by Robert C. Sage

Created on: September 07, 2008

Iraq, as the inheritor of Mesopotamia, is a country of extreme contrasts and confusion. Lying between Persia and the Arabian peninsula, it has been run over repeatedly by conquerors seeking empire for glory and plunder. Its modern incarnation dates to the close of WWI, when Great Britain was still building its global empire or colonies. At the time, the Kurds were promised an independent homeland in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, a promise which was broken by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Consequently, the Kurds have been fighting virtually non-stop for their own destiny, being thwarted by Turks, Iranians, Syrians and whoever holds sway in Baghdad. The American imposition of a "no-fly" zone enabled the Iranian Kurds to realize autonomy after Bush I's "Desert Storm" liberated Kuwait and the defacto civil war between Shiites and Sunnis that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has enabled the Kurds to maintain their experiment in self-rule. Any future resolution to the internecine fighting in Iraq will require a firm commitment to Kurdish self-determination, as attempts to stymie the Kurds in Turkey and Iran have only stoked violent insurgencies.

The violence in American-occupied Iraq has been caused by many factors. First of all, the US chose to dismantle Saddam's large military forces and his Ba'ath Party, without consideration for what those million plus persons would be expected to do with themselves. Although al-Qaeda was non-existent in Iraq prior to the 2003 American invasion, the bogus claims by President G.W. Bush of links between Saddam and the 9-11 tragedy and al-Qaeda as justification for the action naturally caused reaction both within Iraq and in third countries. Being unjustly charged of attacking America and in effect being punished for something they did not do, caused the ex-Ba-athists to distrust America's motives and to welcome willing al-Qaeda recruits from abroad to fight the foreign invaders. Meanwhile, festering ill-will between Sunni and Shiite tribesmen resulted in a virtual free-for-all war in which nobody knew how many separate forces were involved.

During the reign of Saddam, his brutality is beyond doubt, as he used violence as his method of control of the country. Saddam initially attacked Iran in a 8-year vicious and bloody war that ended without enlarging Iraq's borders. America was involved behind the scenes on both sides, although officially neutral. That is when Oliver North's "Iran-Contra affair" occurred under the guidance

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