Iraq and Iran: The New Islamic Brotherhood

The U.S. intervention in Iraq has had the unintended consequences of uniting Iraq and Iran. Both Islamic nations are now controlled by Shiites.

In Islamic nations, religion is far more important than nationalism. "The Believers are but a single Brotherhood" [Al-Hujurat 49:10].

The initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had the legitimate purpose of pursuing the 9/11 terrorists. The U.S. should have continued and completed that important mission. Instead, the U.S. administration abruptly stopped pursuing Osama bin Laden and turned their sights to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq never had anything to do with 9/11 or terrorists or WMD. But Iraq did have one of the world´s largest reserves of oil. Instead of focusing on world terrorism, the U.S. focused on acquiring Iraq´s oil.

"One of the (American) goals is to establish control of the country´s (Iraq) oil resources." -Russian President Valdimir V. Putin, Oct 19, 2007, L.A. Times.

The U.S. administration is still living in a state of denial about what they have done in Iraq. The American public is still in the delusional state of being uninformed, misinformed and mentally fogged with a total misperception about what the war has actually produced in Iraq.

There are several reasons for this muddled state of widespread U.S. public misperception. The U.S. administration doesn´t want to admit that they have been totally wrong about every assumption and assessment that they had made before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The administration doesn´t want to admit that they were clueless about Iraqi politics, Iraqi religion, Iraqi social values, Iraqi history, or what the Iraqi people wanted for their own future. The naïve U.S. administration assumed that the Iraqi people wanted exactly the same things that the American people want. Nothing could be further from the truth. Truth is a word that to George Orwellian Bush means whatever he wants it to mean.

The U.S. government convinced, threatened or intimidated the news media into accepting that it would be unpatriotic to criticize or oppose any Bush administration policies. The news media voluntarily gave up, without a whimper, their own constitutional rights to have a free press. Goodbye to the first Amendment. Goodbye to free speech and a free press.

For five years, the U.S. government´s censorship of the major news media, and the news media´s own voluntary censorship of itself must bear a large portion of the responsibility for the U.S. public´s lack of understanding of the Iraq war and the devastation that it has produced. In many American small towns, the news media has given such scant attention to the long Iraq war, that there are literally thousands of Americans who don´t even know that the war is still going on. This is an abysmal failure and a tragic statement about the state of the free press in the United States. The U.S. government has used the news media as a Weapon of Mass Deception. The news media has become a blatant propaganda tool for the GOP (Big Oil) agenda. Infotainment or infomercials and promoting biased administration policies is the best way to describe the present pathetic news media. Whenever the news media tells the truth or opposes any administration policy, they are accused of being ´too liberal´. The U.S. news media today, is primarily profit-orientated and inadequately information-oriented. As an important functioning participant in democracy, the primary mission of news should be to provide truthful information to the public. For the past eight years, Big Business has corrupted this patriotic mission.

The next time that the U.S. government unilaterally decides to aggressively invade another sovereign nation and embark on an expensive taxpayer-funded nation-building adventure, they should first try to understand the people and the culture of that nation. In Iraq, the self confident U.S. administration made no attempts whatsoever to do this. The Iraqis who initially supported the U.S. invasion (mostly Shiites) naïvely thought that the U.S. actually cared about the Iraqi people and would simply remove the dictator Hussein and then let the Iraqis freely choose their own government. But behind closed doors, the U.S. government had other grandiose plans. These secret meetings were dominated and controlled by Big Oil, Big Business and Wall Street. The U.S. wanted to rebuild the Iraqi government, society and economic system in their own image and assume control over (privatize) all Iraqi oil resources (It is illegal under the Geneva Convention for any occupying forces to make such changes). After the liberated Iraqis began to understand the real sinister motives of the U.S., the disillusioned people began to oppose the foreign occupation and the patriotic resistance was born. The majority of the Iraqi opposition fighters were never insurgents, they were citizen patriots. Insurgents fight against their own government. (Iraq had no government to be opposed to). The U.S. occupiers were never the legal government of Iraq. Patriots are citizens who fight against foreign occupiers, such as the U.S. Most of the Iraqi casualties caused by the U.S. military actions were not insurgents, they were Iraqi patriots and civilians. The U.S. will never admit this, but the Iraqi people who have buried their own children and their neighbors, know that it´s true. The Middle Eastern and European news media have given a much more realistic and complete coverage of the Iraq war than the sanitized version that the U.S. public has been given. For years, the U.S. military didn´t even bother to count the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by the U.S. The vast majority of these were Iraqi men, women and children who were innocent civilians.

The overconfident U.S. assumed that they could easily invade Iraq, quickly establish a pro-American government that would cooperate economically with the American (oil) companies. The U.S. administration assumed that it would be easy to establish the same kind of democratic institutions and government structure in Iraq that the U.S. has. This was one of the worst foreign policy decisions ever made by any U.S. administration. The U.S. viewed Iraq as a soft lump of clay, waiting to be molded into whatever the U.S. wanted it to be. A simple knowledge of past Iraqi politics and Middle Eastern history and the strong character of the Iraqi people, should have warned the U.S. that this would be almost impossible. A simple understanding of Islamic sectarianism should have warned the U.S. not to get involved in a potential religious civil war. Iraqi history, traditions and religious beliefs are many centuries older that the young nation of the U.S. Simple statistics that showed that Iraq was 60% Shiite, should have easily predicted that a free general election would give control of the nation to the Shiites and result in a Shiite Islamic Republic, exactly like Iran. In Iraq, free elections did not produce a western style democracy. It did however, produce an Islamic democracy.

The current U.S. definition of ´victory´ in Iraq includes the establishment of ´democracy´. This is totally misleading. The majority of Iraqi people have never wanted the same type of government that the U.S. has. The Iraqi people want an Islamic government not a secular government. If the U.S. goal in Iraq is to establish a secular democracy, then U.S. ´victory´ is impossible. If ´victory´ means that Iraq has a national army strong enough to protect themselves and the Iraq people are allowed to peacefully develop their own style of Islamic democracy, then it is Iraq that has won, not the U.S. If ´victory´ means that all al-Qaeda and terrorists are removed from Iraq, then the U.S. should never have invaded Iraq in the first place, because al-Qaeda and the terrorists were not in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. They were in Afghanistan.

The unique western style of democracy, such as the U.S. has, has taken 200 years to evolve and it is still not completely democratic. Our own democracy still has a long way to go and many social and economic problems and inequalities still exist. Democracy is not just one simple type of government, it is many. It´s always an evolving process. There are over a hundred nations in the world that claim to be democratic, and yet they are all different. Democracy can exist in many different degrees and styles. Not only are they all different, but they each continue to evolve in their own independent ways and with their own unique national characteristics and cultures. Democracies can exist in many different economical, social and religious environments. They can be theocratic democracies, Islamic democracies, Christian democracies, Jewish democracies, socialistic democracies and one-party democracies. Even one-party dictatorships usually have sham elections and claim to be democratic (the government may pre-select the candidates, decide who can vote and count the ballots in secret. All of this was done in the U.S. during the early administrations). There are endless arguments and debates about what constitutes a democracy.

Even today, in the U.S., the President is not elected directly by the people. The U.S. President is elected by the Electoral College, whose delegates are selected by the state legislators, not the people. There are no U.S. laws that determine who the Electoral College delegates must vote for. They can elect anyone that they want to. The Electoral College could elect Paris Hilton to be the next U.S. President, if they wanted to. The Electoral College should be replaced with a direct election of the President by the voters.

The degree of democracy that exists in the U.S. varies from one administration to another, depending on who is actually controlling the government. In some administrations, the lobbyists, Big Oil, Big Business, Wall Street or other special interests such as Right Wing religious organizations have more control over Congress and the White House than the general public does. In these administrations, the U.S. government is less democratic and more of a monocracy (or Unitary Executive). Lobbyists essentially bribe the U.S. Congress into passing favorable legislation for special interests (Big Business). This is legal because theoretically the general public can also lobby Congress. However in reality, this practice is not just or fair because the lobbyists have millions of dollars to spend and the general public doesn´t. In Washington D.C. money buys power and influence. Congressional re-districting makes it almost impossible for constituents to remove any politician, no matter how corrupt they are.

American citizens and those in the U.S. government who have the naïve idea that all democracies must conform to the present U.S. model are not living in the real world. There is no such thing as a perfect democracy. The U.S. democracy is not perfect. Every democracy has some good qualities and some bad qualities. Every nation has their own definition of what they consider to be a good democracy or a good government and one nation cannot and should not force their conceptions or ideology on another nation which will almost always have a different point of view. Especially if the two nations have fundamentally different religious views, values, cultures and histories. In an Islamic nation, Islamic democracy will prevail, not western style secular democracy.

The U.S. actions in Iraq since 2003 have been strictly military. This is all that they can ever be. It was easy to overthrow the weak Islamic military regime of Hussein. The U.S. simply walked into Baghdad, with very little resistance from Hussein´s ragtag army. It was easy to establish a U.S. military occupation government. It has not been difficult to completely rebuild the Iraqi Army and establish military training facilities and military bases. It has not been difficult to train Iraqi military leaders or provide them with modern military equipment. It has not been too difficult to reestablish peace or at least establish martial law. This could have been achieved in half the time it actually took, if the U.S. had not foolishly disbanded the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police forces. This single decision by one person (Jerry Bremer), cost the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars and resulted in thousands of casualties.

All of these actions in Iraq, taken so far, have been successful but they are still strictly military activities. When the most powerful military in the world invades a much smaller and weaker nation, a military ´victory´ is to be expected. In March 2003, the powerful U.S. Army achieved overnight military victory over the weak, poorly trained, poorly equipped Iraqi Army. Victory was achieved on the day that the U.S. marched into Baghdad. However, the fundamental nature of the Iraqi government has not changed in any way, during five years of military occupation, despite all of the idealistic, ideological rhetoric by the U.S. administration. The U.S. cannot have a ´political victory´ in Iraq. All decisions about Iraqi politics must be made by the Iraqis, not the U.S. The U.S. has simply replaced the previous Sunni Islamic military regime with a Shiite Islamic military regime. The present Iraqi government may have an elected president or prime minister (usually appointed), and a parliament, and a judicial system (all of which are subserving to Islamic Law). However in a predominately Shiite Islamic nation, the executive, legislative and judicial branches will all be totally dominated by the Shiites with very small representation by the numerous other political-religious parties. Islamic Law is still the law of the land. This is Islamic democracy. The U.S. cannot change the religious beliefs, attitudes or institutions in Iraq. The U.S. cannot change the social values, customs or traditions in Iraq. The U.S. cannot force any type of government on the Iraqi people. Iraq is a sovereign nation and must make it´s own choices.

The U.S. military can remove one military regime and replace it with another military regime. But the U.S. cannot create a western style democracy in an Islamic nation instantly. It is foolish for the U.S. to have claimed to have done so. There are obviously different political opinions among the Iraqi people. Different Iraqi people want different degrees of Islamic laws and government control. But all Iraqis want Iraq to be an Islamic nation.

Not only is the present government totally dominated by the Shiites, it is still an Islamic military regime. The only type of democracy that Iraq can possibly have is a Shiite Islamic Republic which can also simultaneously be a theocracy either overtly or covertly. The present Iraqi constitution openly defines Iraq to be an Islamic nation. This is the legitimate sovereign choice that the Iraqi people have unanimously made. Free elections in an Islamic nation can only produce an Islamic democracy. This is not a contradiction. One nation does not have to be either a military regime or an Islamic theocracy or a democracy. It can be a simultaneous mixture of all three. It can be whatever the people want it to be. This is what the Islamic Republic of Iraq is.

The fundamental failure in the prewar planning (or lack of planning) by the U.S. administration totally failed to take into account the 1000 year conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis. The Iraqi political system does not separate religion and politics as the U.S. political system does. In the Iraqi government, they don´t have political parties, they have religious-political parties. In Iraq, religion and politics are united. They can´t be separated when 95% of the people don´t want to separate them. This makes compromise impossible. Politicians can compromise, but religions can never compromise. The Shiites and Sunnis have not compromised for 1000 years and they will not compromise for the next 1000 years. Religions don´t compromise. Because every religion (not just Islam) thinks that they are 100% right, they don´t see any need to compromise, they only want to dominate or eliminate any alternative belief. Religious wars will continue to exist as long as different religions exist. And this will probably be as long as human civilization continues to exist.

This was a tragic fatal flaw in the U.S. administration´s plan to establish a secular democratic government in Iraq. Iraq will never have a secular government and they will never have a secular constitution. They can only have an Islamic government and a constitution which is not above the laws of Islam (this is clearly stated in the present Iraqi constitution). In Iraq the U.S. can never separate religion and state and because of this, the only type of government that Iraq can have is an Islamic Republic.

How can anyone in the U.S. government claim to have achieved ´victory´, when the only thing that they have done is to establish a Shiite Islamic Republic which is fundamentally a military regime? Was this the intended goal of the Bush administration?

Iran now has a Shiite Islamic Republican government. Iraq now has a Shiite Islamic Republican government. Iran is now also ruled by an Ayatollah, who has all of the real political, social and economical power in the Muslim nation. The Islamic religious leaders in Iraq are equally respected by the Iraqi people and one of them will probably soon rise to the same political-religious position as the Ayatollah in Iran. In an Islamic nation, the religious leaders are more respected than the politicians. Iraq and Iran are only one step away from becoming united in a new Islamic Brotherhood. This unification will occur as soon as the occupying U.S. forces leave the area. In Islamic nations, religion is far more important than nationalism. "The Believers are but a single Brotherhood" [Al-Hujurat 49:10]. The U.S. invasion of Iraq has brought these two Shiite nations together.

The militarism that exists in most Middle Eastern nations is something that most Americans simply cannot conceive. During the past century, every war that the U.S. has been involved in, has been on foreign soil. Only Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were attacks on U.S. soil. It is because these national assaults are so rare, that the U.S. public was so shocked by these two dramatic events. Within other nations, the people are angry when they are physically attacked, but they are not so shocked, because they are more accustomed to local wars. When whole generations of people grow up surrounded by war, they know nothing but militarism and they respect nothing but military force and religion. In such a nation, every home, every family and even every teenager grows up with automatic weapons and knows how to use them. This is something that is completely absent in tranquil American neighborhoods where teenagers grow up learning how to play video games and watch High Definition TV.

In the future, Iraq will only have a strong Islamic and a strong militaristic government. Only religion and military force are respected. Since the Shiites are the majority party in Iraq (60%), they will continue to dominate the government, society and the military. (Iran is about 90% Shiite. For many centuries, Iran has been the only Muslim nation in the world that was not under Sunni control. Now Iraq is also under Shiite control.) The laws of Islam will not be separated from the government or from the daily lives of the people. Social and religious traditions and beliefs, habits and customs will continue in everything that the Iraqi people do. Because religion and politics are not separated in Iraq, the ruling Shiites will probably have very little compromise with any other religious-political parties. The U.S. cannot change this Islamic tradition no matter how long they continue the present military occupation. As far as the type of government that Iraq ultimately develops, it makes little difference whether the U.S. leaves Iraq today or ten years from today. The sooner that the U.S. leaves Iraq, the sooner the Iraqi people can return to a normal peaceful society and self-determination.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has succeeded in replacing a weak Islamic military regime with a much stronger Islamic military regime. As the present Shiite Islamic Iraqi Army continues to grow in size, training, strength, leadership and equipment, they will continue to be more insistent that the U.S. leave their sovereign nation. Prime Minister Nori al Maliki has set the date of Dec 31, 2011 as a deadline for all foreign troops to leave Iraq. The Iraqi parliament has already requested that the U.S. leave. In public opinion polls, the Iraqi people also want the U.S. to leave their nation, soon. The U.S. has created an Iraqi military government that is not only totally aligned with Iran, but is many times stronger and more capable than the previous very weak Republican Army of Hussein who was opposed to Iran, opposed to al-Qaeda, opposed to the Taliban, opposed to terrorism and opposed to Osama bin Laden. Before the U.S. invasion, none of these insurgents or terrorists existed in Iraq. The U.S. did Osama bin Laden a big favor by removing Hussein. The real problem that faces the Iraq government today is how to prevent another military dictator exactly like Hussein from taking over the military government. Strong military regimes often have ambitious Generals who secretly plan military coups. Democracies take centuries to develop, but an aggressive military coup only takes 24 hours or less.

The new Islamic Brotherhood of Iraq and Iran are rapidly growing in strength and capabilities. These two Shiite controlled nations may pose a growing threat to the other predominately Sunni nations of the Middle East and also to Israel. (Worldwide, Islam is 90% Sunni and 10% Shiite.)

Hopefully these two developing Shiite military regimes will only use their growing military (and nuclear) power for peaceful and defensive purposes. However, theocracies and militaristic nations usually are unable to remain peaceful for very long. Both have the inherent desire to expand their ideology, power and influence.

Iran is already surrounded by war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (in addition to the Palestine-Israel conflict and ongoing conflicts in many east African nations). Escalating war is much more likely in the Middle East than any prospects for peace. The religious and militant extremists on both sides, actually want a military escalation because they both believe that God (or Allah) is with them and that they can´t loose. They are both wrong. In wars everyone looses.