And
unless I've been missing it because I took a few days off, the story that
hasn't come forward to the degree that I think it should, and which
stands out for me, is:
The Saudi
foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, a son of the late King Faisal,
came to Washington.....
Continued....
recently to meet with administration officials
including Bush and Condoleezza Rice. The Prince offered some very
unpleasant predictions on Iraq, which were in direct opposition to the
administration's usual positive spin, which is that the Iraqi elections and
constitution were successful, and quote: "The forward movement of
the political process is the best answer." Really?
Anyway, enormously
disappointed by the administration's tepid response, Prince Faisal invited
a bunch of reporters to the Saudi embassy and told them in no uncertain
terms:
"There is no dynamic move pulling the nation (Iraq)
together." And: "All the dynamics are pulling
the country apart," which was an important part of the
message he gave to Bush who apparently was not impressed, or who was at
least irritated by such disagreeable news.
A specific
complaint made by the prince was that the U.S. had described
"...every Sunni as a Baathist criminal," a problem for the Prince
of a country that has a Sunni majority. "Unless something is
done to bring Iraqi's together," he went on,
"elections alone won't do it. A constitution alone won't do it."
He blamed the U.S. for not insisting on a more important
role for Sunnis.
I have no
great love for Saudi Arabia, which is another subject altogether, but keep
in mind al-Faisal has been the Saudi foreign minister for 30 years,
and therefore knows the thinking of his Sunni countrymen, and all
his country's middle eastern neighbors, all of whom are exceedingly
worried about a constitution that would create partitioning, causing a
civil war between the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, a war that would draw
into it, these same neighbors.
The Prince
emphasized, "This is a very dangerous situation, a very threatening
situation."
Remember
that Bush's father during the Gulf War in 91, understood this. He
stopped short of Baghdad and left Saddam in place, not because he felt
kindly toward Saddam and the Iraqis, but to prevent the kind of
disintegration of Iraq we are seeing today. Bush senior and his advisors
feared a bloody civil war would draw the surrounding nations into the fray
and completely destabilize the middle east, thereby preventing the flow of
oil. Bush junior wasn't, and isn't, so smart, considering the oil he
was hoping to control--the reason he deceived the American people --was
supposed to pay for the Iraqi reconstruction, and is now down to a
trickle.
Today we
are witnessing the killing of American and Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi
policemen, Iraqi politicians, the massacre of innocents, plus both Sunni
and Shiite death squads assassinating each other by shooting and
beheading.
What Prince Faisal is telling us via a
media which did not make this the major story it actually is, is that if
the constitution is not ratified, things could get worse. If it
is ratified, things could get worse anyway, because the constitution
will not have given the Sunnis the role the prince believes they should
have--not because he loves them, but because he understands that they will
intensify their efforts to regain the loss of power they enjoyed
under Saddam. Unless the Sunnis are included, he said, "Iraq
will be finished forever." Civil war?
Think of
this partitioning: a Kurdish state in the north (on the border with
Turkey--the Turks hate them), a Shiite state in the south, and a Sunni
state in the center. The Turks will attack the Kurds, Iran will
support the friendly Shiites, the Saudi Sunni majority will support the
Iraqi Sunnis. This is what Prince Faisal understands: the complexity
of tribal, religious, ethnic and cultural traditions, fraught with
emotional energy, which a secular Saddam had held in check; an energy which has
already been released like flammable gas into the ether, just waiting for
a spark.
SAMMY
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