Iran (formerly Persia) has had a complicated relationship with the WeAmerican foreign policy in regard to Iraq has repeatedly failed to take into account the history of the region, especially its ethnic divisions. While most of the...
moreIran (formerly Persia) has had a complicated relationship with the WeAmerican foreign policy in regard to Iraq has repeatedly failed to take into account the history of the region, especially its ethnic divisions. While most of the population of Iraq consists of Arabian-speaking people of the Muslim faith, they are divided into Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurds (the latter of whom are Iranian-speaking Sunni and Sufi Muslims, Yarsins, and Yazidis). The Shi’a consider the cities of Karbala, Samarra, and Najaf as holy sites. While the United States and Britain initially supported an independent Kurdistan, they both reneged on the promise. British colonialists, such as Winston Churchill, intentionally divided these ethnic groups into an arbitrary country after World War One and placed on the throne of Iraq a Saudi Hashemite ruler in the person of King Faisal, who was a Sunni Muslim who supported the British against the Ottomans in World War One). The British were mainly interested in Iraq for its oil reserves both around Mosel in the Sunni northwest, Kirkuk in the Kurdish northeast, and Basra in the Shi’ite south along the Persian Gulf.
The United Nations created by the victorious powers of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, China, and the United States (with veto power in U.N. Security Council) established a system under which any change to the status quo post-bellum was legally defined as “aggression.” This was a departure from the principle of self-determination that Woodrow Wilson tried but was unable to establish as the basis for peace after World War One. The United States inherited the mantle of British colonialism after World War Two by accepting the arbitrarily boundaries in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that were created by the victors in World War One. The underlying issues of self-determination were first masked by the Cold War and then by the War on Terrorism. In the former case, the United States chose to side with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and the Shah of Iran against the neutralist and socialist Ba’athists, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power in Egypt in 1952. In 1958 the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by the Ba’athist in Iraq, which paved the way for Saddam Hussein to come to power in 1979. However, Saddam Hussein was also a Sunni Muslim, and he continued the Sunni dominance over the Shi’a and Kurds in Iraq.
In 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Shi’ite fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein launched a war against Iran in an effort to regain the part of the delta of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that were once part of the Ottoman province of Basra. The administration of Ronald Reagan backed Saddam Hussein in this war by providing aid through their mutual Sunni ally, Saudi Arabia. In this war Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons both against the Iranians, but also against the Iraqi Kurds who sided with Iran in the hope of gaining an independent state. Then, in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, which also had previously been part of the Ottoman province of Basra. However, this put Saddam Hussein at odds with his former allies of Saudi Arabia and the United States. President George H. W. Bush assembled a coalition of nations that quickly forced Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. But the coalition forces dominated by the United States military were ordered not to enter Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who retaliated against the Shi’a and Kurds who wanted to remove him from power.
After the attack on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the new President of the United States, George W. Bush, the son of George H. W. Bush, declared a War on Terrorism. After overthrowing the Sunni Taliban government if Afghanistan that sheltered Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, Bush turned his attention to Iraq in an attempt to finish the job his father started, that is, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney (who had previously been the head of Halliburton Construction, which gained no-bid contracts in Iraq) and his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, made a case that Saddam Hussein possessed “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which later were never found. On the basis of this erroneous argument, the United States invaded Iraq for a second time in March 2003. This time the United States succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein from power and his eventual execution for crimes against humanity. However, the United States replaced him with a Shi’ite dominated government. This led to a Sunni insurgency that the United States managed to buy off with cash payments to insurgent leaders.
When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, he promised to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American troops were finally withdrawn from Iraq in 2014, and a new Sunni insurgency was launched by Islamic extremists in an organization named the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISI) from Syria. The Kurds have taken this opportunity to establish its sovereignty in northeast Iraq. Today, Iraq is on the verge of dividing into three countries by means of warfare. But President Obama has bought into the concept of a War on Terrorism, as have most of America’s other leaders, both Democrat and Republican. They all fail to see that the United States was founded on the principle of self-determination. We as a nation must reclaim this American principle and work to redefine the role of the United Nations as an organization dedicated to settling ethnic disputes through internationally supervised plebiscites rather than by wars of “aggression.”
