Richard H. Curtiss, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 5 April 2004 — Let’s skip China and point out that Iraq and Egypt have the longest written histories in the world. Leaving out Egypt let’s turn our attention to Iraq. Time is short so we won’t start at 3000 B.C. We’ll pick a much later date, and go to the last days of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958.

I was in the Ankara, Turkey airport to meet the Iraqi delegates for what was to have been a meeting of the Baghdad Pact Organization. The members and associate members included Jordan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, Britain and the United States. The Iraqi party was to include Nuri Said who was a grizzled veteran statesman, the crown prince regent Abdul Al Illah and the young Iraqi King Faisal II.

We waited for at least three hours until it became clear that none of the party was going to arrive. When we got back to Ankara we learned that the party had been delayed. Already rumors were flying and by the next day we learned that the young prince and the regent had been killed.

A day or two after that we heard that Nuri Said had tried to escape but was caught dressed in women’s clothing because a young boy saw that he was wearing men’s shoes under a woman’s black robe. He was killed and then dragged through the streets until, literally, there was nothing left of him. Meanwhile it turned out that most of Iraq’s royal family, including the women, had also been killed.

The bloody details were horrible but so is much of Iraq’s history. The new leader who had plotted the assassinations was Abdel Karim Qassim and his vice president was Abd Al-Salam Mohammad Aref.

It appeared that a new era was dawning in the Middle East. Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser would join with Qassim and Aref, and Syria into one entity called the United Arab Republic. But there were jealousies. Soon the United Arab Republic fell apart. For a time longer the Baathists in both Iraq and Syria worked cooperatively together. But eventually they, too, parted.

Qassim began to have serious troubles and because he was neither photogenic nor handsome, as many Arab leaders are, he resorted to surrounding himself with a permanent cheering section. Wherever he went one could hear them shouting rhyming slogans, such as “there is no other leader except Qassim.” More and more the Iraqis began to hate him.

Eventually Qassim was seized by Aref and moderate Baathist officers. They put Qassim in a chair sitting boldly upright and machine-gunned him to death. Lest no one be in doubt about what had happened, the scene was televised over and over for days.

Only half a year later there was another coup and so it went. Among these tragic events, one stands out. A large group of Communists was loaded into boxcars and sent off into the desert. They remained there until all had suffocated.

Eventually Baathists took control under Ahmad Hasan Al-Bakr. At this point Saddam Hussein was No. 2 in the country and not too long after that, Al-Bakr died and Saddam became the new president. From that point on there has been a long period of relative stability due to Saddam’s iron-fisted rule.

That ended with the conquest of Iraq by US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a handful of other allies. It took fewer than 200 US and British lives to end the shooting.

But what followed has been a long and tragic story as the US, British and other military and civilian forces continued suffering more than 600 deaths and at least 2,500 injuries. There is no official toll of Iraqis killed and injured but it surely already has totaled more than 10,000.

Among the first casualties were Saddam’s sons, Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37 and one of Saddam’s teen-aged grandsons, Mustapha. They were killed in a shootout when they were betrayed by a man eager to collect the reward money.

Subsequently, Saddam himself was found and has been held in American custody ever since. It’s going to be up to the Iraqi people to decide what to do about him. No American should be involved in deciding his fate.

The United States should do its best to put the entire Iraqi saga behind it. Sad to say, it may well be that the only thing all of the Iraqis have in common now is a poisonous hatred of the newest foreign conqueror. I’m not sure that the United Nations will pick up the job but I am certain that the US must get out as soon as possible.

The conventional wisdom is that about 60 percent of the Iraqis are Shiites. It appears that they have no intention of sharing power with the Sunnis or the Kurds. The Sunnis are probably at least 20 percent and the Kurds are a little less numerous.

We’ll only know whether the Shiites will share any power when the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani agrees to meet with an occupation official. To date the ayatollah has refused to do that but the US occupation will end on June 30.

Perhaps the Sunnis and the Shiites will go their separate ways. That is not going to happen peacefully, however, since Baghdad is ethnically a very divided city and there’s no easy way to separate the adherents of the two sects. The third group, the Kurds, are the only people who do not have potential oil riches. It’s unlikely that the Kurds will get deeply involved and they will probably stay in their own traditional homeland in the north and east.

Will there be a civil war in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shiites? No one really knows.

It may be far more complicated to disentangle the two or three groups than to have them learn to live with each other. What the United States has to do is get out on schedule because we have become an obstacle to peace.

If any American politician is closest to the truth it is probably Dennis Kucinich who says “get out, period.” Second closest to the truth is Howard Dean who says the US should get out gracefully. Furthest from the truth is Sen. John F. Kerry who hasn’t fully grasped that the US must get out. And, most frightening of all, is President George W. Bush who never understood why he couldn’t just go from one war to another without having to pay the terrible consequences of wars of conquest.

Meanwhile it is undoubtedly tempting to go after those Sunni ghouls who have just finished tearing four American mercenaries from limb to limb. But the United States should not even dream of revenge. Our job is to disentangle from a bad war, not create new grievances.

The US was quite justified in hitting back hard at Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban. As long as the US is welcome in Afghanistan the United States should do whatever it can to remain a positive influence. In Iraq, with its bloody history, there’s no way to win.

It was George W. Bush’s misadventure to get into something that he couldn’t finish. He is encumbered with his despicable neoconservative advisers, whose only desire is to find oil for Israel. Let us never forget the names of these neoconservatives who set out to assure the world that going to Iraq would be “a walk in the park,” or “a cake walk,” to use two of their catch phrases.

Strangely, apparently none of these neoconservatives knows anything at all about the Middle East, and certainly not about Iraq. George W. Bush had never been near the country until after the war began. Nor apparently had Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Board member Richard Perle, nor Deputy Assistant Secretary Douglas Feith, to mention just a few. And let us never forget the American servicemen and women who died or were maimed in the service of a “wartime president” who had never gone to war.

— Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.