Is this how you see what we're doing in Syria and Iraq right now?
Gary Leupp, at Counterpunch, pulls the whole mess into
historical and geopolitical perspective:
There are...deep animosities within Islam, as there have been, historically, within Christianity.
There was a time when Protestants viewed Roman Catholics as idolatrous heretics and bloody wars of religion ravaged Europe. ISIL is now fighting such a war against Shiites, Christians, Yezidis, secularists, and others it sees as unbelievers and as stooges of the west. But its primary target is the Shiites.
There are very few people in the U.S. government who understand basic Islamic history or even regard it as important.
He goes through a number of examples of US “counterterrorism officials” -- including a member of Congress heading the subcommittee overseeing the CIA’s work with Muslim "assets," the head of a subcommittee on tactical intelligence, the FBI counterterrorism chief, members of the State Department under Bush -- demonstrating their profound ignorance of this basic schism in Islam and the implications for dealing with it.
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration shows little indication of understanding it any better than the Bush or earlier administrations have.
In striving to crush ISIL without an alliance with Syria and Iran, and relying on the reluctant Saudis and NATO, he [Obama] is (1) recruiting thousands more anti-U.S. Sunni jihadis into ISIL ranks and (2) exacerbating a Sunni-Shiite war while marginalizing key Shiite players.
There are today only four Shiite-majority countries, two of them non-Arab. Iran is over 90% Shiite.... A powerful, populous country, it sees itself as the defender of Shiites globally. Neighboring Azerbaijan...is about 75% Shiite. The two Arab countries are tiny Bahrain (60%) and Iraq (65%).
The current map of the Middle East is an artifact of colonialism that cut through the existing religious and cultural groupings for the purposes of the colonial powers, with uprisings and rebellions against the imposed regional configuration being put down with great brutality by the colonial-installed rulers.
Amid all the bloody history in the region, there were factions that might have been able to provide a way past the hatred and religious factionalism.
The Baathists were committed to secularism, pan-Arabism, and “Arab socialism” (meaning the development of independent national economies). The Alawites of Syria have never been interested in establishing a religious state but rather have used the Baathist party to establish religious inclusiveness and prevent the emergence of a Sunni-dominated religious state. Bashar al-Assad’s father even attempted to change the constitution to remove the stipulation that the Syrian president be a Muslim....
During the 1950s the U.S. embraced the Baath party as the only alternative to communism...and Islamism. Its view changed after the 1967 war, when Washington came to see the Middle East through Israel’s eyes and bought the Israeli line that Baghdad was a “sponsor of terrorism”....
George “Dubya” Bush gleefully destroyed the Iraqi state. He smashed a state in which Christians served in high posts, women attended college and felt free to leave their heads uncovered, rock n’ roll blared from radios, liquor stores operated legally, and there was even a gay scene. He replaced it with an occupation run by clueless cowboys ...issuing orders—most notably the orders of dissolution of the Baathist Party and the Iraqi Army....
These were secular institutions, not tools for the propagation of any theology. Their dissolution was an attack, not on a religious belief system...but on the Sunni community that had provided Saddam Hussein’s support base and dominated his regime.
So why is the US not working with secular forces in the Middle East instead of trying to take them out?
In 2011, during the ill-fated “Arab Spring,” a pro-democracy, anti-corruption protest movement erupted in Syria. Obama announced that President Bashar Assad must resign. (Why? Here was another secularist, another Baathist, presiding over another country where women dress in Western fashions, go to college, drink beer and listen to rock n’ roll—a country striving for a normalized relationship with the U.S. but spurned by the State Department due to its opposition to Israel, which illegally occupies its Golan Heights, and due to its alliance with Iran).
The peaceful movement vanished, supplanted by a multi-headed armed insurrection dominated by al-Qaeda affiliates and spin-offs that capitalized on Assad’s religious identity.
It's a long article but well worth reading, not just for the way it untangles the history of Western interactions with the religious factions in the region, but for the questions it raises and the prospects for success it lays out for this latest US intervention. Let's just say they don't look good.