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So here is that history article I promised you! Well, I had to write this next and post it first, since this article grew so long before I could even get to 20th Century Iraq. Part of my expanded library is “The Iraq War” by Robert H. Scales, MG(ret). I had the opportunity to meet this man a few years backs and he could have been an NBA star. The man is huge.
I also had the advantage in this as I knew exactly who he was at about the same time his book (which I did not know about) was going to print and I could see the confusion in his face as I seemed very out of place. He was sure he should know me and he has a reputation of remembering everyone he encounters but he could not place me because it was our only encounter. I reveled in all of this, even though I have tremendous respect for his reputation and that grows with the reading of his book. We shook hands after my salute and the encounter was over.
In his book, he enlightens me on a part of Middle East history on which I was deficient. Frankly, I’ve found other accounts of early 20th century history on the region less than enlightening.
I’ve mentioned the Ottoman Turks before and at the beginning of the 20th Century, they were one of the 7 powers of Europe. They ruled Arabia as well as Syria, Turkey and many other parts of the islamic world. Not surprisingly, they got entangled in WWI which destroyed their status, just as it did many others. It seems that they took up the side of Germany, Austria, and Italy against Serbia, Russia, England, and France.
They demonstrated their military capabilities against the Brits early in the war, when the British decided to open a route to their ally Russia. It didn’t go so well for our allies and soon Russia fell not to Germany but to Communism.
But still the war was on and it pitted the English against the Turks in the Middle East. The next battles were for Baghdad which also proved less than successful initially. Eventually though, they took Baghdad and other parts of modern Iraq. Then they launched their attacks into Palestine (a region, not nation) which then included modern day Israel and Jordan. By 1918, the Brits controlled Damascus (capital of present day Syria) and by that fall the Turks admitted defeat and saved what they could of their former empire, i.e. modern day Turkey.
Meanwhile back in the safety of Europe, a couple of bureaucrats were drawing lines on maps of the Middle East, dividing up the spoils of war: the former Ottoman Empire between the French and the Brits. The French got modern day Syria and Lebanon, while the Brits kept Palestine and the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra.
The Brits were in a bit of a pickle. Not only did they not really want this hot potato but they had also promised their local allies as made famous by Lawrence of Arabia self-rule. Their primary concern was that the French not get control (though in the long run, that may have been better though they would have screwed it up even worse.) While the land had plenty of oil, it had little else and oil really wasn’t all that valuable to them at that time.
Many of today’s conflicts are born out of this next historical act. For some reason the British and French mapmakers sat far from the places for which they were drawing national boundaries. They took into account the terrain but not the local politics. In this case, the Brit sat in his office and saw a vast desert to the west and a lot of flat land going south all the way to the gulf. It made for a simple terrain based set of lines on the map.
Meanwhile, the Brit diplomats had decided Faisal would be rewarded for his alliance and given the throne to this new nation. Why wouldn’t a monarchy create a monarchy? But there were some problems. Faisal was a Sunni and when combining the Baghdad province with the Basra province, he was a bit outnumbered by the Shi’a which he was to rule over. To change the ratios, the Brits threw in the Mosul province to the North which contained the Kurds, which while Sunni, didn’t happen to be Arabs. Well if you’re drawing lines on a map in London, you can’t know about all these little nuances and Faisal was happy to have more territory and subjects.
The nation of Iraq was born out of three provinces. In 2007, we occasionally heard a proposal that they be divided back up into those three, but the Sunnis (non-Kurd ones) don’t like that idea because the Kurds have the oil. The Shi’a don’t like it because they have the numbers. The Turks, Iranians and Syrians don’t like it because they have their own Kurd problems and a Kurdish Nation would only exacerbate the problem. The rest of the world doesn’t like it because the above parties would likely absorb the new nations or form their own puppet governments. It seems only the Kurds like the idea.
It seems all the players want to gain and maintain as much power as they can grab. While many accuse the US of imperialism, we have the most altruistic goals. Just like the Brits in 1920’s, we don’t want to hold on to this hot potato any longer than we have to. Hence we have put tremendous diplomatic pressure on the new government to kiss and make up with all parties involved and to share the oil revenues of the Kurds with all the others.
As of 1932, as per the august international body, the League of Nations (the predecessor to the UN), the Iraqis had a brand new nation and a brand new king to go with it at a time when monarchies were on the decline and communism was on the rise. Two Syrians had just come up with the Ba’ath political and government ideology in Paris, which they would bring to Damascus Syria) in 1941.
Following WWII, the Cold War was on. Both sides of it attempted to influence the Middle East, because oil was important in the world now. The US did this primarily by means of financial and military aid while the Soviets used home grown rebels and coups. In 1958, an Iraqi General led a coup with Communist Party support. They massacred the royal family, including Faisal’s grandson which was the new young king at the time. The Soviets had a foothold of influence.
Saddam Hussein himself led a Ba’athist assassination team aimed at killing General (and President) Qassem. This attempt failed but in 1963, the Ba’athist’s did manage to win and to kill Qassem in the process. They showed his body on television and proceeded to commit mass murder and purges across the country. But their lack of solid control resulted in a counter coup by the Communists and the Ba’athists were again out of power.
The humiliation the Iraqis suffered as a result of the 6 Day War in 1967 was the final straw for the Communists however. Even though the Iraqis showed up late for the battle, they were equally embarrassed by the mass surrendering of the “glorious” Arab armies to the tiny country of Israel. The mid level officers threw their full weight behind the only alternatives to Communists and the Ba’athists took control of Iraq in 1968.
The new President of Iraq, Hassan al-Bakr made the most sadistic man he knew the chief of the secret police. This time they were a bit slower to institute purges but they started by hanging several Jews and a few other “Zionist” spies in Liberation Square and promised there would be more, thousands more as they rooted out all the western and Zionist spies. Saddam did his job of torture, murder and tyranny well and he enjoyed it.
Saddam proved to be brutal and effective in methods of torture and execution while systematically putting people of loyalty in the key positions of Iraq including in all the intelligence services until by 1979 he told al-Bakr to step down and install himself as President. His first act was to call the Ba’ath Party together, and under threat of a family massacre, one of the members outlined a coup plan within Saddam’s own party. Saddam called out the guilty parties one by one and had them escorted outside.
With all of the less loyal members falsely accused of treason, he gave the rest of the party membership the opportunity to prove their loyalty. They could volunteer for the execution party. The message was clear, even within the brutal party, the choice was kill Saddam’s opponents or be killed by those that didn’t wish to be killed. He had complete control from the top of his party down to the vendor on the street. All dissenters were killed.
The nice things about a coup are that they don’t necessarily involve all that much bloodshed, but Saddam went on a campaign of atrocity to overcome that, and it leaves the nations infrastructure and military in tact. Contrast that to a full fledged revolution and there are some obvious benefits to taking over a government this way. For those using the “I wish the politicians would fight it out instead of our soldiers fighting wars” crowd, it’s called a coup. You should get behind this method if you really believe your argument.
Meanwhile, Iran had finally got our attention. Iran (then Persia) had been our ally in the Middle East for decades. We had a very good relationship with the Shah (their version of a king) but reality was that he wasn’t all that good of a leader. The Shah had long depended on advice from the United States as to how to best govern. Unfortunately for him, the nicest guy we ever elected President didn’t believe in meddling in the affairs of others.
So when the Shah needed advice on how to handle those idealistic students, the ole Peanut farmer was just too nice to tell him not to kill the dissidents. He was too nice to suggest that perhaps the Shah should hold some elections. The fact was that the US President pretty much ignored Iran all the way up until the Shah was the victim of an Iranian coup while he was off in the hospital. Well, the good ole boy must have felt a little bad about that because he decided to give the man a place to live here in the US, which angered the islamists that had taken power.
That’s when they decided to get our attention. They overran our embassy and took our diplomats and businessmen hostage. Only slightly less embarrassing than the fact that the Ayatollah didn’t release them until the nice guy was in his last hour of office and the cowboy was about to take the reins, was the fact that his demand that the rescue operation share glory amongst all services ended up causing disaster between elements that had never really talked that much. This little detail brought about massive changes in the way the US military operated, but at the cost of a lot of lives in the Iranian desert.
They had our attention and we had lost our best islamic ally in the Middle East. The young anti-communist leader in Iraq wasn’t looking as bad as he could have. He accepted aid from the Soviets and bought their weapons but he was anti-communist, anti-Iranian and unfortunately anti-Israel as well. He was a very bloody tyrant but who wasn’t in the Middle East. He also wasn’t all that high up on our list of interesting people that we wanted to shake hands with, until a few years later.
Blood and torture were his pastimes. His heroes included Stalin, Hitler and Al Capone. The Ba’athist party motto of “hate everyone all the way to the grave” was well suited to him. He taught his sons his arts and they did things more evil than even he could dream to the degree that he was embarrased, privately. But they were family. He took over a country rich with money from the booming oil business and he looked around for a place to start his quest for the pan-Arabic empire. He noted that the bloody revolution in Iran had weakened their military and figured it would make for an easy expansion.
He failed to realize that Iran had 3x the people that he did and while pretty much hated by everyone by that time, it still had the armaments sold to the Shah and the Soviets were more than happy to make money off selling weapons to both sides. The French were happy to buy influence and earn a pretty penny off upgrading any weapon system Saddam wanted to buy with all that oil money. He bought the best he could get his hands on.
At the same time, Iran was looking to expand their Islamist Caliphate and Saddam's Iraq looked to be in disarray. Mahmoud Ahdiminijihadist and others were sent behind Iraqi lines to start a revolution there.
The French meanwhile started selling him nuclear technology. They used the excuse that it would even the odds against Israel which the world knew but Israel refused to admit had their own nuclear weapons. He began using chemical and biological weapons on both his own people, the Kurds and his enemy, the Iranians. Everyone turned a blind eye to his atrocities because he was fighting one of the worst the world had to offer, Iran.
Many in the Arab world loaned him money to fight the islamist threat in Iran. No one wanted radical Shi’a Iran to win and some were just as happy to see the basic stalemate between the two. Eight years of war bankrupted Iraq and Saddam needed to find a new way to get out of debt.
Many of my readers will remember this period of time, when most of the islamic world was embroiled in the Cold War where both sides dared not take their eyes off the other. The main interest either side had in the Middle East was steeped in maintaining an open path to the oil to buy. Neither side had any serious dreams of actually holding that land for themselves. Both sides were willing to look the other way if a tyrant would pledge alliance against the other. There were Armies and allied armies of millions, both sides armed with nukes, looking for proxies to do battle with the other, to try to get the other side to blink long enough to score some real points.
Syria and Iran learned how to play the game of war through proxy from the two Superpowers and Lebanon and Palestine became the hottest places on earth while Berlin became a stone cold city of spies. And Vienna became the neutral city of spies.
But the Cold War was ending and Iraq was near bankruptcy, so he decided to go on down to the rich little emirate of Kuwait, eliminate a creditor and take the Emir’s gold and wealth. It was the perfect solution for a maniacal tyrant like Saddam. He was accustomed to the times of the Cold War and believed the United States had no will to stop him.
He also looked to Viet Nam and assumed the US would pull out if he could just kill a few Americans if they did decide to try to stop him. We built up a coalition of over a million soldiers and most of the world, including his old ally Syria, though Jordan “remained neutral” while selling him some weapons and ammo. Meanwhile, he bragged that both his shepherds and his French anti-air defenses would see our Stealth Fighters. When both failed at the task, he had his Generals in charge of the Air Force and Air Defenses forces executed.
Wars cannot be won by air alone and particularly not in the Middle East, but he thought his ground forces would perform better than his air defenses did. He was still holding on to the idea that America would retreat with a few casualties. We expected higher casualties in the ground war too. We expected it to cost thousands of lives a day. We were going up against “battle hardened seasoned soldiers” of the 4th largest Army in the world on their turf with the best the Soviets would sell them.
I’ll admit I thought I was going into the "next Viet Nam" when I crossed the border into Iraq that night. It didn’t get any better when tired from a lack of sleep and an excess of adrenaline for a prolonged period of time left me and my battlebuddy asleep at the wheel. When using blackout drive, you can’t see the vehicle ahead if it’s 100 feet in front of you and during one of our frequent stops, they moved while we nodded off.
We were two scared E4’s driving as fast as we could through a desert known to be mined and believed to be full of battle hardened Iraqis on the first night of ground operations of a war we expected to last years. Fortunately we linked back up with the convoy somehow. He hated to be called “top” but somehow the 1st Sergeant found us.
And you have to remember, in those days “night vision goggles” gave you a nice green picture of snow and a fuzzy picture of anything within a few feet with no perception of whether it was inches or yards. They were so uncommon that we were lucky to have two sets per platoon and they sure as hell were too expensive to give to a couple of E4’s.
We didn’t stop advancing for the next 5 days. We entered Kuwait from Iraq at the same time that BBC short wave radio announced the war was over. We kept going until we found us a nice spot on the border to wait for the Iraqi counter attack. In those 4 days of the ground war, I went from being a non-smoker to a chain smoker. Haven’t quit but once since, for 8 months, but it wasn’t worth it. No one likes a quitter. They’re irritable.
We annihilated the enemy so completely that Bush was afraid of a public backlash. He decided to end the war quickly before the pictures of the “Highway of Death” made it to press. Nevermind that it was 7 miles of stolen vehicles driven by Iraqi soldiers and full of stolen loot from Kuwait. Nevermind that those stolen vehicles were destroyed but there weren’t so many Iraqi soldiers killed in the process. The press would ignore all that or so he thought.
So anyway, we came away from Iraq knowing full well that before we started, Saddam had chemical, biological and was working on nuclear weapons. He had already stated that Iraq would be on par in power with the US, China, and the Soviet Union. He was the ‘great islamic hope’ at least in his own fantasy world. As part of the cease fire, he agreed to weapons inspections and to destroy all of that.
Swarzkopf made one great mistake in this war. He didn’t make Saddam come to the cease fire table and sign the papers of defeat himself. Swarzkopf didn’t want to totally strip Saddam of honor and let him send his Generals to sign them instead. Saddam executed these ‘defeatist’ Generals and claimed victory since the US had “backed off from attacking Iraq proper.” In the Arab mind, that meant victory for the retreated and surrendered Iraqi military. We gave him back about 300,000 Iraqi EPWs. They had surrendered to any American they could find, including a case where a platoon of Iraqis surrendered to a single Blackhawk helicopter armed only with a few .38 caliber pistols.
Bush Sr however lost the backing of the people as a result of Tianamen Square. He waited 3 days for the polls to tell him what the people thought he should do. We don’t vote for leaders to be wishy-washy. We want decisiveness. Meanwhile, Saddam continually threw up walls and shell games in front of the UN weapons inspectors while re-confirming his victory over the Americans as evidenced by outlasting the US president that failed to take him out of power.
Saddam was an incredibly intelligent yet paranoid and brutal egotistical maniac. A common problem with people like him, particularly when they have their own little country to run is that they believe their own bs and have plenty of people to tell them just how smart they are. Because they believe themselves so clever they often ignore the advice of smarter people in their company on the subjects they pay them to know. I.e. Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam all had Generals executed that disagreed with their military prowess, which resulted in two of them being removed from power by a foreign military and the third got lucky by siding with Britain and the US against Hitler.
We elected our own egotistical genius to replace Bush Sr. His concept was to continue the policy of containment against Saddam rather than face him head on. He figured it worked against the Soviets and could work against Saddam. (It took us 50 years and several wars in places like Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, and Afghanistan to end the Cold War in a massive arms build up that the Soviet economy could not sustain.)
The Containment Policy meant embargos and sanctions but Saddam figured that the UN and Clinton would get a soft heart and end those policies that have always failed when the world saw that only the common people were starving and Saddam continued to live in largesse. The Oil for Food program was corrupt on every level, as well as the black market in and out of Iraq and Saddam’s sons, along with Kofi Annan's son, and the French and Germans, were the primary beneficiaries.
After Saddam attempted to assassinate Bush Sr with a car bomb in Kuwait, Clinton launched a cruise missile attack against the Intelligence Agency Headquarters that planned the attack, at night. It killed only the civilian janitors and NONE of the military or intelligence agents that actually planned it. Saddam was emboldened. He knew Clinton would never actually force his hand and that the UN would eventually back down.
At that time he was offering $10,000 to anyone that killed a UN humanitarian worker in the Kurdish areas or to the family of a suicide bomber in Palestine. He upped the reward to $25,000. At least two renowned terrorists with a successful resume were living in Baghdad. The one that survived Operation Iraqi Freedom-1 was al-Zarqawi, later to be the #1 commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later still to be killed by US forces.
Though unsuccessful, Saddam maintained orders to shoot down any US aircraft enforcing the no fly zone in Northern Iraq. Our technology kept our pilots safe, even if puckered butts and kept his ADA in piles of rubble, so he moved them inside of schools and to the tops of historical monuments and archaeological sites. Clinton decided to launch a few cruise missiles on precisely the same day he was being impeached by Congress, in response to Saddam again moving the Iraqi Republican Guard towards Kuwait, again. The whole world saw it as a wag the dog scenario, most particularly Saddam and he continued to prevent weapons inspectors from doing their job.
He continued killing and torturing Iraqi civilians and his sons continued kidnapping, raping and feeding women to the lions, literally. His atrocities, bravado and speeches only grew stronger. His policy, as was his life, was confrontation, particularly in the face of a policy of containment. In poker, the one that calls the bluff wins. He had his military shoot at UN weapons inspectors. I can’t say they were just bad shots nor can I say they shot high on purpose but the weapons inspectors retreated unharmed. He showed all the signs of having WMD, which we had incontrovertible proof he had prior to Desert Storm. In fact in numerous speeches, Saddam stated he was willing to use WMD against Israel.
The Egyptians, Jordanians, and British all agreed with US Intelligence that he had WMD. The French who had sold him the Nuclear technology in the 80’s said they would never support another invasion of Iraq, even if he did have them. They were already selling him weapons and had made several other business deals for a post sanctions (as well as during sanctions) Iraq. They knew they would be found out if we went in. Oh and by the way, it was Jacques Chirac that had sold Nuclear technology to him the first time.
The Russians and Germans had their own deals in Iraq, also breaking the sanctions. Hence they weren’t thrilled that Bush wanted to go back in, which not only would cost them business but also provide proof that they were breaking the rules. Meanwhile, Saddam continued to kill thousands of his own citizens as well as threaten his neighbors and the US verbally and with actual bullets and missiles. He believed that the current price of American retreat was 18, as demonstrated in Somalia.
OBL and 9/11 finally gave America some resolve and Bush Jr decided it was time to remove the tyrant that continually threatened us, his neighbors and killed his own citizens. Some intelligence, some of which was later disproven demonstrated that Saddam was trying to contact OBL. Later intelligence, proven by Troops on the Ground, demonstrated he had set up two terrorist camps for Al-Qaeda, one in Fallujah and one in Nasiriyah. Everything pointed to Saddam being close to having WMD, if he didn’t already have it. And an AQ armed with WMD would be a bad day in NYC.
Now we have a fledgling democracy to protect long enough to stand on its own feet, while it has neighbors that are scared that democracy may take hold in the Middle East and that they will lose their power over their own tyrannical dictatorships. They continue their policies of keeping Iraq in turmoil to prevent each other from having too much influence as well as to keep the biggest threat to tyranny, democracy from being successful on their own borders.
But as our daily Iraq News demonstrated, the Iraqi people are tired of being the pawns in a chess game between Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah (aka JAM aka Iran, and Syria.) They were ready to help the American and Iraqi militaries protect them from islamists that constantly target average everyday muslims trying to go to mosques, markets, and funerals. They were simply leary of US commitment to stay in Iraq long enough to see democracy bloom.
Current events in Iraq, run centuries deep, with a tangled regional as well as global ties.
It is a tangled web in the Middle East and yes, it is vital to US interests that we get Iraq worked out, that the Iraqi politicians work out their differences and share oil revenues and continue to establish a working stable, democracy that in no way is a puppet of the US government nor from which we steal oil nor of the tyrannical regimes in the area but is an ally against terrorism and tyrants alike.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, US Troops defeated Saddam's Military, the Fedayeen (guerilla remnants), the Mehdi Militia (Iranian supported Shi'a Islamists of Muqtada al-Sadr), Hezbollah (Iranian sponsored spinter of Mehdi Militia), and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQiM, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia), while developing a fledgling democracy, rebuilding decades of ignored infrastructure.
As of 2010, there is still an Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah presence in Iraq and many Iraqis believe PM al-Maliki is a puppet of Iran, evidenced by his alignment with al-Sistani and al-Sadr. Many Iraqis claim that Iranians have been illegally given Iraqi citizenship and government positions as a result.
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