by Michael Patrick

Created on: December 23, 2008

Insurgency, the disruptive effect of militants against a governing power, will not end in Iraq as long as poverty, political corruption and religious intolerance exist. It's like asking if children disputing their parents will ever end.

First, we have to remember the history of Iraq, which was carved out of Mesopotamia by the British after WW-II, a political decision made by the West in complete disregard of the "conditions on the ground" of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences and natural boundaries established by centuries. Immediately thereafter, in 1948, the same Western "conquerors" bequeathed Palestine to the Israelis and established a "pro-western" state while displacing millions of Arabs who had lived there since the Diaspora.

The Third Reich had occupied what we call the Middle East in an attempt to secure its supply of oil, and the Allies fought tooth and nail to wrest that control into their own purview. This was accomplished with Hitler's fall. The Allies won and had little regard for the subtleties of Arab culture or religious boundaries. The Arabs seemed disparate, poor, tribal rather than nationalistic and generally unable to cohere into discrete political groups or nations. So, the United Nations, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, set about creating nation-states with the idea of access to oil just as the Nazis did.

In other words, we completely disrupted the natural topographic, social and religious boundaries that had evolved over millennia and tried to force it all into a tight construct of Western political and economic ideology. We didn't think the Arabs knew or cared. They rode camels and wore funny robes and scratched a minimal living out of the sand and appeared to be so tribal that it never occurred to us they might actually have an overarching, working culture.

Easy to imagine why there is such obdurate conflict in the region and our invasion of Iraq has done little to subdue bruised sensibilities and moral outrage against the West.

We, Europe and the United States, a Christian cabal if there ever was one, forced an entire region of Muslims, with its own internecine provincial and religious disputes, into chaos and we wonder why there's conflict? Please. Our actions gave us the warped ideologue but rich Saudi, Osama bin Laden, who began organizing opposition that led to the horror of 9/11.

The Bush-Cheney doctrine held that we would wipe out the Taliban in Afghanistan and topple Saddam Hussein and then Afghan

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