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| Iraq Prime Minister Maliki |
I suppose that if you ever wanted
to see an example of the widely held theory that religion and politics don't
mix, then you probably need look no further than the entire Middle East region,
where both history and current events continue to prove beyond doubt that a
belief in a single, intangible, divine "God" to help regulate
people's lives, or for that matter to run a country, is often a very poor
substitute for a modern, secular and inclusive democratic government.
Of course, most countries in the
world have already realised that running a entire country along purely
religious lines, using holy scriptures that are possibly thousands of years old
and therefore completely unsuitable for the modern age, is an absurdity in itself.
Those few that do, or at least come closest to being a fully fledged religious
state are almost always Islamic, autocratic and some of the least successful
countries when it comes to basic issues like health, education, industry,
international trade and most of the other common measures that are used to
judge a nation's comparative success in the 21st century.
The likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
Kuwait the UAE and other oil rich Arab states appear to have escaped the worst
of the religious upheavals in the Middle East simply because of their oil
wealth and their ability to use those natural riches to both insulate
themselves from and regularly suppress incidents of religious fundamentalism
within their own borders. The fact that the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
Kuwait and the UAE are not modern democracies, but little more than feudal
kingdoms, with a strict adherence to Islamic teachings, has also helped to
ensure their survival, as has their willingness to use their wealth and
influence to ensure that the various religious wars are fought well away from
their own population centres.
Although clearly not an expert on
the intricacies of Islamic history, it seems fairly obvious to me that some
followers of Islam are still fighting wars over religious arguments that first
began hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, much the same as Catholics and
Protestants did in Europe five centuries ago, with the same very bloody, but
rather pointless outcomes. Despite the tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands who died in Europe's religious conflicts over the centuries,
Catholics still hold on to their faith, Protestants to theirs, Jew to theirs,
Muslims to theirs. In other words, not a single death has made one iota of
difference in the overall scheme of things, other than to help create decades,
or centuries of hatred, intolerance and division that no single religion ever
gained one single benefit from.
What is more disturbing about the
current conflicts in the Middle East is the attempt by a relatively small group
of religious fundamentalists to use the underlying and historic religious
tensions, those that exist between Sunni and Shia Muslims, to somehow justify
the wholesale extermination of other minor faith groups in the region. Whether
it's the Yazidi, Christians, Shia's or other non-compliant Sunni Muslims there
can surely be no justification for the genocidal campaign that's currently
being launched against them by the fighters from the Sunni inspired Islamic
Caliphate movement.
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| ISIS Militia |
But of course that pre-supposes
that these religious fighters are what they purport to be, Islamic warriors,
waging some sort of holy war against the unbelievers, as opposed to just being
a band of brigands who loot, rape, murder, torture and ransack, not for any
higher purpose, but purely because they can, the usual forces of law and order
having withdrawn before them. If the definition of a terrorist is simply
someone who terrorises his fellow citizens, putting them in fear of their
lives, then the entire Islamic State movement is little more than an
out-of-control terrorist organisation, or how else would one explain the
purpose of their photographs and videos depicting their victims being
crucified, shot or beheaded? What religious army rapes young girls and women,
robs people of their money or possessions, or tortures their prisoners? It
doesn't sound very spiritual to hack someone's head off in public, especially
when they're bound hand and foot, unable to offer any sort of defence. No, try
as they might to justify their base and brutal actions by draping them in the
flag of the Islamic religion, to even call them animals would be to insult the
lowliest of creatures, the IS fighters are much, much worse than that.
Our leaders in the West though
must take their fair share of responsibility for the rise of the IS plague, as
it was their thoughtlessness and conceit that inadvertently led to its
creation, following the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, ostensibly to destroy
Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMD's, which didn't actually
exist. By removing Saddam from power, along with his army and intelligence
services, the allied forces essentially removed any effective counterweight to
those religious fundamentalists who would have previously been suppressed by
Saddam Hussein's administration. Even though he was a dictator of the worst
kind, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in his own country,
Saddam was said to have operated a generally secular government, in recognition
of the fact that inter-faith rivalries did indeed exist and could therefore
pose a significant threat to his continued rule.
By defeating and then disbanding
the standing Iraqi army after the 2003 invasion, western forces helped to
create a situation where extremist groups were able to thrive, so much so that
allied troops were reported to have incurred losses as the result of militant
actions, which might not have been the case had the regular Iraqi army units
been kept in place. In fact, it has even been suggested that numbers of these
same former well trained Iraqi soldiers went on to form a core of the various
religious militias that regularly attacked coalition forces in Iraq, causing
additional human losses that otherwise could and should have been avoided.
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| Tony Blair |
No doubt hoping that a completely
reformed Iraqi national army with very little experience and a new civilian
government would help resolve such issues after western forces had withdrawn
from the country, almost inevitably the problem has got worse rather than
improving. Iraq has not only found itself saddled with a national army that is
incapable of confronting the IS militia, but one that finds it easier to run
away without even firing a shot at the religious insurgents. With an officer
corps lacking both quality and experience, who are generally reported to be the
first ones to flee the scene of an impending battle with IS, it is perhaps
little wonder that the regular troops are inclined to follow their officer's
lead and abandon their uniforms and weapons, rather than confront the heavily
armed and mobile enemy which is approaching them.
Added to this is the national
government of Prime Minister Maliki, who has thus far failed to bring the
country together under his leadership, preferring instead to exacerbate the
tribal and religious differences that even Saddam Hussein would regard as a
disastrous approach. Having ignored and isolated both the Kurds and the
mainstream Sunni Muslims within the country. Prime Minister Maliki is only now,
albeit late in the day, coming to realise that an inclusive military and
political approach must be employed if he is to rescue Iraq from the real
threat posed by the Islamic terrorist groups that now hold power in huge
swathes of the country. Even though many thousands of Iraqis have died thus far,
as a result of the IS invasion of the country, in the event that the Kurdish
peshmerga forces were to fail through no fault of their own, or the remaining
Iraqi military forces were to refuse to stand their ground, it is almost
certain that a humanitarian disaster will eventually occur, of the sort
previously witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and in Cambodia; even
though the international community has since dedicated itself to preventing
such events from happening, yet again!
The point being of course, why
has it taken this long for the international community to finally wake up to
the looming disaster that is taking place in Iraq, bearing in mind that it was
this same international community and principally the United States and the
United Kingdom who were the chief architects of the disaster, in the shape of
President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Although no-one could
doubt that Prime Minister Maliki has been instrumental in creating the basic
conditions for the worsening ethnic and religious divides in Iraq that has
added to the situation, ultimately it was the Americans and the British
administrations that chose the framework for a post Saddam Iraq, with no
effective army, no effective intelligence services, no inclusive government and
who between them allowed the Kurdish peshmerga forces to be marginalised and
under resourced in terms of military arms and equipment, with which they could
help protect the wider country. It is utter madness that the most effective
fighting units in Iraq at present were and continue to be denied the sort of
logistical support that the overrated and totally outclassed Iraqi national
army were more than happy to abandon; that subsequently fell into the hands of
the IS militias and is now being used to attack what is left of Iraq.
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| Peshmerga Fighters |
For their part at least the
United States is trying to offer some sort of military support to the Iraqi
government, if only by attacking the IS militias from the air and by targeting
equipment that has fallen into the hands of the Islamic terrorists. It is
astonishing though that for its part the UK administration of David Cameron
doesn't seem to accept that our country has at least a moral responsibility to
try and rectify a situation that a previous British Prime Minister helped to
create. Food parcels, water, tents and groundsheets for Iraqi refugees are all
very well, but ultimately they provide little or no protection from the bombs
and the bullets that the Islamic militias have at their disposal and that they
will almost inevitably use against the refugees at the earliest opportunity. We
helped to create the problem of ISIS and it is only right and proper that we
should use our armed forces and our logistical muscle to help in resolving the
problem, ideally by using strike aircraft to both undermine and degrade the IS
military forces.
Although no-one is suggesting
that the UK should put men on the ground in Iraq, there can be no good reason
why Britain cannot arm and re-supply the Kurdish peshmerga forces who are more
than capable of taking on and defeating the Islamic militias provided that
they're are given adequate military materials to do the job. I find it truly
astonishing that Mr Cameron was more than happy to involve our country's armed
forces in Syria, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with us. He was
more than happy to involve our armed forces in Libya, even though it had
nothing to do with us. Yet when it comes to Iraq, where we do bear some degree
of responsibility for the current situation, he refuses to take any sort of
meaningful action! Regardless of the fact that both Iraq and Afghanistan have
turned out to be the most wasteful sort of adventurism for our country; and
especially for members of our Armed Forces, if we ever hope to regain our reputation
for being a guardian of international law and protecting the weak from the
powerful, then surely we must be prepared to clean up the mess that we have
helped to create, beginning with Iraq?
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