in 1257 when Genghiz Khan’s Mongols swept in from the far northeast and sacked Baghdad. Sunnis had dominated throughout the Abbassid caliphate but Shia were able to convert others when it fell and more importantly, Sufi mystical Islam became popular in Iran, preparing the way for a subsequent Shia regime. In the mid 1300s, the Black Death halted recovery in Iraq and throughout the Middle East where fully a third of the population died (45-50% in Europe). Then in 1401, another Mongol warlord came, sacked Baghdad again and massacred the Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq.

The Shia Safavid Empire that arose next in Iran began with a battle in 1499 led by their first ruler when he was twelve. He captured Tabriz two years later, declared independence from the Ottoman Empire (see below) and held most of present-day Iran by 1510. He set up a well administered theocracy that brought a nomadic society under control and financed an army that soon conquered much of Iraq, Turkey, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Safavid Empire ruled for more than two centuries, and enforced conversion to Shia under penalty of death.

The Ottoman Empire had been expanding in stages from the early 1300s. Their siege of Constantinople in 1453 brought the Byzantine Empire to an end and left them in control of trade with the Far East. They took Iraq from the Safavids in 1533.

Iraq remained a battle zone between the Sunni Ottoman and Shia Iranian empires from then until the Ottoman Empire finally fell at the end of WW1.

The result of those centuries of turbulence is a Sunni population where Iraq borders Turkey, Kurds in the northeast, and a Shia population where Iraq borders Iran in the south.

The British got control of Iraq when the Ottoman Empire fell and established a Sunni government with a king from French Syria. Iraq gained independence in 1932. In 1941, Britain invaded to protect oil supplies following a military coup and reestablished the monarchy. There was another military coup in 1958, and that regime was overthrown by the Ba’ath Party in 1968.

The Iraqi Ba’ath Party formed in 1951/2 was Arab Nationalist, socialist, and primarily Shia but it slowly became Sunni and dominated by the military. When General Saddam Hussein gained control in 1979, he welcomed the fall of Iran’s Shah, but Ayatollah Khomeini, wanting the Islamic Revolution to spread, armed Shiite and Kurdish rebels in Iraq, so in 1980 Iraq declared war. After some initial success, its forces were driven out in 1982 and for the next six years, Iran was on the offensive. The war ended in stalemate with half a million to 1.5 million dead.

The US had broken with Iran when the Shah fell and supported Iraq in the 1980-1988 war, but when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, US-led forces quickly drove them out. The Iraq/Kuwait border had been fixed by the British in 1913 and accepted at first by independent Iraq but it was disputed since the 1960s. In 2003, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the US reversed course and led an invasion. Saddam Hussein’s government was replaced by a Shia-led one that excluded many former officials and disbanded the mainly Sunni army, then chaos and intense violence ensued between Sunnis and Shias.

US leaders assumed a Shia government would be pro-American because Saddam Hussein had oppressed Iraq’s Shias. Instead, it cautiously allied with Shia Iran, which the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel saw as a great threat. VP Cheney warned of “a nuclear-armed Iran, astride the world’s supply of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy, prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the world.” Jordan’s King Abdullah warned of an Iranian-led imaginary crescent that would stretch from Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait through Iran to Syria and Lebanon.

Those fears were fanciful. There is much more in common between Sunni and Shia Iraqis than between Iraqi and Iranian Shia. Iraq’s Shias are chiefly Arab while only 2% of Iranians are Arab, the majority being Persian (60%+) while those in the north are mostly of Turkish heritage (20%+) and Kurds (10%). The conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is chiefly about the right to rule. It results from the Shias’ long suppression by Sunni governments in Baghdad.

Now Iraq’s leader since last September is trying to build trust with the Kurds and Sunnis who were alienated by his divisive Shia predecessor. His view of Iran and Iraq’s strategic imperatives is clear. He says he will “take any assistance, even from Iran” against the Islamic State that, in the aftermath of our destruction, now controls large parts of Iraq. Iran began providing direct military aid to Iraq in mid-2014 and an Iranian General now appears to be commanding both Iraqi and Iranian forces against the Islamic State.

So… Our government at this time finds itself supporting Iraq’s Shia government, increasingly less committed to overthrowing the Shia regime in Syria as its Sunni Arab allies want, and seeking to end its estrangement from Iran.

Confusing as that is, it is good to stop escalating bloodshed by arming adversaries whose allegiances keep changing. I will explore what to do about the Islamic State in a future post.

The chaos in Iraq now is very far from new. Its future will continue to be determined by its position between powerful rivals, and whether it can establish an effective government for all Iraqis.

Feb 7 2015

Beyond the Media Hype: Syria

Centuries of violence underlie the civil war that has so far killed over a hundred thousand Syrians, driven out two million refugees, and displaced six and a half million internally, and it is just part of a war where we and other powers are fighting for our own conflicting aims.

Syria is where agriculture and cattle breeding began in Mesopotamia around 10,000 BC. It has been under empires of Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Turkey. It was held a thousand years ago by French, English, Italian and German Crusaders. After WW1 when Iraq was taken by the British, it fell under France. Britain later offered not to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in return for hegemony over a Greater Syrian state but France retained control until 1946. Independent Syria made a chaotic start and was stable for only forty years.

Syria’s population includes Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and others. Roughly three quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, including Kurds who make up 9% of the overall population. Shia Alawites (12%) and Christians (10%) make up the rest along with small numbers of Druze and others.

Although Sunni Arabs are by far the majority, Syria is ruled by Shia Alawites from the narrow coastal region that is separated by a mountain range from a semiarid steppe zone that covers three-quarters of the country and which is bisected by the Euphrates valley where cereals and cotton thrive. The east is desert. In the extreme northeast there is oil and natural gas.

Newly independent Syria had military coups, twenty different cabinets and four constitutions in its first decade. Martial law was in place for more than half a century after Israeli, British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956 to regain the Suez Canal. Syria signed a pact with the USSR when they were forced to withdraw then united with socialist pan-Arab Egypt from 1958-61. The Arab Republic of Syria came into being in 1963 in a Ba’ath Party coup emulating one just before that in Iraq.

The Ba’ath Party was established in 1947 by a Christian, a Sunni Muslim and an Alawite Shia Muslim, anti-imperialists who aimed to replace religion with socialism and social reform.

In 1966 traditional Ba’athists were overthrown by Alawite army leaders. In 1970, air force leader Hafez al-Assad seized control and ruled Syria as a strongman until his death in 2000. He was succeeded by the present ruler, his son Bashar al-Assad.

In 1967 Syria lost half the Golan Heights when Israel also captured Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. After losing more of the Golan Heights in 1973 when Syria and Egypt invaded Israel, Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 and remained there until 2005 supporting proxies like Hezbollah to prevent Israel from taking southern Lebanon. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982.

Syria’s current Ba’athist Alawite regime is based in what was an Alawite State when Syria was ruled by France. Under the Ottomans, the head of each ethno-religious group — Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, Greek Christian, Assyrian Christian, etc — administered the laws of his community. France defined Lebanon’s borders to put Sunni Muslims under Christians who were allied with France, and divided Syria into the State of Damascus at the heartland of the Sunni Arab majority, the State of Aleppo at the trading center of Kurds, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others who felt closer to Baghdad than Damascus, and the Druze and Alawite States where people are “sort of” Shia.

Alawites celebrate many Christian festivals, use bread and wine in their ceremonies, and believe they originated as divine light but were cast out of heaven for disobedience and must expiate their sin over many lifetimes. Their God has three emanations that manifest in human form, most recently as father of the Shia faith, Ali, the prophet Muhammed and Salman the Persian who was born into a Zoroastrian priestly family, converted to Christianity, heard of the coming of another prophet and found Muhammed. Salman was the first Persian convert to Islam and the first translator of the Quran.

For political reasons, the Alawites have been recognized as true Shias by Iran’s supreme leader.

The US view of Syria has changed greatly since the civil war began in 2011. In the early years of our War on Terror we were quite approving. The Dept of State’s 2006 International Religious Freedom Report noted that Syria’s Government “suppresses extremist forms of Islam [and] made affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death [in] 1980.”

We thought Bashar al-Assad was, like his father, keeping his people under firm control: “The generally amicable relationship among religious groups in society contributed to religious freedom; however, there were occasional reports of minor tensions between religious groups mainly attributable to economic rivalries rather than religious affiliation.”

But when Saudi Arabia recognized the Syrian National Coalition formed in Qatar in 2012 as “the legitimate representative” of the Syrian people and France and Turkey declared it the “only representative of the Syrian people” our State Dept issued a press release saying: “We look forward to supporting the National Coalition as it charts a course toward the end of Assad’s bloody rule and the start of the peaceful, just, democratic future that all the people of Syria deserve.”

The State Dept’s 2013 Human Rights Reports: Syria said: “Syria is a republic ruled by the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Asad … The Asad regime continued to use indiscriminate and deadly force to quell protests and conducted air and ground-based military assaults on cities, residential areas, and civilian infrastructures, including schools and hospitals throughout the country.”

Our media said nothing about the issues, just demonized Bashar al-Assad, the same playbook they used for Nicaragua’s Ortega, Panama’s Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The State Dept report continued: “on August 21, the regime used sarin gas and artillery to target […] suburbs of Damascus, and killed over 1,000 persons.” President Obama asked Congress to approve the use of military force “to deter, disrupt, prevent and degrade the potential for future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.”

But just as there was no evidence for the “weapons of mass destruction” President Bush used to justify invading Iraq, there is no evidence that al-Assad’s regime was responsible for the sarin gas atrocity or has any weapons of mass destruction.

We did supply sarin gas that Saddam Hussein used on Iraq’s Kurds, but the gas used in Syria was not weapons-grade. It appears to have been used by rebels who hoped to provoke us into helping them topple al-Assad’s government.

Now, four years into the civil war, Syria looks much as it did under the French Mandate except that the government still at this time controls a large part of what was the State of Damascus as well as the Alawite and Druze States. Most of what was the State of Aleppo is now controlled by the Islamic State while the northeast is held by Rojavan forces.

The Rojavan, aka Western Kurdistan, manifesto says: “The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a State system, it is the democratic system of a people without a State… It takes its power from the people.” Kurds want Kurdistan to include parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, too. Kurds following Ottoman policy in the early 20th century massacred Christians throughout that area and were rewarded with their land. More than half Syria’s poor are of Kurdish origin.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) which controls territory in Iraq as well as Syria began operating under a different name in Jordan in 1999. When we invaded Iraq in 2003 they attacked our forces, made suicide attacks on civilan targets and beheaded hostages. They pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004 with the intent: “to free Iraq’s Sunnis from Shia and foreign oppression, and to further the name of Allah and restore Islam to glory.” Early in 2014 al-Queda disavowed loose-cannon ISIL.

The al-Nusra Front is an al-Queda branch formed in Syria and Lebanon in 2012 that aims to overthrow the al-Assad government and replace it with a fundamentalist Sunni state. They are focused on that alone and have warned against Western intervention. ISIL announced its merger with al-Nusra in mid-2013 but fighting broke out between them a year later.

ISIL now controls much of Syria and Iraq while Syrian and Iraqi Kurds dominate the northeast.

I will delve deeper into Iraq, Kurdistan and the Islamic State which in mid-2014 claimed religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide.

So… our air strikes are now leading the battle against the Islamic State, but we destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist regime in Iraq and say we will also end Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria, which clears the path toward a fundamentalist Sunni regime like the Islamic State.

Does what we’re doing make sense? Our military can destroy, but will we like what comes next?

This 1993 article by Robert Kaplan is excellent.

Jan 28 2015

Beyond the Media Hype: Yemen

Yemen, a crossroad of cultures where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, was always important for trade between Europe, Africa, India and further east. Shipping along its coasts is among the world’s most active and strategic. It has been ruled by sun worshipers, all three Abrahamic religions — Jews, Christians and Muslims, its location has several times enabled its rulers to control most of the Arabian Peninsula, and it has forever been bedeviled by tribal rivalry.

Only 2% of Yemen is arable land. Its mountainous interior is ringed by narrow coastal plains and in the north and east by desert. The western highlands reach 10,000 feet, have relatively fertile soil and get enough rain for sorghum, coffee, bananas and such (coffee is first known to have been cultivated in 15th century Sufi monasteries in north Yemen.) The central plateau gets enough rain for wheat and barley in wet years. The northeastern desert gets little to no rain at any time.

Yemen’s sun god worshiping rulers for a thousand years were conquered around 270 AD by the Himyarite whose king a century later converted to Judaism, seemingly to maintain good relations with both Roman Christian and Persian Zoroastrian empires. The Himyarites were defeated in 525 by Aksumites from Ethiopia whose king converted to Christianity around 350 when the Roman emperor also began trying to convert Yemen to Christianity. Fighting between Jewish and Christian warlords continued for centuries, then in 630 Mohammed introduced Islam in the person of his cousin, Ali.

Ali is considered by Sunnis nothing more than the fourth of Mohammed’s elected successors as leader of all Muslims. Shias, however, consider him Mohammed’s rightful successor. That disagreement plunged the Muslim community into violent conflict that still persists 1,400 years later.

Muslim Yemen was ruled by a Shia dynasty founded in the north around 1040, then Sunni ones of Kurdish origin that invaded from the south.

When Portuguese merchant ships arrived in the early 16th century, the governor of Egypt began conquering Yemen to protect the Ottoman trade route with India.

Then the British entered three centuries later wanting a base to stop pirate attacks on their trade with India. They were in 1838 granted by a local Sultan 75 acres around the ocean port of Aden. After the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 cutting 4,300 miles off the sea voyage between Europe and India, Aden became a coaling station. and Britain expanded inland from there.

While Britain gained control of south Yemen, the Turkish Ottoman empire retained nominal control in the north although tribal chiefs there made real control impossible. In 1918 when the Ottomans fell, a kingdom was established as North Yemen that in 1962 became the Yemen Arab Republic.

South Yemen continued to be ruled as part of British India until 1937. It remained a British protectorate until armed struggles that began in 1963 resulted in its independence in 1967 when Britain was also forced by Egypt to relinquish control of the Suez Canal.

Marxists gained power in South Yemen in 1969, established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and formed close ties with the Soviet Union, China, East Germany and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Soviet Union gave them strong support for which in return they got access to South Yemen’s ports.

North and South Yemen united in 1990 with North Yemen’s leader as President. He outraged our government later that year by opposing military intervention from non-Arab states when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saudi Arabia supported us by expelling 800,000 Yemenis.

South Yemen seceded in 1994 with active support from Saudi Arabia but was defeated in a brief civil war. There is still substantial support in south Yemen for an independent state.

When rebellion by Shia Houthis began in the north in 2004, the weak government tried allying with al Queda in unsuccessful counter attacks. Then we began drone attacks on al Queda when in 2009 the Saudi Arabian and Yemeni branches merged to form al Quaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) based in Yemen. Yemen’s government was now trying to defend itself against Shia rebels in the north, separatists and AQAP in the south.

Yemen never had effective government institutions. Since it was unified, leaders of competing tribal, regional, religious and political groups have collaborated just enough to make it the 164th most corrupt of 182 countries in Transparency International’s 2009 survey, and it was ranked last of 135 countries in the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report for violence against women.

Pagan, Jewish and Christian influences from before Islam’s arrival are long gone. For a thousand years the former North Yemen has been Shia, the former South Yemen Sunni and the two have been proxies in great empires’ wars to control trade routes. Yemen’s history of never-ending struggles for power and wealth make it hard to see how a stable, unified, modern form of government can be established.

The latest development is, a few days ago Yemen’s President Hadi, who replaced the previous leader in a 2011 pro-democracy uprising and was trying to end secessionist and tribal unrest, resigned in frustration. Al Queda forces already controlled much of the south. Now Houthi rebels had taken control of the capital, Sana’a. Warriors from north Yemen always have been formidable and their latest incarnation, the Houthi, were doing better against al Queda than the government forces. They seemed set to take over.

So what should our government do? We have spent nearly $1 billion on military, economic and humanitarian assistance in Yemen since 2011. Who should we support now? Who are the good guys? Who, for that matter, are the bad ones?

Can Yemen’s government survive and will its next leader, like ex-President Hadi, support our drone attacks on AQAP? Or will the next government turn back to AQAP to counter the Houthi?

Who are the local great powers supporting? Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist regime supports the Sunni in south Yemen, and AQAP is supported by Saudi Arabians. Iran’s fundamentalist regime supports the Shia Houthi in the north, which borders Saudi Arabia.

We support the Saudi regime and have opposed Iran since its 1979 revolution. President Bush branded Iran in 2002 part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” We have been placing ever-tighter economic sanctions on Iran.

Echoing President Bush, National Security Adviser Rice said, “Iran’s direct support of regional and global terrorism and its aggressive efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, belie any good intentions it displayed in the days after the world’s worst terrorist attacks in history.” In 2003, we invaded Iraq on the pretext that it already had weapons of mass destruction.

So should we continue to support Yemen’s weak government, should we instead support the Houthi who have been more successful than the government against al Queda, or should we join Israel in supporting Saudi Arabia and its proxies who include al Queda in south Yemen?

Our government is deeply divided. President Obama is engaging in diplomacy with Iran. Congress just invited Israel’s leader to address them for a third time on why we should support Saudi Arabia and cripple Iran whose leaders support Hezbollah, the Shia force Iran established in 1982 to resist Israeli occupation in Lebanon.

We have no good allies in this part of the world. The forces in north and south Yemen are on opposite sides of a 1,400 year-long battle that never had much to do with religion, was always about power, and is now amplified by rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Battles for power in the Middle East now are much like those between Protestant and Catholic nations in medieval Europe.

Our military actions in the Middle East lead only to more suffering (as well as dependable sales of weapons.) Instead of continuing to make war, we should support UN peace-keeping forces.

And what about terrorism? No matter how horrific and whether committed in the name of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or any other religion, or whether committed in the name of communism, anti-communism, anarchism or any other ideology, terrorism is a crime of violence. Crime cannot be ended by war.

Crime cannot be ended at all, in fact, but it can be minimized when the rule of law is supported by an effective system of justice and policing. After exploring more of the Middle East, I will consider how international justice and policing could more effectively counter al Queda and other terrorists.

Dec 14 2014

Beyond the Media Hype: Saudi Arabia

Where next to combat my ignorance about the Middle East? Here. We Americans fear and loathe Arabs in general but we imagine Saudis to be our friends.

Saudi Arabia is mostly inhospitable desert that covers 80% of the Arabian Peninsula. The prophet Muhammed united nomadic tribes here in the early 7th century and established an Islamic state that his followers rapidly expanded. The center of the Muslim world soon moved to better lands and most of what is now Saudi Arabia reverted to tribal rule.

In the 16th century, Ottoman rulers of Turkey north of Iraq added the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula to their empire. Their control of the area varied over the next four centuries. In 1916, tribal leaders encouraged by Britain mounted a failed revolt then the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of WW I. Ibn Saud, who founded today’s Saudi Arabia and avoided the revolt, continued his three decades long campaign against his regional rivals.

He established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 as an absolute monarchy governed under a puritanical form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabi that is practiced by 85–90% of Saudis. The other 10-15%, who face systematic discrimination, are Shi’a. No faith other than Islam is permitted, conversion by Muslims to other religions is outlawed and so is proselytizing by non-Muslims.

The royal family controls all the kingdom’s important posts. Around 200 of more than 7,000 princes occupy the key ministries and regional governorships. The country in effect belongs to the Ibn Saud family.

Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north with Egypt, Israel and Palestine to Jordan’s west. Syria is in the northwest and Iran is a few miles east over the Persian Gulf. These borders were drawn up by the British and French at the end of WW I with little regard for tribal, religious or ethnic realities.

(Map created by Norman Einstein, February 10, 2006)

Saudi Arabia is interesting to two communities. Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammed and the site of his first revelation of the Quran, is Islam’s holiest city. Non-Muslims are prohibited from it and a pilgrimage to it is mandatory for Muslims. That Saudi Arabia is the world’s dominant oil producer and exporter and has the world’s second largest proved petroleum reserves motivates our interest.

Oil was struck in Pennsylvania in 1859, Russia found it in the Caucasus in 1873, then the British found it in Iraq in 1903. They promptly declared they would “regard the establishment of a naval base or a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.” Five years later, they struck oil in Iran.

Three years after that, the British began converting their navy from coal, of which they had ample supplies, to oil, of which they had none. They landed forces in Iraq in 1914, captured Baghdad and began projecting power from there. More oil was found in the Persian Gulf, starting in Bahrain in 1931 and followed by Kuwait and Qatar. Then in 1933, Americans found oil in Saudi Arabia.

American businessmen were cautiously welcomed by the Saudi king as less threatening than Britain or other colonial powers. He negotiated well with Aramco executives, the business established to export the oil, and later with the US government, trading oil for infrastructure development that transformed Saudi Arabia in a very short time from a medieval fiefdom to a 20th century one that became leader of the petroleum exporters, OPEC.

Saudi Arabia gained control of 20% of Aramco in 1972, full control in 1980 and was by 1976 the largest oil producer in the world. In 1973, Saudi Arabia led an oil boycott against Western countries that supported Israel in its war against Egypt and Syria.

The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 led Saudi Arabia’s king to fear rebellion by the Shi’a minority in the east where the oil is located, and in the same year protesters against laxity and corruption in his government seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. These events led to enforcement of much stricter religious observance and a greater role in government for Muslim legal scholars.

The royal family’s relations had been primarily with Aramco leaders until the reign of King Khalid starting in 1975. After 1975 was when Saudi and US foreign policy grew closely aligned.

Saudi Arabia provided $25B to Iraq in its 1980-88 war against Iran, which we supported. It condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and allowed US and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. But it did not support or participate in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. The US by then no longer seemed a dependable ally.

There is significant opposition in Saudi Arabia both to US influence, and to the absolute monarchy. The strongest opposition comes from Sunni religious leaders who want a stricter form of Islamic rule. Others want the opposite. The Saudi government was rated the 5th most authoritarian government out of 167 in 2012. Women have almost no rights, it’s the only country in the world that bans them from driving. There is also opposition from the Shi’a minority as well as tribal and regional opponents.

The Saudi royal family’s greatest fear, however, until the recent rise of the Islamic State whose stated goal is leadership of an Islamic world, has been Iran’s growing influence. They are more alarmed now the US and Iran seem to be inching closer to a rapprochement.

So the Saudi royal family needs US military support but is at odds with us among other reasons because, like every other nation in the Middle East, they opposed the creation of Israel and are supportive of the Palestinians. They have condemned the Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, but the Saudi royal family is Sunni and Hezbollah are Shi’a.

The royal family must also deal with anti-American feeling among the Saudi people. Osama Bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and it is widely believed, in former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s words, that: “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Very recently, the king criminalized “participating in hostilities outside the kingdom” fearing that Saudis taking part in Syria’s civil war will return knowing how to overthrow a monarchy. Syria now defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.” One of the groups they have named as a terrorist organization is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fear of its neighbors motivates Saudi Arabia to spend more than 10% of its GDP on its military, among the highest percentage of military expenditure in the world. The kingdom has a long standing military relationship with Pakistan. Some believe it funded Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and could purchase such weapons from them for itself.

A good representative of what the Saudi government fears is Safar al-Hawali, a scholar who was a leader of the 1991 movement opposing the presence of US troops on the Arabian peninsula and a leader of a 1993 group that was the first to openly challenge the monarchy.

No surprise that al-Hawali is also a critic of the US government.

In 2005, al-Hawali wrote in An Open Letter to President Bush “the Roman Empire claimed to be the symbol of freedom and civilized values, just as you referred to America in your first statement after the incidents of September 11. It was the greatest world power of its day, the heir of Greek civilization. It had a Senate and a façade of democracy. The Roman citizen had freedom of religion and personal behavior. All this made it superior to other Empires throughout the world, and yet history does not speak well of this Empire because of the repulsive crime with which it stained its reputation: the persecution of the Christians.”

Elsewhere, al-Halawi wrote: “Since World War II, America has not been a democratic republic: it has become a military empire after the Roman model … the American way can be discerned and defined in one word: war. America unhesitatingly enters into war anywhere in the world … Thus we notice that America is always seeking an enemy, and if it does not find one it creates one and inflates it using its terrible media to persuade its people’s conscience that the war it has declared is necessary and for a just cause.” (“Inside the Mirage” Thomas A. Lippman, p. 328)

We imagine Saudi Arabia is our friend, but our thirst for oil provokes their memories of colonial powers. Saudis and others in the Middle East don’t understand our unquestioning support for Israel. Their Muslim leaders are as suspicious of American Christians as we are of them. Inside Saudi Arabia the Shi’a minority is oppressed by their Sunni rulers, Wahhabi fundamentalists battle progressives, and nobody except the royal family can have a role in government.

Preconceptions like the ones we and Saudis hold about each other are not a dependable basis for friendship. Instead, they fuel hatred.

Nov 24 2014

Beyond the Media Hype: Iran

A 2013 BBC poll found 87% of Americans view Iranian influence negatively, which is odd because few Americans ever met an Iranian. What caused the negativity?

Our relations with what was Persia used to be positive. We established diplomatic relations in 1883 when Persia, like many other nations, was threatened by British and Russian colonizing although there was little contact between us until 1906 when Persia established a constitutional monarchy.

The Shah was forced to accept an elected parliament. The Qatar royal family had borrowed massively from Britain and Russia, ruining the country’s finances, so Persia’s new parliament appointed an American, Shuster, as Treasurer General to set things straight.

But Britain and Russia continued to dominate Persia and its neighbors. Following their formal agreement about which of them would control which parts of Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, they pressured Persia in 1911 to expel Shuster.

In 1921 when the treasury was empty again, another American, Millspaugh, was hired to straighten things out. He freed the country from foreign loans by 1927 and Persians came to see the US as their liberator from Britain and Russia.

In 1925, Reza Shah deposed the last Qajar Shah and founded the secular Pahlavi dynasty. He introduced reforms that modernized the nation he renamed Iran, but he was a despot. He was forced to abdicate in 1941 at the time of a WW2 Anglo-Soviet invasion.

In 1942, Millspaugh was invited back by Iran’s parliament but he was forced out in 1945 by Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, because he kept refusing to increase military spending.

In 1953, the government was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and the British MI6 after Iran’s elected leader tried to nationalize its oil industry, 80% of the profits of which were going to Britain. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was reinstated as a close US ally.

During the Cold War, we supported Iran’s and many other unpopular and repressive regimes as bulwarks against the Soviet Union.

In 1979 when widespread unrest forced the Shah to flee, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and established an anti-American, radical Islamic regime. Iranian students, angry when the Shah was admitted to the US, stormed our Embassy and held hostages.

That was the end of secular Iran and friendly relations with the US.

We made a failed attempt to rescue the hostages in 1980, they were released immediately Reagan replaced Carter, then things got murky.

Iraq hoped to take advantage of the chaos in Iran and attacked without warning in 1980. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, fearing the Iranian revolution could spread, provided support. Saudi Arabia is thought to have provided $1B/month. Support also came from France, Germany, the Soviet Union and the US, including intelligence on Iranian deployments from our satellites and radar planes.

President Reagan said we would “do whatever is necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.” We sold poisons for chemical weapons Iraq used against Iran and its own Kurds. The war ended in stalemate in 1988 with perhaps half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers and as many civilians killed.

In 1985 while we overtly supported Iraq, we also secretly sent weapons to Iran in exchange for help freeing US hostages in Lebanon. We illegally sent the profits to anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua and when that became public in 1986, President Reagan suffered a short-lived political crisis.

In 1988, we shot down an Iranian commercial flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 Iranians, most of whom were on their way to Mecca.

When the war ended, Iraq could not repay the $14B it borrowed from Kuwait and asked that the debt be forgiven, saying they had prevented Iran from over-running Kuwait. Kuwait did not agree.

In 1990 Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by slant drilling, then invaded and announced that Kuwait was now part of Iraq. US-led forces drove Iraq out early in 1991.

That was when Iraq ceased to be our ally. In 1993 we adopted a new “dual containment” policy that aimed to end the regional ambitions of both Iran and Iraq.

Iran elected a reformist president in 1997 but in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush named Iran part of an “axis of Evil” and said Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.

Then in 2005, Iran elected a conservative president. He called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and Iran resumed uranium conversion. US Secretary of State Rice termed Iran an “Outpost of Tyranny” along with Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Belarus, and Zimbabwe.

But in 2006, Iran’s president wrote to President Bush calling for dialog. We made no direct response but agreed to join European nations in talks with Iran if Iran suspended uranium enrichment. In 2007, for the first time in 27 years, officials of Iran and the United States met face-to-face.

In December 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate said Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. But nonetheless, the UN ratified four rounds of sanctions on Iran between 2006 and 2010 and the US and EU also imposed sanctions, including on its financial sector in 2012. The US Treasury claims Iran’s currency lost two-thirds of its value in the next two years.

In 2013, Iran’s next President, a reformist, called President Obama, the first between US and Iranian heads of state for 30 years. Diplomatic discussions began but our State Department website says: “The current Iranian government still has not recognized Israel’s right to exist, has hindered the Middle East peace process by arming militants, including Hamas, Hizballah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and continues to play a disruptive role in sustaining violence in the region, particularly Syria.”

Is that what really motivates our government?

No. In 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said: “Several of these [small enemy nations] are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis.”

In 2008, Democratic Senator Robb and GOP Senator Coates wrote: “Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable. It would threaten U.S. national security … the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent.”

What really motivates us, then, is that nuclear weapons would prevent us from attacking Iran. It’s quite a stretch to claim Iran is an existential threat to us.

Our media portrays Iran’s leader (whoever he may be at the time) as a new Hitler who will stop at nothing to dominate the world. But that’s nonsense. Iran will not commit suicide by using a nuclear weapon against us or Israel. We both have huge nuclear stockpiles.

Positioning Iran in that way tells them they would be fools not to acquire nuclear weapons. The dictators who gave up that quest, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, provide the lesson.

It is rational for Iran to want nuclear weapons. We toppled their democratically elected government and installed a despotic ruler in 1953, we backed Iraq’s war against them from 1982-8, President Bush threatened a military strike, Israel often does, we’ve imposed the harshest ever sanctions, and they see what we’ve done to their neighbors, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Equally, it is not irrational for Iran to back Hezbollah’s battle against an Israel that keeps threatening military action. A deal to end that support would be good for us as well as Israel because Hezbollah is a far more capable terrorist group than al Qaeda ever was.

It is true that Iran has a terrible human rights record. In 2013 it ranked 167 in the world, according to the International Human Rights Indicator. But we don’t care about our allies’ human rights: think Mubarak, Gaddafi, and for many years, Saddam Hussein.

What we care about is compliance with our foreign policy. Egyptian dictator Mubarak was OK with Israeli military action in Lebanon and occupied Palestinian territories. Gaddafi became our friend until he spoke of nationalizing Libya’s oil.

We supported Iraq’s war on Iran then made war on Iraq, threatened Syria, are making drone attacks in other Middle East nations, and now we say the “Islamic State” is the enemy. But if we really do want to destroy the Islamic State, we need Iran as a partner because air strikes won’t be enough.

And more importantly, the power vacuum that allowed the Islamic State to flourish must be resolved unless we want perpetual instability in the Middle East. There must be a political solution, which means we must talk with Iran not just because of their concerns but because they influence Shia leaders in Syria and Iraq.

Our leaders fear an Iran with nuclear weapons that would neuter their freedom to attack. But what makes we the people fear Iran? What is our underlying fear?

This poster from a Facebook friend, many of whose beliefs distress me, offers a clue:

Iran jailed Pastor Saeed for “undermining national security.” His Christian missionary work did not threaten territorial security. He was working against the religion on which Iran’s laws are based.

We, just as the colonial powers did, send missionaries to “foreign lands” to replace their beliefs with our own. The poster’s publisher, ACLJ.org, is an arm of Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, Inc. Christian evangelism tends to suggests we aim to make the whole world American.

Iran’s leaders may also wonder if temporal victory really is our aim. President Reagan believed in the Rapture, when all true believers will be taken into heaven and all others will face tribulation. On at least eleven occasions he said the end of the world is coming, maybe soon. President Bush had similar beliefs but, since the Cold War was over, he saw the Antichrist not in Russia but the Middle East.

Still though, why would so many Americans want no deal to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons? How could the pastor’s release from jail be more important than nuclear proliferation in the Middle East?

Because humans are programmed to fear “the other.” Some small group becomes noticeable, we don’t know any of them personally, we don’t know much about them, they seem different from us, we imagine they are all the same and rapidly growing in number, then we feel threatened.

Jews have been “the other” in many societies throughout history. Roman Catholics were “the other” here when Kennedy was running for President. More recently Muslims have become “the other” here and in Europe.

Now we imagine all Muslims are the same, and because the ones we’re shown by the media are terrorists, we imagine all Muslims to be potential if not yet actual terrorists.

Nothing I or anyone else can say will eradicate that fear. It will only evaporate as more of us get to meet more Muslims, or if our media first positions some new small group as “the other.”

Oct 9 2014

Our Eleven American Nations

I was quite startled to learn that our Constitution has a stated aim to protect the “opulent minority.” I was impressed when I studied our system of government for my citizenship exam. Now I realized that I didn’t understand the system’s history or implications.

I started with Robert Dahl’s excellent How Democratic is the American Constitution? Daniel Lazare’s The Frozen Republic opened my eyes wider. Then I read Colin Woodard’s enormously helpful America Nations – A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America.

Woodard began his career in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was collapsing. He noticed that the boundaries of Hungary, Poland and other nations bore little or no relation to the ethnic and cultural realities. Groups within those countries had always been rivals and people across borders shared a culture and long history.

That got Woodard thinking about cultural rivalry within our nation. The South versus the North, the coasts vs the heartland, those grossly simplified divisions don’t explain the reality. Cultures that came from England, France, Spain, the Netherlands and so on were significantly different and those cultures remain powerfully alive.

Our values and the behavior they motivate are much more those of eleven distinct people than of fifty States, or of an homogenous population with shared values.

Eleven American Nations

What are the implications?

The Constitution’s first words are “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Coming in the recent past from very different cultures with very different values, many of the delegates did not want union but to be left alone. Those who wanted union had very different ideas about its form. The great majority of the population was not consulted, certainly not those whose land had recently been invaded.

The Constitution that resulted from all the necessary compromises results in an ongoing contest between only two major parties.

My conclusion before I read Woodard’s research was that since the Republican Party has been taken over by a tiny minority of the most wealthy Americans in alliance with fundamentalist Christians and anarchists, “something-other-than-progressives” must take over the other Party. But that would result in even more extreme gridlock.

The Democratic Party must not shift to the far left to balance a Republican Party that is moving further and further to the far right. It must find a position that accommodates the diverse values of a majority of people across all our eleven nations.

Our world is constantly changing, so our policies and programs must, too. Sometimes a conservative brake on changes will be best, other times major changes will have grown urgently necessary. And the priorities of neither major party will permanently align with those of any of our eleven nations.

Some of us wage war on “invasive species”, plants, insects, fish, rodents, mammals, any form of life that “does not belong here.” Some of us reject people who arrived recently and “don’t belong.” But as the world inevitably changes, life forms inevitably move.

Recent linguistic research indicates that the first people in North America did not come directly from Siberia across the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago. People from Siberia had been living in Beringia for around 85,000 years. When the ice melted and their habitat was flooded 12,000 years ago, some came here. Others went back to Siberia where they perhaps no longer “belonged”.

Those who came here formed into tribes, some peaceful, some making war on each other. We think of those Native Americans as being decimated by “the white man” as if a single invasive species destroyed them. In fact, it was a variety of new species, eleven major ones, that set up an entirely new form of government which excluded them.

What we need to do now is figure out how we can use that system of government to better represent the people of the eleven nations who we speak of collectively as “Americans.”

We are not alone in facing this challenge and we have had governments that better represented us all in the past. We can have such a government again. We’re in a much better position than, for example, Nepal. Politicians there continue to wrangle without visible progress over what structure of government could represent all Nepalis, not just the Brahmin elite.

Nepal’s politicians cannot even start to learn how to govern until they choose a structure. Ours could start governing effectively right now. We must make them do so.

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