America latest in long line of invaders

Home News Tribune Online 08/15/07

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HASSAN
MAHMOUD

In 1258, Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad and killed 800,000 of its inhabitants. The Abbasid caliph surrendered and offered all the gold in his treasury, which Hulagu took, but he put the caliph to death by stuffing him in a sack and ordering the soldiers to kick him and stomp on his body until death, following a Mongolian tradition not to spill the blood of a defeated king. (Similarly, The Washington Post reported on Aug. 3, 2005, that in Abu Ghraib, Abed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general, substituted himself for his two arrested sons, and the interrogators stuffed him, head first, in a sleeping bag and sat on his chest until death.) Traditions relate that the Mongols emptied the famed Baghdad Library and used the books to build a bridge over the Tigris River. (After capturing Baghdad in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the looting of the magnificent Iraqi Museum as freedom untidiness.)

Ostensibly, Hulagu, marching west, was to destroy a fanatic Shiite sect, commonly called Assassins (Hashashins), who were known for their political assassination using cloak and dagger. The stronghold of that sect was in northern Iran. It is said that 400 Assassins were dispatched, in a failed attempt, to kill the Mongolian great Khan in the Mongolian capital Qaraqorum and, therefore, Hulagu decided to eliminate them. After wiping them out and devastating Baghdad and looting its wealth, Hulagu attacked Syria with the help of the Crusaders, who came from Europe 160 years earlier to displace the native Arabs and establish the mighty Kingdom of Jerusalem motivated by religious fanaticism to recover the land of the savior. (A disastrous encore was enacted in the 20th century by fanatic followers of another religion.) Usurpation by the West of Middle Eastern lands, whether in the name of Christ or the name of Yahweh, has been a rallying cry for radicalization.

After 9/11, President Bush decided to destroy the terrorists who attacked us. Instead of attacking them where they were hatching their criminal plots, in the same manner as Hulagu did when he eliminated the Assassins, the neocons nefariously convinced him to attack Iraq, which sheltered no al-Qaida nor threatened our country. Actually, the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein was ruthlessly fighting all religious fanatics, were they Sunnis, Shiites or al-Qaida as the enemies of his regime. Contrary to what Hulagu achieved by eliminating the Assassins, the Iraq war strengthened al-Qaida and it became a strong recruiting cause for terrorism worldwide. That strength was illustrated in the recent National Intelligence Estimate report.

This misbegotten war, in its fifth year, has created devastating consequences. These include the deaths of 3,680 American soldiers (more than the victims murdered by terrorists on 9/11); the injuring, maiming and psychological damage to more than 60,000 of our fighters; the killing of an estimated 700,000 Iraqis (close to Hulagu's number of victims); the rendering of 4 million (16 percent) of Iraq's population into refugees; the destruction of all governmental and social institutions; the obliteration of buildings and infrastructure, save the Oil Ministry building; the facilitation of the return of the pro-Iranian Shiite fanatics to rule what is left of what was a whole country, and the solidification of the separation of Kurdish Iraq from the motherland, thus creating instability in Kurdish Turkey that might ignite perpetual warfare in that region.

It is estimated that this war cost us so far $750 billion and runs at a rate of $2 billion a week, without counting the cost for the care, for life, for those tens of thousands of injured coming back from the battlefield. I recall Paul Wolfowitz's testimony in the Congress before the war. He stated that the war on Iraq wouldn't cost us more than $50 billion and it would be paid from the Iraqi oil revenue, and that the price of oil would go down because of the increase of Iraqi oil production as Iraq contains the second-largest reserve in the world. Ironically, the oil prices before the war started were about $30 a barrel and, now, they are around $75. If Vice President Dick Cheney and his neocons gang and his oil industry backers were hoping to monopolize the Iraqi oil and get it cheaper, they were in for a shocking surprise.

This disaster has to come to an end and our future leaders should learn how to, rationally, conduct world affairs.

"Be Counted" columnist Hassan Mahmoud is a resident of Westfield.

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