Cry Havoc and Let Slip

February 22,.2006

The Golden Mosque of Samarra, yesterday

The Golden Mosque of Samarra, today

It wasn't just another mosque, and it wasn't just another bombing, not anymore than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 was just another political murder.  As the world's editorialists locked themselves in their offices today to adequately dissect the significance of today's portentous violence, the implications appear ineluctably apocalyptic, not just for the besieged citizenry of America's latest military experiment in Iraq but throughout the entire Middle East as the Shiites mull over twelve centuries of Sunni political and doctrinal regional hegemony in the context of today's cataclysmic bombing of a holy site central to the Shiite sect of the broader Islamic faith:  the Al-Askari "Golden Mosque" in the largest continuously occupied city in the world:  Samarra, Iraq.

For a bit of historical perspective, the Golden Mosque of Samarra was built in 847 AD, and upon its inauguration in 852 was the largest mosque in the entire Muslim world.  The mosque houses the tombs of the earthly remains of the father and son 10th and 11th imams of the Shia sect of Islam.  The 12th imam, who went into hiding in Samarra in 931 AD upon the murder of his father the eleventh at age 27, who lived his entire life under house arrest, is believed by the faith to have been whisked away by Allah in order to be delivered back to Earth as a Shiite equivalent of the Messiah to establish peace on Earth in some uncertain future.  It took over a thousand years--until 1979 with the rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran--for the Shiite sect to welcome to political power (in Iran) a religious authority from the historical annals of Shiite orthodoxy.  The Golden Mosque bombed today by rabble-rousers in Iraq is one of the four holiest sites to Shiite Islam.  It is potent juju that has withstood the test of the marauding Mongols, the marauding Crusaders, two world wars, and the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq by American precision munitions and overwhelming military might in March, 2003.

Fast forward from the religious turmoil of the ninth century Tigris River society to 1991 to a tightly-controlled despotic autocracy led by a secular Sunni Arab named Saddam Hussein badly bruised from his devastating defeat by his punishing rout by a global coalition's indomitable will and dominant air power.  With the Iraqi strongman brought to his knees, then American President George H. W. Bush stuck to the constraints of the United Nations authorization of military action.  Having pushed the invading Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and having amply degraded Hussein's military power through punishing bombardments, the former leader of the Free World drew short at the border, and rather than pursue the Butcher of Baghdad to his deepest and most secluded bunker to incinerate him with American firepower, Coalition forces allowed the enemy to retain control over the country of Iraq.  Widely criticized by slack-jawed hawks, could the current President's father possibly have foreseen the flood-gates of real violence that on February 22, 2006 were jarred open by an act of sectarian violence foreseen for decades and now an apparent fait accompli?

The oft-invoked Iraqi Civil War began today, and the occupying American forces may well become irrelevant and superfluous in the regional blood bath almost certain to result from this latest escalation between the Shiite and Sunni confrontation that has waged in that country with growing intensity ever since the fall of Saddam.

The irony is that to the American jihadist enemy--the terrorists in American parlance--the strike that lit the powder keg was directed as much at the Green Zone as it was at Shiite society and culture.  The rising star of the cave-dwelling American Wahhabi Sunni Al Qaeda enemy has shown that Iraq is expendable in its prosecution of the American's disastrously planned and strategically flawed War on Terror.

Before the American invasion, Iraq was not even on the map of this American conflict overseas.  But America's undermanned, mismanaged, and poorly planned invasion of the country changed all that.  Jihadists flowed in from all over the world for a hand in fighting the American enemy and in honing its devastating tradecraft in guerrilla warfare.  Nearly three years into this war, it has become clear that the insurgents cannot defeat the American military eye-to-eye on the field of battle.  And even with hit-and-run asymmetric tactics employing IEDs, suicide bombings, and a brutal campaign of civilian terror, the Jihadists have been dealt increasingly bitter setbacks in their confrontation with the occupying American forces.

Fully trained now and ready for the wider global campaign, jihadist Sunnis that poured in to assist their Iraqi brethren at arms are now taking their training to more fruitful areas of military engagement.  What better manner to have the final say in the whole Iraqi debacle than to spawn a civil war and leave the internecine bloodbath to snicker over bloodying America's nose?  As Iraq is poised for its bitter civil war, the extremist element can now take their war to a theatre deeply steeped in Jihadi tradition and culture, Afghanistan, where coalition forces are stretched much more thinly and where the mostly-American enemy are flanked on all side by confederate fighters eager to push the Americans out of the region altogether for once and for all.

The caustic irony to the developments in the Middle East is that this has been foreseen for decades.  In fact, many would argue that this powder keg has been in place since before the United States was even first colonized by Europeans.  And certainly the fuse has been well in place, probably for just as long, but most certainly since the British and French partitioned the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.  As Jihadism was given birth in the fall of the millennial caliphate, the powers that be drew arbitrary lines on a large map and ceded political power in the newly born Iraq to a minority Sunni population over a region with a majority Shiite population in addition to a second minority, the Kurds.  All this ticking time bomb ever needed was a match.  Bush the elder recognized that this match would be the toppling of Saddam Hussein.  Bush the younger figured, instead, in a kind of faith-based foreign policy assessment that history was not on the side of the dictator, and history has proved Bush the Son to be right about that.

The misguided Iraqi military adventure might have been salvageable--even despite a disastrously planned invasion in which looters were allowed to freely rampage in the street--had the Bush administration and its Neo-Con cabal heeded reason and not dissolved the Iraqi military and disenfranchised the Baathist party.  But it did not do that and instead of bringing to the table the one third of the population actually secular enough to be able to partner with American initiatives and nation-building, pushed this class of technocrats, engineers, military commanders, politicians, judges, doctors, and teachers into the cold to beckon in their stead into the halls of Iraqi power a long-radicalized and oppressed Shiite majority with religious and ethnic Iranian sympathies   Can't make an omelet, seemed to go the Neo-Con rationale, without breaking a few eggs.

Now that even the oppressed Sunni minority recognize their own error in opening the floodgates to the wave of foreign extremist fighters, it is now, officially too late.

Today the bombers of the Al-Askari Golden Mosque cried havoc and let slip the real dogs of war.

The last Jihadi out of Iraq, be sure to turn out the lights.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual assemblage of facts you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact-assembly shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.