Andrew Sullivan: Thirty Years' War brewing in the Middle East
Americans, by and large, are unfamiliar with much of history. Their passion is the future, not the past; and their focus is understandably on their own vast and varied continent, not on the minute details of distant foreign lands. The new chairman of the House intelligence committee cannot tell the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, and his predecessor was not much better. And I’d wager that no one in the US Congress was forced in school, as I sadly was, to study Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. But they’d better start, because it may be already upon them. Not in Europe this time, but in the Middle East.
The Thirty Years’ War in Europe formally broke out in 1618 and didn’t end till 1648. It consumed every major power and its battleground was predominantly the varied and divided melange of states and principalities that make up what is now called Germany. Its deepest dividing lines were religious, or, rather sectarian. Lutherans battled Catholics, and then Calvinists added to the toxic religious brew.
Major Catholic and Protestant powers intervened to keep the conflict constantly evolving, in ways guaranteed to confuse every schoolkid trying to figure it out. I remember a brief couple of days in the third form when I thought I understood it. And then it eluded my grasp again. It all ended with the famous Treaty of Westphalia, which cemented a new power structure in Europe.
This was less than four centuries ago. It occurred at a time of religious ferment, when nation-states were weak and the distant empire, Spain, was slowly declining over the horizon. It centred on a region that had never truly been unified as a state. Its effects were devastating.
Historians now doubt that a third of the German population died, but up to a fifth did — not just from conflict, but from the diseases that spread with armies and disruption. This was the era from which the German folk tales of the Brothers Grimm emerged. Massive depopulation allowed wolves to make a comeback, and they stalked abandoned villages and towns for human prey.
Is this now the future for the Middle East? Iraq, like 17th-century Germany, has never been a viable independent nation-state. It was always part of various empires, run by Persians or Greeks or Turks — and then the British. It was always divided, even under the Ottomans, into three provinces centred on Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. And it has long been divided ethnically between Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Marsh Arabs and others and on sectarian lines between Sunni and Shi’ite.
To make sectarian tensions even worse, it was also home to sacred Shi’ite sites in regimes long dominated by Sunnis. Churchill once described governing the place as being perched on the edge of an “ungrateful volcano”. Saddam’s brutal rule and his genocidal attacks on the Shi’ites and Kurds only added to the heat of the lava below.
It’s now clear that the US invasion in 2003 took the last lid off the volcanic crater: Saddam Hussein. Worse, America disbanded the only trained force capable of restraining it — the Ba’athist military — and refused to provide enough US troops to maintain order. Al-Qaeda shrewdly saw the potential for chaos and tried desperately to foment a sectarian war. ...
Read entire article at Times Online (UK)
The Thirty Years’ War in Europe formally broke out in 1618 and didn’t end till 1648. It consumed every major power and its battleground was predominantly the varied and divided melange of states and principalities that make up what is now called Germany. Its deepest dividing lines were religious, or, rather sectarian. Lutherans battled Catholics, and then Calvinists added to the toxic religious brew.
Major Catholic and Protestant powers intervened to keep the conflict constantly evolving, in ways guaranteed to confuse every schoolkid trying to figure it out. I remember a brief couple of days in the third form when I thought I understood it. And then it eluded my grasp again. It all ended with the famous Treaty of Westphalia, which cemented a new power structure in Europe.
This was less than four centuries ago. It occurred at a time of religious ferment, when nation-states were weak and the distant empire, Spain, was slowly declining over the horizon. It centred on a region that had never truly been unified as a state. Its effects were devastating.
Historians now doubt that a third of the German population died, but up to a fifth did — not just from conflict, but from the diseases that spread with armies and disruption. This was the era from which the German folk tales of the Brothers Grimm emerged. Massive depopulation allowed wolves to make a comeback, and they stalked abandoned villages and towns for human prey.
Is this now the future for the Middle East? Iraq, like 17th-century Germany, has never been a viable independent nation-state. It was always part of various empires, run by Persians or Greeks or Turks — and then the British. It was always divided, even under the Ottomans, into three provinces centred on Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. And it has long been divided ethnically between Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Marsh Arabs and others and on sectarian lines between Sunni and Shi’ite.
To make sectarian tensions even worse, it was also home to sacred Shi’ite sites in regimes long dominated by Sunnis. Churchill once described governing the place as being perched on the edge of an “ungrateful volcano”. Saddam’s brutal rule and his genocidal attacks on the Shi’ites and Kurds only added to the heat of the lava below.
It’s now clear that the US invasion in 2003 took the last lid off the volcanic crater: Saddam Hussein. Worse, America disbanded the only trained force capable of restraining it — the Ba’athist military — and refused to provide enough US troops to maintain order. Al-Qaeda shrewdly saw the potential for chaos and tried desperately to foment a sectarian war. ...