US should leave Iraq before it blows up again
Jason Ditz, Summit Daily News, Nov 22 2010
After eight months under an interim caretaker, the longest period between election and formation for any parliamentary government in history, a recent deal finalized the next Iraqi government. The delay, and the convoluted deal that finally broke the stalemate, reflect the reality of Iraq’s political landscape: divided as ever more than seven years after the US invasion. The government is far from ideal from the US perspective. Its power block is extremely close to Iran and even Obama’s unseemly attempts to dictate terms related to who should be included in the government and in what capacity were largely ignored. Still, the government is what it is, and it is time for the Obama administration to finally fulfill its campaign promise (albeit belatedly) and use this relative stability to get out of Iraq while the getting is good. Efforts to secure a more US-friendly government in Iraq have roundly failed. The pro-US Iraqiya bloc, despite winning the largest plurality in the election, wound up only a minor player while long-standing US critic Moqtada al-Sadr’s faction wound up with enormous political clout. Ayad Allawi will not, despite Obama’s last minute phone calls, be President of Iraq. The Mar 7 election may have been a big victory for secularists in Iraqiya, but the behind-the-scenes brokering has put Iraq squarely on the course toward becoming an Iranian-style Islamic Republic, complete with pledges from the State of Law and Iraqi National Alliance factions to give the nation’s Shi’ite clergy the power to issue binding edicts.
Many USAians will be rightly confused to learn that the Iraq War is still going on after the administration made such efforts in August to sell the idea that the war was over. They will likewise be galled to learn that the war’s great accomplishment was to oust the secularist tyranny of Saddam Hussein and replace it with a religious tyranny squarely in Iran’s back pocket. Yet this is the reality in Iraq, and the best US efforts to the contrary have been unable to prevent what was an inevitability when troops first started marching toward Baghdad. The Shi’ites, downtrodden under Saddam, now wield the power of the state in Iraq, and the inevitable backlash for their own unwise policies will be theirs to deal with. And this too is clearly coming, members of the Sunni Awakening Councils, once funded by the US government to fight against the more extremist factions, are now finding themselves gearing up for a battle with the Shi’ite government. If US troops remain it will only be a matter of time before they are faced with direct clashes against the Awakening Council militias that they armed and trained. This is why the US must get out of Iraq, and soon. The political settlement reached is unlikely to satisfy many, and may not last at any rate. The battle lines are slowly but surely being drawn for another Iraqi Civil War, and USAia cannot afford to find itself in the middle of it. The current situation is unstable at best, but it is also as stable as Iraq is liable to get going forward. US troops are not in the position to solve what is basically a political problem, leaving them there will only get them swept up in the mess to come. Instead of keeping the troops in place through the end of 2011 (and the inevitable calls to stay past this date) the troops should leave now: It only gets worse from here.
RE: “allow saudi-backed guerrilllas to smash the iraqi state” – niqnaq
MY COMMENT: Perhaps “Pricky Dick” Cheney and his not too useful idiot George W. Bush promised the the Saudis “sloppy seconds”. Anyway, Israel and the neocons are going to insist that someone (other than Iran) “finish the job” so that Iraq is broken up into at least three parts.
SEE: “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” ~ By Oded Yinon, 1982
The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.
ENTIRE DOCUMENT – http://radioislam.org/islam/english/toread/kivunim.htm
Yep, that sounds about right. But not quite; Israel would prefer that the statelets be irreconcilably fragmented, which is best achieved by ethnicity. The Sunni guerrillas represent salafi (or ‘wahhabi’) Islam, which is universalistic in its aspirations, and hence not at all a suitable tool for long-term fragmentation. Shi’ites, being when all is said and done only a minority of world Muslims, something like 15%, are in this sense more suitable as a fragmentation agent, since at least they can never unify on a pan-Islamic scale. Shi’ism has another advantage from a fragmentation point of view: besides being a minority within the world of Islam when taken as a whole, it is itself subject to internal fragmentation, since it is within Shi’ism that you find the multitude of schismatic ghulat sects, which are essentially mini ethnicities, with hereditary rulers. It is also a remarkable historical fact that these sects are very amenable to being adopted by western Freemasons and occultists, all of whom delight in hybrid, syncretic, or ‘universal religion’ type theological fantasies. If you have a few minutes, you might be surprised to discover how widespread these are, the three below being from just one region, and you will appreciate that people who accuse ‘wahhabis’ of oppressive and persecutory behaviour towards other types of Muslim may have bizarre axes to grind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alevi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bektashi
The US has been wrestling with these conundrums of divide and rule in the Muslim world for fifty years, the Jews (as western-backed imperialists) for about a hundred years, and Britain and France for two or three hundred years; things never quite work out the way any of them intend. If Tom is still reading us, it would be interesting to hear his comments on this.
I agree with your analysis. I actually have a pseudo-Bektashi friend, I can ask him how he feels about all of this. Most of these sects are fundementally innocuous and not deserving of any chastisement or persecution in themselves, as they are simply sufi tariqas of a particular stripe, and I feel that we should cherish these things. I’d be quite surprised to see an Alevi sectarian uprising for example. The Kurds and Houthis and their conflict with surrounding Muslim governments are not religious or even demarcated by religion. The religious sectarian overcoding is rather superficial and seems to primarily work to “explain” the conflicts to colonial-minded westerners (that Arabs and Muslims, lacking the civility of modern enlightenment, fight amongst themselves for theological reasons).
The Alevis maybe. They and the Bektashis, who are derived from them, have every reason to cling to the kemalist system. But the Alawis not only hold political power in Syria; they have actually used Alawi sectarianism as a political weapon against Sunni political ‘Islamism’.
I find the idea that ‘Allah, Muhammad, and Ali’ constitute a ‘Holy Trinity’ of deities absolutely grotesque. A surprising number of these sects, both east and west, managed at some point to add the Blessed Virgin Mary to the ‘Trinity’, making it a quaternity. In 1950, the Roman Catholic church did something similar, to the great delight of the depth psychologist C G Jung:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munificentissimus_Deus
I added another clause to the comment, about how and why western Freemasons and occultists love these sects. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, claimed to be a ‘Nusairi’. This was in the days when the only thing westerners thought they knew about the Nusairis (Alawis) was that they blew out the candles at the end of their religious gatherings and held sex orgies in the dark.
Confusingly, the supposedly ‘Sufi’ cult of Frithjof Schuon was originally called the “Alawiyya,” for some completely different reason, but became so devoted to the Blessed Virgin that it changed its name to the “Maryamiyya.” This cult also came unstuck amid embarrassing revelations of sex orgies. Seyyed Hossein Nasr was a member of this cult.
Isn’t Wahhabism itself one of these sects? I’ve heard that the House of Saud has Masonic connections, perhaps you could enlighten me as to the details on that or debunk it.
I am convinced that the Saudi royals, like ‘royals’ everywhere, are Masons. As I noted on a previous occasion, there is a video clip of old King Faisal, I suspect it is, in a Masonic procession, wearing a huge Masonic cross on his chest. I don’t know where to find this clip now, so it may not have been Faisal but another king.
Freemasonry in the Muslim world as in the west serves several apparently conflicting socio-political functions. In the higher social strata, it serves as a useful adjunct to traditional chivalry (via its supposed relationship to the crusader orders); in the lower social strata, it pretends to stand for religious universalism and friendship between open-minded members of otherwise hostile faiths.
I should add that in the nineteenth century, French Freemasonry was extremely hostile to the Catholic missionary movement in the near East, and was also extremely hostile to British imperialism. It was French, not English, Freemasonry that such people as ‘Afghani and ‘Abduh were attracted to join. This is often obscured by English Masonic historians, who enjoy confusing people about it.
But ‘Wahhabism’ or salafism is not a sect in the proper sense of the word. Superficially some might call it that simply because it seems to be one ‘extreme’ tendency among many others. But it claims quite logically and accurately to be nothing more or less than an attempt to recover the original Islam of the Prophet and his companions. This is therefore the opposite of ‘sectarianism’, which derives from theological divergence and innovation.
Sectarianism is not determined by deviation, but by divisiveness. The Prophet spoke of disagreement amongst the ummah as a mercy. I see no harm in permitting the proliferation of various sects and tangential belief systems within Islam so long as they can peacefully co-exist and abide by certain fundamental principles of praxis (zakaat, jihad, et c.).
Well, actually, the ghulat sects don’t pay zakat, as you will see from the wikipedia pages. It is worth noting that the twelver Shi’ite hierarchy in Khomeinist Iran, for purely political reasons, has declared several of these sects to be Shi’ites in good standing, whereas theologically speaking they are no such thing. But I will not get into the semantics of the word ‘sectarianism’.
(Sorry, double posting)
Freemasonry has always seemed to me to be a alternative and rival to the Catholic power structure, hence their obsession with secularism in the government (to break up the relationship between the Church and European government). Of course nowadays the distinction between the Church hierarchy and the Masonic hierarchy is not really arranged this way. The Masons / secularists have won and the Church is at their behest (the end of the prohibition of usury is probably the most significant marker of this).
English Freemasonry is pro-royalist and pro-Anglican. You must remember that the Anglican church, to a greater extent than any other protestant church I can think of, is a political construction designed specifically to serve the monarchical English state. It is fascinating to observe how English Freemasonry, from its very inception, set about obscuring its own artificial, court origins, and pretended to pre-date the Catholic Freemasonry of the Scots (usually referred to as ‘jacobite’ or ‘ecossais’ Fremasonry) which was actually older. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century French Freemasonry changed, probably under Jewish influence, from this rather romantic and mystical pro-Stuart and pro-Catholic position to a revolutionary republican anti-religious style, without ceasing to be anti-English.
Which sects don’t pay zakaat? Was this in effect during the Ottoman period, and if so was there some alternate arrangement? Many of the people in Eastern Turkey lived in pseudo-feudal arrangements (this is the material basis for Kurdish separatism, by the way), and so I can imagine that perhaps they did not pay zakaat personally to the Caliphate but to their lord, and perhaps he had some arrangement with the Caliphate.
Well, I saw this remarked on in one of those three wikipedia pages, I think it was the Alevis. But given the system of millets, i.e. autonomous religious communities, which already existed in the Otttoman world, and the well-known impossibility of actually conquering the sects militarily (since they generally live in quite inaccessible mountain regions), a compromise would develop whereby they managed their own mini-economies and their rulers paid a lump sum tax, i.e. a form of jizya. You can see how all this would be ideal for the western (and Jewish) ‘fragmentation’ strategy, and how easily these sectarians can be persuaded to support ‘secular’ regimes, which will be ‘liberal’ and ‘tolerant’ to them, thus conforming to Masonic ideals in the newer sense, while still possessing the ‘mystical secrets’ so beloved of Masons in the older sense. This is really one of my favourite subjects, because it shows how the activities of the modern, functional secret services dovetail with the activities of the older, occult secret societies.
Ha, as I suspected
Alevi architecture is quite beautiful, I’d like to return to Turkey and travel around that area a bit.
Responding to your amendments: the solution then is not to take then as enemies but to provide, through Islam, something preferable to the secular offer.
If salafism was not so compromised by the alliance of the saudi rulers with western (and zionist) imperialist forces, then salafism would present itself as an anti-imperialist religious and political freedom movement, based solely on the purest and most fundamental Islamic teaching, and it might be able to muster the moral force to really argue that the sects are polytheistic and corrupt. This, I imagine, is how the MB would actually like to pursue it. Sayyid Qutb said many times that to obey a king, rather than to obey Allah alone, is already polytheism.
There are a whole series of fascinating parallels here to western religious reform movements. The most radical reformation churches of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries c.e. were opposed to all royal rule, proclaiming that they wanted no ruler but God. Many of these movements, which were strongest in south-eastern Europe, may have been influenced by Islam.
Yes, I agree. But one shouldn’t argue from a theological basis but from the example one sets in the real world. I’d be happy to count myself as salafi if the Ikhwan or whoever else adopted this tendency and was truly making the moves to establish an Islamic socioeconomic world and base. Not to detract from or criticize the existing movements out there or anything, but I just don’t know that any one movement has established itself as the Islamic vanguard, so to speak.
Indeed, none of them have. The usually unacknowledged division between ‘salafi’ forces that tacitly serve western goals, and ones that are genuinely anti-imperialist, has prevented it. It remains too easy for the official ‘salafi’ establishment to dismiss the MB, the Hezb ut-Tahrir, and so on, as ‘modernist’ and ‘innovating,’ or even, if they put forward reformist economic theories, no matter how soundly based in the Sunna, as ‘crypto-marxist’. And the ‘Islamist’ movements themselves are very reluctant to endanger their traditional support base, which lies among small landowners and business owners.
I think this problem is symptomatic of a lack of (Qutb-style) Islamic consciousness in the beleaguered parts of the ummah. They need to go beyond superficial Islamist overcoding and reactionary traditionalism and organize behind an Islamic political program.
I have come to the conclusion that at least theoretically, HuT is probably the best thing out there. I don’t feel sufficiently energetic to join anything, but if I did, I suppose it would have to be them. But I imagine that its leadership is absolutely riddled with sleeper agents, from practically everywhere on the planet.
I don’t really see the point in me joining any particular group. I do dawah as much as I can and inshallah I will be able to translate my (academic) career into something beneficial to the ummah.
There’s a very enjoyable short fantasy novel by G K Chesterton called “The Man Who Was Thursday” about a secret society dedicated to global revolution in which it turns out that every single member of the central committee except the president (and founder) is a police spy. He is the ‘Thursday” of the title, and at the end he bounces off laughing like a gigantic human balloon and vanishes over the horizon…
You may wonder whether I have any evidence for this claim, which I made in my 9:31 a.m. comment:
It’s very hard to find information on this, but it appears that in 1780 a certain Moses Dobrushka, nephew of Jacob Frank, the Sabbatian pseudo-messiah, gained control of a Rosicrucian order called the Asiatic Brethren and/or Fratres Lucis, which had a considerable effect on European Freemasonry. It seems to have taught ‘oriental sex magic.’ Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Dobru%C5%A1ka
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Dobruschka-Schonfeld_Family
http://www.bavarian-illuminati.info/?p=303
Nesta Webster says (Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, pp. 167 – 170):
Gershom Scholem wrote a biography of this man Dobrushka (who in his last persona, as ‘Lucius Junius Frey,’ is involved in the French Revolution and is described as a ‘banker’), but as tends to happen in these cases, it is quite unobtainable.
It is possible, with some difficulty, to trace this movement right through to today’s Crowleyite OTO. This site belongs to the Gnostic bishop Allen Greenfield, an ex OTO luminary:
http://www.mindspring.com/~hellfire/bishop/trad.htm
From the YIVO site: “Western Jewish philanthropists, including Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) and Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831–1896), also helped fill the leadership gap by fostering emigration and resettlement schemes, with Palestine and Argentina as well as North America featured as projected sites for Jewish colonization” They knew exactly what they were doing and what they wanted to do. This site is gonna come in handy. THX
Monday I spoke with a man on the subway because I noticed he was reading N. Webster’s SSSM – and now you mention it! Spooky
And this: “As early as the 1880s, America began exporting culture back to Eastern Europe. The use of Yiddish speeches and press to spread the socialist message among the “masses,” and high-profile strike campaigns that focused on economic grievances—tactics pioneered in the immigrant socialist circles of New York and London—were afterward imitated by Jewish radicals in the Pale of Settlement. Proletarian protest songs written in New York by immigrant poet David Edelstadt (1866–1892) quickly became familiar “here in Russia,” wrote Avrom Reyzen, another socialist Yiddish poet (1876–1953): “[Edelstadt] is spoken of with reverence . . . and workers sing his songs with tears in their eyes.” – This supports L. Fry’s “Waters Flowing Eastward” I don’t believe for a minute Jacob Schiff cared for the peasants (jewish or not) of Russia, but bring down the Romanovs, that could command his attention. The Romanovs represented tradition not based in money.
If I come across any other tid bits I’ll keep’em to myself.
Don’t forget you can download Nesta here:
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/Webster_Secret_Societies.pdf
I think if we really want to get into the 1920s style of things, then in future whenever anyone calls us ‘anti-Semitic,’ we must look them straight in the eye and say in tones of the deepest contempt, “I’m not ‘anti-Semitic,’ I’m ‘Jew-wise.’”
By the way, and this should particularly interest you, Helvena, despite what we have said above about the actual origin of the seventeenth-century Masonic Rosicrucians in kabbalistic, Catholic, Scottish Freemasonry, and how it pre-dates the Anglican/English variety, there is a tendency among US Protestant conspirologists, and a few English ones too, to turn history upside-down and pretend that the Rosicrucian lodges were an attempt by Jesuits to infitrate Freemasonry, which on this hypothesis would otherwise have been anti-Catholic all along. Guenon comments on this in his “Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion”:
I should say that, given the actual fact that these ‘Rosicrucian’ orders came under increasingly Jewish control, anyone who accuses them of having come under Jesuit control is serving a Jewish agenda of misdirection and mystification. I am usually reluctant to accuse anyone of sowing deliberate ‘blinds’, but I think this is an instance.
I do find it interesting but frankly I can’t keep it all straight. These groups seems to morph so often and in such contrary directions that it’s just a house of mirrors for me. I must follow my beloved Pound’s advice and “keep it concrete”. However, I trust you to sort it out.
We don’t want to go back to the 1920′s because…that didn’t work (devil winking face)
I know what you mean
For comments on Jacob Katz’s Jews and Freemasonry in Europe, see here et seq.