Once in every hundred
tries, the nutjobs get lucky. Alas, they are trying a thousand
times a day. So we have to “budget” for things like
the destruction of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra this week
-- the big event that did happen, and threw Iraq into sectarian
turmoil, so that within 24 hours at least 100 Sunni mosques had
been hit in retaliatory violence, and they are still counting
the dead.
Compare this with
an event that didn’t happen, yesterday, across the Persian
Gulf. (Or, “Arab Gulf” if you prefer.) Three carloads
of Islamist nutjobs, with some serious high explosives, shot their
way through an outer perimeter guard post at the Abqaiq oil processing
complex in Saudi Arabia. Given all that gunfire, the security
guards at the inner perimeter woke right up, and the attackers
were detonated at the second turnstile. A little farther in, and,
according to my information, they could have set off the first
of a remarkable chain of oil tank explosions, that would have
lit the evening sky all the way to Riyadh. The loss of the adjoining
town could have entailed the deaths of more than 1,000 Americans
and other foreigners -- for Abqaiq, which dates back to the glory
days of Aramco in the 1940s, hosts one of the four principal foreign
compounds in the world’s biggest oilpatch.
The Islamists were
probably more eager to kill those Americans, than destroy the
complex. But they would also have reduced planetary oil production
by about 7 percent -- enough to pop prices back into the lower
stratosphere.
In the imaginations
of the terrorists, if not in reality, the foreigners in those
compounds are Christians, who not only make light of Shariah themselves,
but are surrounded with Arabian, Egyptian, Pakistani, and other
apostate Muslims who make light with them. Rumours constantly
circulate that they drink alcohol in there, and utter prayers
to Jesus -- in defiance of Saudi law, which makes the practice
of any religion except Islam a grave criminal offence. “Death
to the infidels!” -- to coin a phrase.
Back in Iraq, the
security around the Golden Mosque was not all it might have been.
The handful of guards assigned to watch it towards morning were
all apparently sleeping. They were Shia paramilitaries. It is
rich, of Muqtada al-Sadr and other Shia hotheads, to blame the
Yankees for failing to protect the mosque -- and use this as an
excuse to arm more Shia paramilitaries -- when they themselves
told the Yankees formerly protecting it to go away.
This is incidentally
now the meme throughout the Muslim world, thanks to Al-Jazeera,
Al-Arabiyya, and other mass media, who have repeatedly broadcast
the declarations of President Ahmadinejad of Iran on this incident.
According to “Islamic logic and justice” (his own
words), Americans and Jews are responsible for the loss of the
Golden Mosque, and all retaliation should be directed against
them. To their credit, the Iraqis seemed to think otherwise, and
most of the targets were selected for their associations with
radical Sunni imams -- at least a dozen of whom are no longer
with us.
But anti-Islamist
mobs are no better than Islamist mobs, for creating order. The
hard fact is, that even before the Golden Mosque went up, the
Sunni and Shia factions that emerged from the parliamentary election
were showing themselves incapable of agreeing on anything, let
alone the formation of a government -- with the Kurds, and others
watching their negotiations, chafing to get out of the madhouse.
(A recent poll among Kurds showed 98.7 percent would prefer independence
from Iraq: that is what their federalist leaders are pulling against.)
The blast in Samarra triggered a bomb already planted. Sooner
or later, it was going to go off.
It is worse than that.
The project to make Iraq the first Arab democracy is also now
struggling, domestically, with the fallout from the “cartoon
affair” that is still being stoked by Muslim fanatics everywhere.
While anti-Danish rioting in Iraq was modest, compared with that
in most Muslim countries, it was a significant harbinger. For
a rising tide of fanaticism lifts all boats.
I thus draw my reader’s
attention to the depth mark on the wall. If Iraq cannot be made
into a secular democracy (nor even Turkey, nearly a century after
Ataturk), the question becomes, what’s the next best thing?
The answer would seem to be, a Shia dictatorship pretending to
be a democracy, with the Kurds effectively out the door.
Copyright
2006 Ottawa Citizen
