Sword of division is poised over Iraq

[bemildred]

BAGHDAD — Less than a year and a half after the last U.S. troops left, Iraq's political leaders are openly debating the prospect of two dangerous paths for their country: de facto division or civil war. Perhaps both.

Tension between the Shiite majority, now in control of the levers of power, and the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein, has been building for months. But politicians on all sides agree that the country has entered a perilous new phase, highlighted in late April by an attack on a Sunni protest camp by security forces that killed at least 45 people.

As word of the shootings spread, fighting erupted around the country, leaving more than 200 people dead. Overall, the United Nations said, more than 700 people were killed in Iraq in April, the highest monthly toll in five years.

Polarized political leaders openly discuss the threat of more bloodshed and the gradual breakup of the country, either through an informal declaration of an independent Sunni Arab region, modeled on the Kurds' region in northern Iraq, or outright war.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iraq-divided-20130511,0,7429689.story

[The Magistrate]

1. That Would Be, Sir, Pretty Much Revision To The Natural State

Ever since the India Office with Ms. Bell cobbled it together, it has been a sort of Middle E Yugoslavia....

[bemildred]

2. And that is pretty much what I expect, Sir.

I must say I feel privileged to watch this debacle, makes it worthwhile to stay alive, see how it comes out.

[The Magistrate]

4. Morbid Curiousity, Sir, Is About All That Gets Me Out Of Bed In The Mornings....

Has been for a long time; it is distinctly under-rated as motive and state of mind.

[bemildred]

5. Any reason is a good one at our age, Sir.

And what can they threaten you with, really? Not much.

[The Magistrate]

6. True, My Friend

"Death --- it's like sleep, only better!"

[bemildred]

7. An addenda for the curious:

The Woman Who Made Iraq

Gertrude Bell scaled the Alps, mapped Arabia, and midwifed the modern Middle East.

On the cover of this book is an arresting photograph taken in front of the Sphinx in March 1921, on the last day of the Cairo conference on the Middle East. It shows Gertrude Bell astride a camel, flanked by Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence. She wears a look of some assurance and satisfaction, perhaps because—apart from having spent far more time on camelback than either man—she has just assisted at the birth of a new country, which is to be called Iraq.

The picture is especially apt because Bell spent a good part of her life sandwiched between Churchill and Lawrence. If Churchill had not committed the Allies to the hideous expedition to Gallipoli, she would probably have married a young man—imperishably named Dick Doughty-Wylie—who lost his life on that arid and thorny peninsula. And if the Turks had not triumphed at Gallipoli, the British would not have had to resort to raising an Arab revolt against them and staffing it with idealistic Arabists of uncertain temperament. Finally, if Churchill as a postwar colonial secretary had not been forced to make economies and to find Arab leaders to whom Britain could surrender responsibility, there would have been no Iraq.

As Georgina Howell puts it in this excitingly informative book, those idealistic Arabists of Britain’s hastily formed “Arab Bureau” were objectively committed to living a lie. They knew that the promises given to the Arab tribes—self-determination at war’s end if you join us against the Turks—were made in order to be broken. The dishonesty was famously too much for Lawrence, who became morose and inward and changed his name to Shaw. But it was not too much for Gertrude Bell, who was determined that some part of the promise be kept, and who helped change Mesopotamia’s name to Iraq.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/the-woman-who-made-iraq/305893/

[msongs]

3. well at least they have islam to comfort them :-) nt