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COMMENTARY
February 25, 2006
Back in Iraq
Once in every hundred tries, the nutjobs get lucky. Alas, they are trying a thousand times a day. So we have to “budget” for things like the destruction of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra this week -- the big event that did happen, and threw Iraq into sectarian turmoil, so that within 24 hours at least 100 Sunni mosques had been hit in retaliatory violence, and they are still counting the dead.Compare this with an event that didn’t happen, yesterday, across the Persian Gulf. (Or, “Arab Gulf” if you prefer.) Three carloads of Islamist nutjobs, with some serious high explosives, shot their way through an outer perimeter guard post at the Abqaiq oil processing complex in Saudi Arabia. Given all that gunfire, the security guards at the inner perimeter woke right up, and the attackers were detonated at the second turnstile. A little farther in, and, according to my information, they could have set off the first of a remarkable chain of oil tank explosions, that would have lit the evening sky all the way to Riyadh. The loss of the adjoining town could have entailed the deaths of more than 1,000 Americans and other foreigners -- for Abqaiq, which dates back to the glory days of Aramco in the 1940s, hosts one of the four principal foreign compounds in the world’s biggest oilpatch. The Islamists were probably more eager to kill those Americans, than destroy the complex. But they would also have reduced planetary oil production by about 7 percent -- enough to pop prices back into the lower stratosphere. In the imaginations of the terrorists, if not in reality, the foreigners in those compounds are Christians, who not only make light of Shariah themselves, but are surrounded with Arabian, Egyptian, Pakistani, and other apostate Muslims who make light with them. Rumours constantly circulate that they drink alcohol in there, and utter prayers to Jesus -- in defiance of Saudi law, which makes the practice of any religion except Islam a grave criminal offence. “Death to the infidels!” -- to coin a phrase. Back in Iraq, the security around the Golden Mosque was not all it might have been. The handful of guards assigned to watch it towards morning were all apparently sleeping. They were Shia paramilitaries. It is rich, of Muqtada al-Sadr and other Shia hotheads, to blame the Yankees for failing to protect the mosque -- and use this as an excuse to arm more Shia paramilitaries -- when they themselves told the Yankees formerly protecting it to go away. This is incidentally now the meme throughout the Muslim world, thanks to Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiyya, and other mass media, who have repeatedly broadcast the declarations of President Ahmadinejad of Iran on this incident. According to “Islamic logic and justice” (his own words), Americans and Jews are responsible for the loss of the Golden Mosque, and all retaliation should be directed against them. To their credit, the Iraqis seemed to think otherwise, and most of the targets were selected for their associations with radical Sunni imams -- at least a dozen of whom are no longer with us. But anti-Islamist mobs are no better than Islamist mobs, for creating order. The hard fact is, that even before the Golden Mosque went up, the Sunni and Shia factions that emerged from the parliamentary election were showing themselves incapable of agreeing on anything, let alone the formation of a government -- with the Kurds, and others watching their negotiations, chafing to get out of the madhouse. (A recent poll among Kurds showed 98.7 percent would prefer independence from Iraq: that is what their federalist leaders are pulling against.) The blast in Samarra triggered a bomb already planted. Sooner or later, it was going to go off. It is worse than that. The project to make Iraq the first Arab democracy is also now struggling, domestically, with the fallout from the “cartoon affair” that is still being stoked by Muslim fanatics everywhere. While anti-Danish rioting in Iraq was modest, compared with that in most Muslim countries, it was a significant harbinger. For a rising tide of fanaticism lifts all boats. I thus draw my reader’s attention to the depth mark on the wall. If Iraq cannot be made into a secular democracy (nor even Turkey, nearly a century after Ataturk), the question becomes, what’s the next best thing? The answer would seem to be, a Shia dictatorship pretending to be a democracy, with the Kurds effectively out the door. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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