What Government Minders Don’t Understand

In response to the Empire post below, the Government Minder assigned to Hullabaloo made this comment regarding Arab reaction to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict :

“The assertion that Americans are turning isolationist, as evidenced by this poll on the Israel/Lebanon conflict, is an overly broad interpretation. Look at the recent emergency meeting of the Arab League; half its member nations were critical of Hezzbollah instead of a uniform condemnation of Israel. That split is historic and unprecedented.”

Is it?

Here are some additional scraps from that Chicago Trib op-ed piece written in 2005 by E.W. Chamberlain III, a retired Army colonel. It provides some elucidation on the topic. The title of the op-ed was Prediction.

The toll of the war in both lives and treasure are going well beyond what we were promised. The elections in Iraq already are proving themselves to have been merely a vote of the majority for the majority with no room for any meaningful minority voice in the emerging government. Our goal of bringing democracy to Iraq, while worthy, is unattainable. The Shiite clerics won’t stand for it. The clerics, who have taken on the same titles as those used by the Iranian Shiite clerics when they toppled the Shah, have won the elections. The grand titles being used in Iraq right after the elections, “Ayatollah of the Revolutionary Islamic Council,” for example, should have some people in Washington sitting up and taking notice. The Iranians already have visited the newly elected clerics, and it will be but a short time before some agreements between the two countries are formalized. Washington persists in seeing Iraq as, well, full of just Iraqis. Washington doesn’t differentiate between the religious sects in Iraq, nor does it understand that the concept of a state called “Iraq” was arbitrarily devised by the British and the French in the Balfour Declaration at the end of World War I as those two victors divided the spoils of war. People in Iraq and Iran are Shiite first, and Iraqis and Iranians second.
…
The first predictable event was that the Shiites would score an overwhelming victory at the polls in January. This was a no-brainer, because they were the only ones participating. The Sunni political parties had seen the handwriting on the wall and had withdrawn from a contest they could not even hope to win. The Kurds participated in the elections and are participating in the development of the constitution, but this will continue only as long as U.S. forces remain on the ground. Once they are gone, the best the Kurds can hope for is an independent state recognized and supported by the United States in a sea of enemies. The worst they can expect is to be dominated and oppressed by the government in Baghdad, switching one secular dictator for a non-secular one. So much for democracy in Iraq. The insurgency in Iraq is Sunni, which many in Washington have yet to figure out. They are fighting us because we provide a focal point for rallying the Sunni people inside and outside of Iraq. As soon as we leave, the full force of the insurgency will fall upon the Shiite government of Iraq. It already has started. The suicide car bombings that have killed so many Iraqi civilians are mistakenly tagged as terrorist attacks, when in reality they are attacks against Shiites by the Sunni insurgency. If a couple of Americans also get killed, so much the better in their view, but the real target is the Shiite population and the Shiite-dominated government. Probably even before the U.S. withdraws, the “democratically elected” Shiite government in Iraq will be aligned rapidly with Iran and will receive open and massive support. The Saudi Arabian government will continue to support the Sunni insurgency, as it does today, but the support will become open. The Sunni insurgency eventually will lose as the full weight of a Shiite Iraq and a Shiite Iran overwhelms it. Numbers alone, coupled with a real war of attrition that does not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants or follow any rules of engagement, will result in horrific casualties and defeat. This will not be the kinder, gentler, American way of war. This will be an Old Testament conflict with no quarter given.
The remnants of the Sunni insurgency will flee to Saudi Arabia. There they will foment discord because the Saudi royal family did not do enough and allowed the Sunnis to be defeated in Iraq. The royal family will be overthrown in a violent revolution in Saudi Arabia led by Sunni clerics who long have chafed under the pro-Western rule of the House of Saud. The Sunni clerics will emerge as the dominant power in Saudi Arabia. Americans and all other Westerners will be killed or, at best, ejected from Saudi Arabia, which has enough native petrochemical engineers and knowledgeable oil field workers, and can find other non-Westerners to run the oil fields. No Westerner need apply. Of course, we need not fear another attack here at home from Osama bin Laden as all this occurs, because he will have fulfilled his fatwa. The only thing bin Laden ever said he was after was to remove the Westerners from Saudi Arabia, the Land of the Holy Places. This will be done when the clerics assume control of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden will win the war on terrorism by achieving his goals with our unwitting help.

Anxiety for the established Sunni order? An emerging Shia dominance? Trouble in oil land?
Not only is it understandable, apparently it was predictable.
If only.