7/4/2014 Iraq Crisis: If history and oil teach us anything, it's that the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surprise - Comment - Voices - The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-history-and-petropolitics-teach-us-anything-its-that-the-collapse-of-iraq-shouldnt-come-as-surprise-95550… 1/5

THE INDEPENDENT FRIDAY 04 JULY 2014 Apps eBooks i Jobs Dating Shop Offers

SHARE So while Obama’s Spartan 300 deploy to Iraq’s Thermopylae, it’s worth

taking a look at why the new Sunni Islamist caliphate of Iraq should

have come as no surprise to any of us.

Horror it may be. Shock it is not. Take Tel Afar, the Iraqi town

close to Iraq’s border with Syria – when the border still existed, that is –

which has just “fallen” to the rebels. The Americans were scrambling to

hold on to this frontier way station almost 10 years ago and had to

“recapture” it from Al-Qaeda-style insurgents at least once.

Indeed, Hassan Jamal Sulieman Oweydah, a Palestinian from the Mieh

Mieh refugee camp in Lebanon, rammed his car into an American

convoy at Tel Afar in December of 2004.

He was the first Palestinian “martyr” in the war against the US

occupation of Iraq – and came from the same “Levant” forming part of

the title of the Iraqi-Syrian rebel group.

“The last time I saw Hassan, he was standing in the gateway you’ve just

walked through,” his mother told me two years later. By then, 25 other

Palestinians had been killed in Iraq.

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If history and petropolitics teach us anything, it'sthat the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surpriseYou only need to go back ten years to see how this was a crisis waiting to happen

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7/4/2014 Iraq Crisis: If history and oil teach us anything, it's that the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surprise - Comment - Voices - The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-history-and-petropolitics-teach-us-anything-its-that-the-collapse-of-iraq-shouldnt-come-as-surprise-95550… 2/5

“I thought he was going to go and I might not see him again and I said

to ‘come back’. But he said, ‘Leaving is not like returning. It is not

important for me to return.’ ”

Hassan’s Palestinian friend Ahmed al-Faran later blew himself up in a

suicide bomb attack in Fallujah, another of the towns now invested by

the Islamist Sunni rebels of Iraq. Twice, the Americans had to “capture”

Mosul before they left Iraq. And for well over a year before its “capture”

this month – although the country’s flag flew over official buildings –

large parts of the city remained effectively outside government control.

And who can be surprised at the “capture” of Haditha, announced to the

now-familiar consternation on Saturday night. As a centre of Sunni anti-

Western resistance, was it not bound to fall to the Islamic State of Iraq

and the Levant (Isis) and its chums?

And has everyone forgotten – for not a soul mentioned this yesterday –

that this was the scene of the most infamous US war crime in Iraq, the

massacre by US marines of 24 unarmed men, women and children in

November 2005, a slaughter supposedly carried out in revenge for the

killing of a marine in the town.

Compared to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Haditha was an obvious

choice for conquest. Who in Haditha would die for Nouri al-Maliki,

America’s own favourite as Iraqi leader (at least he was, until last week)?

Of course, we may rage to our hearts’ content at the destruction of our

whole absurd Iraqi project. The New York Times columnist Roger

Cohen, normally the calmest of fellows, was in historical wrath mode

only last week. “Iraq and Syria ... were rotten to the core, as ripe for

dismemberment as the Ottoman Empire a century ago, sickened by the

personality cults of brutal rulers, cracking at the internal lines of fracture

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7/4/2014 Iraq Crisis: If history and oil teach us anything, it's that the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surprise - Comment - Voices - The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-history-and-petropolitics-teach-us-anything-its-that-the-collapse-of-iraq-shouldnt-come-as-surprise-95550… 3/5

colonial overseers chose to disregard,” Cohen roared. “They were in a

state of postponed decomposition.”

READ MORE:

• HOW WESTERN INTERVENTION WOULD BE A GIFT TO ISIS

Well, not really. Outrageous though the Sykes-Picot agreement was, it

did at least leave Ottoman Mesopotamia in one piece (although France

wanted Mosul for itself). The problem was that the Brits foisted a Sunni

king from Arabia on to the country and thus ensured that the people

would never exercise real freedom, and never learn the benefits of such

dignity.

It was, as we know, about oil — the same reason for the 2003 Anglo-

American invasion and the strike north by US forces to capture Mosul. If

the city’s major export was – let us say – asparagus, does anyone believe

the 82nd Airborne would have been sent there?

And oil still remains – weirdly — an unspoken reason for this new war.

Sure, it’s a blow to the Iraqi government to lose the oil facilities of Baiji.

But it’s much more of a victory for Saudi Arabia – which funds the

bearded Islamists swarming across Iraq – since the capture of Mosul has

cut the city’s oil supplies to the outside world and closed down output

from Baiji itself.

Saudi Arabia’s claim to be the greatest oil producer in the world is no

longer threatened by Shia Iraq’s output, nor the undiscovered reserves

which might turn Iraq into the greatest oil producer and which lie, quite

literally, under the boots of the al-Qa’ida-inspired Salafists who now

threaten Maliki.

The tomb-desecration apparently already under way in Mosul is not

unlike the destruction of images in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which the

very same Islamists long ago included in the caliphate. It’s just what the

Wahabi-style Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamian in Afghanistan in

2001. And the Taliban – let us remember, oh please, let’s not forget –

were funded by the very same Saudi Arabia.

Iraq’s tragedy is terrifying enough – for the Christians of the country, for

the new cities of refugees moving across its borders, for the

sectarianisation of the whole Middle East – without stubbornly refusing

to accept that this whole revolt has been going on for years, that hatred

of America plays a foundation role and that our Saudi mates are lock,

stock and barrel behind it. Officially, they deny this. Unofficially, they

have been boasting for years of their support for the Syrian Islamists

who fight the Alawite (Shia) Bashar al-Assad – who are exactly the

same as those now threatening Baghdad.

One Middle East newspaper last week wrote scathingly of the failure of

Arab “unity”. The Arabs had failed to unite over “Palestine”. They had

failed to unite through nationalism or Baathism. The only true unity

evident of late was that of refugees. Refugees from Palestine, from Syria,

from Iraq, from Somalia and Sudan and South Sudan. It might be time,

7/4/2014 Iraq Crisis: If history and oil teach us anything, it's that the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surprise - Comment - Voices - The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-history-and-petropolitics-teach-us-anything-its-that-the-collapse-of-iraq-shouldnt-come-as-surprise-95550… 4/5

the paper concluded, for the Arab League to offer refugees their own seat

in time for the next Arab Summit.

And, of course, today let’s remember Lebanon and Hassan Oweydah

who killed himself in Tel Afar all those years ago. He even arranged for

his mother to receive a videotape – she showed it to me – of him

cheerfully waving goodbye as he drove off to “martyrdom” in his bomb-

rigged car.

The Salafists of Syria and Iraq have received arms and money via their

Sunni militant allies in Lebanon – part of the frontier town of Ersal has

for months been a virtual Islamist enclave inside Lebanon.

The “Levant” means Lebanon as well as Syria. And if they’re victorious in

destroying Iraq and Assad of Syria, many of these young men will return

“home” to Lebanon. In their thousands. Perhaps that should be our

“thought for the day” as we gasp, breathless, at the news from Baghdad.

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7/4/2014 Iraq Crisis: If history and oil teach us anything, it's that the collapse of Iraq shouldn't come as surprise - Comment - Voices - The Independent

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