What’s At Stake in Iraq

The scourge of unadulterated fascism has once again ravaged Iraq and ruined the lives of countless numbers of innocents. The fusion of cunning Baathist tyranny and Islamist terror has seen a formidable standing enemy in the way of any chance of Iraq becoming a successful multi-denominational polity. Instead those who wish to subjugate Iraqis under the yoke of fascism are out in force in the form of Islamic State (Daesh). Everyone has seen how much they love to broadcast, and in the process document, their grotesque crimes against humanity.

The remnants of the Iraqi Baath Party helped Daesh perpetrate these crimes against the Iraqi people. Their collusion was a result of their mutual disdain over the prospect of an emerging Iraq which is not dominated by a small Sunni clique. Their murderous exploits against Iraq’s Kurds, Shia and Sunnis alike show their desire to terrorize Iraqis and re-subjugate them under an order maintained through coercion, fear and violence.

The Camp Speicher massacre of last summer (and atrocities leveled against communities in Northern Iraq) reminds one of the dark days of Saddam Hussein’s reign. That incident saw mostly Shi’ite prisoners of war being lined up and systematically shot in the head and then dumped into mass graves in scenes reminiscent of infamous Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. Few things are more heartbreaking than seeing fresh mass graves being sown into the earth of Iraq by the forces of Islamist reaction working in tandem with those very Baathists who butchered and subdued Iraq’s Shia Arabs and who bulldozed whole Kurdish communities and gassed and murdered Kurds in the tens-of-thousands.

Amidst these horrors however are the things that make Iraq worth fighting for. The Iraqi government is striving to be a more inclusive institution and the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq is promulgating level-headed secular attitudes in order not to give Daesh and their Baathists backers the pleasure of seeing exacerbated sectarian fissures plunge Iraq into more bloodletting and violence. A state-of-affairs which, for obvious reasons, would benefit those who want Iraq to fail. Because, remember, Iraq has to be an abject failure, and the majority of its people ruthlessly subjugated, for them to succeed in their endeavours.

Which is one of many reasons one welcomes their defeat and their failure. Not only because they are vicious tyrants but because they stand in the way of a very real opportunity for Iraq to reach its very real potential, and in the process thrive to the benefit of both its people and the wider world.

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