Read Online Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer - Free Book Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Political Science, Modern, middle east, Terrorism, World, Islamic Studies, 21st Century, Middle Eastern
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feature in the self-deceiving discourse of the neo-cons. The country’s 23 million people were indeed among the best-educated inthe Arab world—oil wealth had enabled the ruling Ba’ath Party to build a welfare state that made good education and decent health care available free to its citizens, and even accorded women equal footing in the law and the workplace—but Iraqis were far from a unified people. Twenty percent of them were not even Arabs: the Kurds of the north spoke a different language entirely and nurtured a desire for independence that made them see Americans as potential allies. Much trickier was the fact that about 20 percent of the population were Sunni Arabs, while an absolute majority, 60 percent, were Shia Muslims. Yet the Sunni Arab minority ran everything and had done so for hundreds of years.
Saddam Hussein was a Sunni (though not a particularly devout one for most of his life), and so had been every other governor, king and president since the Ottoman Empire took the territory from Persia in 1533. The great majority of the Arabic-speaking population remained Shia, but Sunnis so dominated the public sphere in Iraq under Turkish and British rule and in the forty-five years of independence before the American invasion that many Sunnis did not even realize they were a minority in Iraq. (Statistics on the sectarian loyalties of the population were not publicly available under Saddam’s rule, for obvious reasons.) So the first thing the U.S. occupation administration would face once it controlled the country was the bitter resistance of the Sunnis whose centuries-long rule it had overthrown, and the relentless drive of the Shiamajority to exploit the opportunity created by the invasion to install a new Shia political supremacy in the country. “Democracy,” in the American sense of the word, was not a high priority for either side.
Iraq was actually far better terrain for bin Laden’s strategy than Afghanistan, which was an extremely poor, non-Arab country on the far periphery of the Middle East. Iraq, by contrast, was mostly Arab in population, a major oil exporter, and located in the heart of the Arab world. The head of al Qaeda just hadn’t been in a position earlier to trick the United States into invading Iraq or some other major country in the Arab heartland, so he had made do with what was available. He must have been astounded at his luck when President Bush declared his intention to take down Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden was not able to influence events in Iraq in any way, but that was not necessary. The highly decentralized “franchise” model he had created in al Qaeda guaranteed that men with the right beliefs, skills and goals would appear in Iraq to exploit the immense opportunity that an American invasion would create. And at this point, bin Laden essentially faded back into an advisory and symbolic role, although he lived on in hiding, far from the action, for another eight years.
The invasion of Iraq by 148,000 American and 45,000 British troops (accompanied by 2,000 Australians and a few Poles) began on March 19, 2003. The conquest of Iraq was just as easy as the American planners expected it tobe. By the time a flight-suited President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations (with a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” prominently displayed in the background for the television cameras), only 138 American soldiers had been killed. The “kill-ratio,” as is often the case when one side tries to fight without air cover, had been around a hundred-to-one in favour of the U.S. Army. American military planners were assuming that they would be able to draw down the occupation force in Iraq to only thirty thousand soldiers by the end of the year—but there had been a striking lack of Iraqis throwing flowers.
CHAPTER 4
JIHAD: THE IRAQI PHASE, 2003–2006
T he invasion of Iraq in 2003 came at a time when the Islamist
Saddam Hussein was a Sunni (though not a particularly devout one for most of his life), and so had been every other governor, king and president since the Ottoman Empire took the territory from Persia in 1533. The great majority of the Arabic-speaking population remained Shia, but Sunnis so dominated the public sphere in Iraq under Turkish and British rule and in the forty-five years of independence before the American invasion that many Sunnis did not even realize they were a minority in Iraq. (Statistics on the sectarian loyalties of the population were not publicly available under Saddam’s rule, for obvious reasons.) So the first thing the U.S. occupation administration would face once it controlled the country was the bitter resistance of the Sunnis whose centuries-long rule it had overthrown, and the relentless drive of the Shiamajority to exploit the opportunity created by the invasion to install a new Shia political supremacy in the country. “Democracy,” in the American sense of the word, was not a high priority for either side.
Iraq was actually far better terrain for bin Laden’s strategy than Afghanistan, which was an extremely poor, non-Arab country on the far periphery of the Middle East. Iraq, by contrast, was mostly Arab in population, a major oil exporter, and located in the heart of the Arab world. The head of al Qaeda just hadn’t been in a position earlier to trick the United States into invading Iraq or some other major country in the Arab heartland, so he had made do with what was available. He must have been astounded at his luck when President Bush declared his intention to take down Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden was not able to influence events in Iraq in any way, but that was not necessary. The highly decentralized “franchise” model he had created in al Qaeda guaranteed that men with the right beliefs, skills and goals would appear in Iraq to exploit the immense opportunity that an American invasion would create. And at this point, bin Laden essentially faded back into an advisory and symbolic role, although he lived on in hiding, far from the action, for another eight years.
The invasion of Iraq by 148,000 American and 45,000 British troops (accompanied by 2,000 Australians and a few Poles) began on March 19, 2003. The conquest of Iraq was just as easy as the American planners expected it tobe. By the time a flight-suited President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations (with a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” prominently displayed in the background for the television cameras), only 138 American soldiers had been killed. The “kill-ratio,” as is often the case when one side tries to fight without air cover, had been around a hundred-to-one in favour of the U.S. Army. American military planners were assuming that they would be able to draw down the occupation force in Iraq to only thirty thousand soldiers by the end of the year—but there had been a striking lack of Iraqis throwing flowers.
CHAPTER 4
JIHAD: THE IRAQI PHASE, 2003–2006
T he invasion of Iraq in 2003 came at a time when the Islamist
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