We are So F***ED: The True Significance of Iraq and George W. Bush

I’m trying to wrap my mind around something that, frankly, seems impossible. It started with some revelations (to me!) about Iraq’s history written by none other than Scott Ritter – the UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998. It’s turned what I thought I knew about Iraq and that country’s relationship with Islam – and us and George W. Bush – on its head and not for the better.

If I may provide you with some examples of what I learned, please repel over the crevasse with me…

I must admit I’m another dumb-ass American who doesn’t know jack about Islam. Of course I know a little about Shi’ites and Sunnis and their schism over the legitimacy of the successors of Muhammed.

I even knew a little about Wahhabism and the desire of some Muslims – including the Taliban – to return to a the very strict teachings of one Muhammed al-Wahhab who lived in the 18th century. Seems pretty simple, right?

Well of course it’s not. And there were some HUGE chunks of “the bigger” picture I’d somehow missed.

Wahhab was a Sunni Muslim born in what is now Saudi Arabia – but he didn’t exactly fit in, at least early on. The term “Jihad” originally meant an inner struggle but Mr. al-Wahhab saw things differently; he saw “Jihad” as an external and eternal struggle between Muslims and infidels – or non-believers in the Prophet Muhammed. Apparently he was such a “rabble-rouser” that the Sunni scholars of the day pretty much ran him out of town on a rail and Mr. al-Wahhab ended up in a small village called Dariya. And this is where I became a wee bit more  “enlightened” as it were about just what we’re up against over there – and I’m NOT talking about extremism; I’m referring to the complexity of the situation.

Because in that tiny village he met and befriended the governor – a man named Muhammed Ibn Saud. You might recognize that last name. A partnership followed, one that had two components where Saud took on the role of emir or political leader and Wahhab took on the role of imam or spiritual leader. Thus began what became known as The Wahhabi Conquest, the repercussions of which are still felt today because it is responsible today for the very strict religious rule in what is present-day Saudi-Arabia.

But wait! There’s more! In fact, to say “chaos ensued” is somewhat of an understatement.

For example, I had no idea that In 1802 a Wahhabi army attacked Karbala (in Iraq) and sacked the sacred Shiite shrine to Hussein. But THEN they did something that really blew my mind and I was utterly unaware of: In 1803 the Wahhabis sacked Mecca, laying waste to the most holy sites in the Islamic world, including the Great Mosque!

These dudes were serious. Can you imagine anyone doing that today – let alone a Muslim?

But even that wasn’t enough: In 1804 the Wahhabis captured Medina, looted the tomb of the prophet Muhammad and shut off the hajj, or pilgrimage, to all non-Wahhabis. And as Bugs Bunny used to say “Of course you know… This means war.”

The long standing Caliphate in Egypt wasn’t going to take this shit lying down and they launched a massive counter-attack and by 1818 the Wahhabi rebellion was rather brutally crushed. The leader of the Saud tribe was captured and beheaded and everyone thought that was that.

They thought wrong. A handful of Saudi tribesman survived and hid in the Arabian deserts and they remained strict Wahhabis. It took over a century for them to do it, but by golly they did and by 1924 the Wahhabis once again controlled Mecca and Medina and in 1932 the new nation of Saudi Arabia was born and just like a century before, all of the religious aspects of the new society were controlled by Wahhabis. And if you were a Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia there were two kinds of heretics that you really wanted to get rid of: The Shiites – who rule(d) Iran and a few other Arab nations and Sunni Arabs who rejected Wahhabism.

Enter oil. Man, those Saudis proved the old real estate maxim of “location, location, location” because they were sitting on an ocean of the stuff and the internal combustion engine had become “The Great God, Motor” and hard cash started flowing in. This allowed them for the first time to sort of “commercialize” Wahhabism – well, actually it was the oil crisis of 1973 that really turned on the spigots of cash.

Enter one Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, who was a member of the Ba’ath political party in Iraq – a country that was “born” the same year I was: 1958. Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the Ba’ath party to power. Saddam did NOT like Wahhabis because they were obviously a threat. (Is this coming together a bit more now as to why Saudi Arabia allowed us to put military bases in its country to fight Saddam in Gulf War I?) Nope. Iraq, under Saddam, was no friend of the Wahhabis.

So… stepping back a second we have an Islamic “sect”, if you will, that counts as its devotees the Saudis and the Taliban, among others. As I’m sure you know by now the majority of the 9/11 hijakers who flew planes into the World Trade Center were Saudis. The Saudi Royal Family is a close, warm, personal friend of George W. Bush. The Saudi Royal Family HATED Saddam Hussein. OK… a little more…

I’m going to quote some of Scott Ritter’s excellent essay entitled, appropriately Calling Out Idiot America at Truthdig:

Wahhabi concerns over the weakening of the Muslim world by those who practiced anything other than pure Islam were certified in the minds of the faithful when, in April 2003, American soldiers captured Baghdad in what many Wahhabis viewed as a repeat of the sack of the city at the hands of the Mongols in 1258. Adding insult to injury, the role of Iraq’s Shiites in aiding and abetting the American conquest was seen as proof positive that the only salvation for the faithful could come at the hands of a pure form of the Islamic faith, that of Wahhabism. As the American liberation dragged on into the American occupation, and the level of violence between the Shiites and Sunnis grew, the call of jihad as promulgated by the Wahhabis gained increasing credence among the tribes of western Iraq.

Wonderful news, eh? Hang to the riggins, matey! (I’m stuck in “Talk Like a Pirate Day”!)

The longer the Americans remain in Iraq, the more violence the Americans bring down on Iraq, and the more the Americans are seen as facilitating the persecution of the Sunnis by the Shiites, the more legitimate the call of the Wahhabi fanatics become. While American strategists may speak of the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq, this is misrecognition of what is really happening. Rather than foreigners arriving and spreading Wahhabism in Iraq, the virulent sect of Islamic fundamentalism is spreading on its own volition, assisted by the incompetence and brutality of an American occupation completely ignorant of the reality of the land and people it occupies. This is the true significance of Baghdad.

I have one last quote from Mr. Ritter and for me, this is the money quote:

It is sadly misguided to believe that surging an additional 20,000 U.S. troops into Baghdad and western Iraq will even come close to redressing the issues raised in this article. And if you concur that the reality of Iraq is far too complicated to be understood by the average American, let alone cured by the dispatch of additional troops, then we have a collective responsibility to ask what the hell we are doing in that country to begin with. If this doesn’t represent a clarion call for bringing our men and women home, nothing does.

My final thoughts in this essay: In the above paragraph Mr. Ritter refers to this situation being far too complex to be understood by the “average American” – and he’s absolutely right when most of us don’t give enough of a shit to even vote – let alone understand who or what the hell it is we’re voting for. What troubles me though isn’t so much that “Joe Sixpack” can’t get his mind around it; I’d expect that.

No, what troubles me is that you KNOW that there’s no fucking way on God’s Green Earth that the current, pipsqueak occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has the FAINTEST FUCKING CLUE what’s going on over there – and Mr. Pretzel-Choker’s the guy calling the shots in the middle of a country that has a war-torn history dating back centuries, that’s sandwiched between rival, warring groups of Muslim countries, that’s home to several of the holiest cities in Islam… This alcoholic, coke-monkey simpleton is running the show!!

Not only do I call the man’s intellectual abilities into question but his alliances and allegiances with the other key players in this sad chess game, one of which is his close, warm, personal relationship with The (current) House of Saud – a brutal, dictatorial regime that has probably committed every crime Saddam Hussein ever thought about and then some. But that’s OK with Georgie ’cause they like Daddy and sell us oil. Then you’ve got The Decider Guy’s right-hand man, “The Dick” Cheney – former president of Halliburton – and we all know how impartial both these clowns can be about all of this stuff.

It’s a “Perfect Storm” of morons.

So, we can surge, splurge, and urge. We can talk tough and huff and puff and blow their houses down… but if anyone thinks that’s gonna make a difference in stopping the inevitable, looming chaos that is Iraq, well they are just delusional and I’ll jump back to my initial title of this essay: We are so fucked.