Last Gasp of the Imperial Misadventure

``free``thinker writes <<< I had asked you to inform the readers with which system you want to replace the western democracy if it is so bad. You evaded that question. Do you want to adopt a Pakistani, an Egyptian, a Syrian, an Iranian, a Saudi Arabian (so on and so forth) system, or what? You did not answer specifically but went on tangentially accusing the western system >>>

You had asked me a question that shows your ignorance of the issues, a question that I have answered multiple time on here. The system(s) you see projected across the globe are a product of a world system, which is dominated by....yes you guessed it right. Now if we replace the global politico economic relationships with any different system, the results, holding other factors constant are bound to benefit humanity. And to add to Zeemax, the US does not only have one system for the domestics and one for the foreigners, it has multiple systems of oppression inside based on a pharoahic hierarchy it has created in a class based system, and when it comes to dark skinned people abroad, they don`t even bother with the count of those killed by their policies according to their official admission, we are like cockroaches that you kill and forget... Even the explicitly coersive system of medieval times was not so impersonal reagarding human suffereing.

#140 by freethinker

“I never thought when I wrote the article that I would enter into such a discussion as is occurring between us.”

The Shia Sunni issue is an important part of your article; you should have anticipated that some one would bring this up for discussion.

“I had stated simply that the stronger faction always dominated the weaker one. By domination, I was implying the kind of violent strife that emerges in Pakistan almost unfailingly every year. Although such outbursts are no comparison to the life and death struggle which is going on in Iraq, it demonstrates that the co-existence between Shias and Sunnis is not always peaceful.”

Gill sahib, the kind of strife that emerges in Pakistan occasionally is entirely different than what we have in Iraq. The roots of both issues are different and as both nasah and Parthaab have pointed out, they should be treated differently.

The ethnic, sectarian or communal violence at a large scale emerges when both warring parties sidestep the law and the state apparatus to resolve their differences violently and this violence can go on until 1. both parties are exhausted, 2.one group is completely taken out or 3.the government is able to re-establish its preeminence to stop the violence. Minor scuffles that you mentioned in Pakistan may cause loss of life, nevertheless, is not the result of a complete breakdown of law and order but is a result of emotional issues between the communities.

To illustrate this I would mention that there is a rift between the Hindu and Muslim communities in India. The disputes go on until they reach a point where both parties sidestep the law, which results in incidents like Gujarat. Similarly, when groups of people in 1947 decided to take their differences outside the limits of law, a massacre took place on both sides of Punjab. The massacre did not stop until the warring groups were completely ejected from each others areas of influence or majority.

The two examples that you quoted are actually very illustrative of what I have been implying in my posts. You seem to believe that the sectarian violence and the state persecution are one and the same thing. What you are quoting are mostly instances of state persecution against one group which could be a political or may even be a different religious group.

As I had shown you in my previous posts, Saddam on many occasions persecuted both Shias and Kurds as they were his political opponent. He did not persecute them for their ethnicity or the religious beliefs on behalf of his Sunni brethren or his own Sunni faith. That is why despite Saddam’s brutalities, Shia and Sunni still lived side by side in Baghdad. Saddam also maintained a strict state structure that had the ability to control any sectarian violence before it could spread in Iraq.

Once the US took over, they destroyed the state structure in Iraq by removing the army, police, and the Bureaucracy thus leaving a vacuum that they were never able to fill with the US army. Obviously, the US army lacked skills to mediate or forestall the spread of violence between the two communities. With complete control of media in Iraq and by managing the information the US was able to create a situation where both communities decided to operate outside the limits of the law and the eruption of sectarian violence that spread quickly and still goes on unabated.

If the US had maintained the structure, both groups could possibly have had recourse to the government officials, police, the court system and even the Iraqi army to address the grievances. In the absence of such a structure, and by constant attempts by the US controlled media in Iraq to magnify the differences to divert attention from insurgency, it was not difficult to escalate the problems between the communities into a full fledged sectarian war.

This is my last post on this subject. However, I would like you to read this article to see the impact of the sectarian violence in Baghdad, probably something the US encouraged from the get go.

Read it here

http://www.ndtv.com/topstories/showtopstory.asp?slug=Officials+suspended+over+Gorakhpur+clash&id=21297&category=National

Re: # 140

A flaw in your argument is the assumption that internal security is not the primary ingredient to peace.

If that were the case, then in India at least, in the absence of internal security, there would have been massacres on a large scale on religious, casteist and linguistic lines. This would have happened even in the USA.

Certainly compounded by biased media and revenge mode.

Internal security is the key to peace.

Re: # 118,

Dr. Gill, It would be rather a simplistic and naive person to accept wholesale, the current media propaganda that Bush initially had only good intentions for Iraq.

If that were the case, he would nt have needed an excuse like WMD to attack the country. Saddam was by and large doing nothing on the international level, having been weakened considerably by economic sanctions. Iraq was already sufferring, but due to his dads sanctions.

The whole world knew that Bush was on the look out for a muslim nation for revenge on the 9/11 attacks, and Saddam, as a `dictator` fitted the media bill. And that a war would cripple the country and eventually divide it on sectarian lines, after an ethnic blood bath, in the absence of any internal security and warring factions. This, the whole world knew BEFORE even the WMD were claimed by Powell.

How could the CIA have possibly not known what the whole world knew before the attack?

Re: # 139 Nasah

``but what is happening in Iraq is something else. the Americans bear the direct responsibility for these bloody encounters massacres``

Nasah, before convicting the Americans, spare a moment for this thought:

``The fall of Tabriz in 1501 before the advancing forces of Shah Isma‘il Safawi marked the beginning of a new era in Iranian history. The land of Persia, whose population up to that time had been mainly Sunni, was now beginning to be transformed into a Shi‘ite homeland. Suppression of the Sunni Iranians was swift and merciless. The Sunni ‘ulama and Sufis were specifically targeted for persecution. Many preferred exile to certain death`` [reference]

or this:

``The House of Saud has made no secret of declaring the Shi`a as ``not being Muslims``, or ``Kaafir``. This is evident from the Shia minority in Saudia Arabia which has no political power or rights, and from outright edicts in which Salafi clerics have declared ``Shia blood to be halal, i.e. permissible to be shed.``[reference]

In short, what we see as relative calm in the Mideast is a result of centuries of tribal warfare that `cleaned out` Sunni-Shia populations. Even Saddam maintained relative calm through a brutal clampdown.

HP: 130

I never thought when I wrote the article that I would enter into such a discussion as is occurring between us. I had stated simply that the stronger faction always dominated the weaker one. By domination, I was implying the kind of violent strife that emerges in Pakistan almost unfailingly every year. Although such outbursts are no comparison to the life and death struggle which is going on in Iraq, it demonstrates that the co-existence between Shias and Sunnis is not always peaceful.

The battle between Ali and Aisha became a precursor to what happened afterwards at Karbala which perpetuated Shiism as a permanent and distinct sect. You wrote, “Ali and Aisha fought a political battle for the control of power in Mecca,” which is true and the bloody battle at Karbala was also motivated by the political reasons. Are you trying to validate the Aisha-Ali battle?


The US also invaded Iraq for political reasons. Why should then this be a big deal? The Shias and Sunnis who are cutting each other’s throats on daily basis cannot be exonerated from the responsibility of the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq.

You wanted instances of Sunni-Shia strife in history. I give you a couple of quotations regarding Safavids and the Ottoman Empire’s wars and battles in the following to illustrate it:
“The major impact of the Safavid-Ottoman conflict on Iraqi history was the deepening of the Shia-Sunni rift. Both the Ottomans and the Safavids used Sunni and Shia Islam respectively to mobilize domestic support. Thus, Iraq`s Sunni population suffered immeasurably during the brief Safavid reign (1623-38), while Iraq`s Shias were excluded from power altogether during the longer period of Ottoman supremacy (1638-1916). During the Ottoman period, the Sunnis gained the administrative experience that would allow them to monopolize political power in the twentieth century. The Sunnis were able to take advantage of new economic and educational opportunities while the Shias, frozen out of the political process, remained politically impotent and economically depressed. The Shia-Sunni rift continued as an important element of Iraqi social structure in the 1980s ,“ (Iraq: Historical Setting, Library of Congress Country Study, The Ottomon Period 1534- 1918).
Another extract is as follows:
“If we look back at the history of Islam and to the Shia-Sunni strife that broke out at in the first chapter of Islamic history following the death of the Prophet of Islam, and that ruptured in a bloody way in the battle of the Great Sedition between Ali and Muawiyyah and continued to divide the Muslim memory into two parts, we can see that nothing has changed since that era—matters calm down and flare up pursuant to the balance of powers between the two parties.
Political strife together with direct threat is the key motivator of sectarian literature, and history has much to relate in this regard. An example is the bloody conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids that began with the famous Battle of Chaldiran in August 1514 between the Safavid Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid state and who was devoted to Safavid culture, and the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, who was prompted to fight this battle to restrain the Safavid ``Empire`` that had expansive ambitions under the slogan of Shia sectarianism….. Ardebili, was a Sunni Sufi mystic. Gradually and due to special complexities, steps were taken towards the conversion to Shia Islam until we reach the era of the Safavid Shah Ismail.
Shah Ismail was extreme in Shiism, in oppressing the Sunnis and in spreading Shia Islam in Iran. He had ambitions in Iraq and in the territories that bordered Iran in the east and north. His ambitions in Iraq were justified—it is home to the holy shrines.
What is also interesting about the story is that the father of Sultan Selim I, Bayezid, corresponded with the Safavid Shah and was interested in poetry and philosophy. He did not feel that he had to fight the Safavids. When news was confirmed about the Shah`s suppression of the Sunnis, the Ottoman Sultan, out of responsibility for his subjects, advised him to be kind to the Sunnis and refrain from being aggressive towards them. However, Sultan Selim I had a different view and believed that the Safavid Empire posed a real danger to the Ottoman Empire and that the Shah`s zealous promotion of the hardline version of Shia Islam was part of Ismail`s endeavor to provide an appropriate cultural ground for the expansion of the Safavid state. Here, the political considerations intertwine with the religious and social ones. Originally, perhaps the cause, or one of the causes for Ismail`s ancestors to choose Shia Islam and Ismail`s consolidation of the Shia doctrine was the political concern in the framework of creating a cultural identity for the new empire, an identity that is based on denominational distinction, differences in historical references, and collective local memory to complete the components of a different identity. We should not be surprised by this as the man`s ambitions, though profuse, were limitless when coupled with power.
In any case, the Ottomans managed to confine the Safavid extension within its present borders, however, the open border for conflict remained in Iraq; at one time the Safavid Shah entered Baghdad torturing the Sunnis, and at another point in time the Ottoman Sultans entered, torturing the Shia and reconstructing the tomb of Abu Hanifa,” (Mshari al-Zaydi, Sectarianism and Forms of Politics, Ashraq al-Awast).

I really do not understand where our discussion is heading to. We seem to have lost the basic point of the article. If we are at two different pages and do not understan each other`s point of view, this discussion is pointless. Be well,

Mohammad Gill

Of course there have been a minor schism between Shia and Sunnis in places like Lucknow for centuries -- that usually exacerbated during Muharram -- but what is happening in Iraq is something else.

the Americans bear the direct responsibility for these bloody encounters massacres and ethnic cleansing -- it is something they started by doing themselves in Fallujah -- and by arming sectarians of one community against the other -- the whole premise of American aggression and diabolical misadventure in Iraq were based on the devious premise -- that the Shias will welcome the Americans with garlands against the `Sunni` Dictator Saddam Hussein.

The same American game is being played in Syria -- that the dastardly American `liberators` will have Sunni garlands waiting for them if Bush invades `Sunni`` Syria ruled by a `Shia` son of a ruthless `Shia` Dictator Assad.

in reality the two dictatorship were NEVER based on the Shia Sunni divide. It is an entirely -- Made In USA -- counterfeit product.

The Shia-Sunni massacres have been started by the Neocon vermins of George Bush -- by playing one against the other and then becoming a pious `arbiter` between the two -- the old trick of the occupiers against the occupied that always worked -- as it worked `wonderfully` for the ethnic cleansing that happened in Punjab post independence.

SR -- thanks for the delights -- here is one that I have on my car bumper -- I am not the real president I only play one on TV.

from your list my favorit two:

5) If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran

21) So Many Christians, So Few Lions....:)

``Human behavior is so strange.``(Sri)

Human behavior is INDEED sooo strange -- when you talk to a plump clay figure that has an elephant head over its human neck -- the strangest when you talk to someone and there is nothing there......:)

For ALL you Bush lovers!


NEW POLITICAL BUMPER STICKERS

1 ) (On an infant`s shirt): Already smarter than Bush

2) 1/20/09: End of an Error

3) That`s OK, I Wasn`t Using My Civil Liberties Anyway

4 ) Let`s Fix Democracy in This Country First

5) If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran

6) Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.

7) You Can`t Be Pro-War And Pro-Life At The Same Time

8) If You Can Read This, You`re Not Our President

9) Of Course It Hurts: You`re Getting Screwed by an Elephant

10) Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?

11) George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight

12) Impeachment: It`s Not Just for Blowjobs Anymore

13) America : One Nation, Under Surveillance

14) They Call Him ``W`` So He Can Spell It

15) Which God Do You Kill For?

16) Cheney/Satan `08

17) Jail to the Chief

18) Who Would Jesus Torture?

19) No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade

20) Bush: God`s Way of Pro ving Intelligent Design is Full Of Crap

21) So Many Christians, So Few Lions

22) Bad president! No Banana.

23) We Need a President Who`s Fluent In At Least One Language

24) We`re Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them

25) Is It Vietnam Yet?

26) Bush Doesn`t Care About White People, Either

27) Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Handbasket?

28) Frodo Failed. Bush Has the Ring.

29) Impeach Cheney First

30) The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century

..... a hint to the answer is that the Government death squads are only in Baghdad ....

But try the question anyway ..

#133 by sri

... it is a sad commentary on Sunnis and Shias that they are behaving worse than animals. Justifying or glossing over the Sunni-Shia carnage by saying that Bush started it is really lame.

I will pose the same question to you which I have posed many times before but never received an answer from those of your ilk who believe it is a religious conflict between Shia/Sunni:

Why isn`t it happening anywhere outside Baghdad in Iraq.

If you don`t have an answer, then desist from making shallow and sterotypical statements. In other words, shut up.

Though I see that now at-least many of your types are coming around to it being an illegal war thrust upon the Iraqi people.

Human behavior is so strange.

People immediately identify ( and magnify ) even the smallest of shortcomings in people who they consider as enemies. Whereas, they remain totally apathetic to the shortcomings of the people who they consider as their ``own``. Even to the point of covering up or justifying their own groups despicable actions. Examples are many - Indians glossing over the gut wrenching poverty in India, muslims justifying terrorism, mexicans thinking nothing of criminal illegal aliens, etcetra ...

The question is, is that a healthy attitude? Does it really help in the improvement of their lot ? These are simple questions and simple concepts.. but I guess in reality the basic impulse of peoples emotions take over.

Now, it is beyond argument that Bush waged an illegal war... but given that, it is a sad commentary on Sunnis and Shias that they are behaving worse than animals. You can only take a horse ot the pond but you cannot make it drink. Justifying or glossing over the Sunni-Shia carnage by saying that Bush started it is really lame. But alas, who said people think intelligently in all circumstances ....

Gill Saheb,

I second this question which HP has posed. I really think we deserve an answer from you:

.... show us the instances when Shia or Sunni were shedding blood before the Iraq drama. Please provide us some instances or the names of any war that these two factions fought on religious or sectarian issues. You don’t have to provide any links to support your claim just name a few of the incident and the periods would suffice.

The second question is over the battle of Ali and Ayesha.

....Both Aisha and Ali were not Shia or Sunni either.

I will just add to above HP`s statement that Usman was not Shia either ... so why did Ayesha rise against Ali to avenge his death (which Muwaiya had promised to avenge and failed to do at the appeal of no less than Usman`s wife? She had sent the severed finger of Usman to Muawiya from the hand he had raised to protect his face).

Ball`s in your court Sir!

#125 by PewResearch

``...who had predicted two years ago that Iraq will be fully democratized in six months and the insurgency over...`` Any references? Otherwise go to jahanum!!

I`m not likely to go over the archives of NY Times over two years to fulfill your wish. However as for your other wish, My Lord, I am on way!