Conflict in Iraq

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Toddling through Mesopotamia

Baghdad

Another Undeclared War?

Toddling through Mesopotamia

Some people say Iraq is democracy's greatest test. Others say it's a violent mess. But a historian will say Iraq's the cradle of civilization.

It's true. Ancient Iraq--Mesopotamia--was likely home to the first agriculture, the first cities, the first laws. It was home to the first wheel and the first writing, too. It was where humans grew out of cultural diapers and into toddler training pants. Here's the story, step by toddler step.

Solid Food -- Agriculture
The days of "cavemen" hunting mammoths in the snow really weren't that long ago. The last Ice Age didn't end until around 10,000 BC, and mammoth meatloaf stayed on man's menu for centuries after that. Lunch came largely where you found it--find a berry, eat a berry. Archaeological evidence suggests that a few crafty cowboys (or bad hunters) domesticated cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats and started tending to their food. But nobody grew crops.

People gathered wild grains where they could, of course. Eventually, someone was bound to notice that a few scattered grains of wheat or barley had sprouted beside the grinding place. Archaeologists think this "a-ha!"--perhaps the most important "a-ha!" in human history--happened around 8000 BC, with the first farmers donning seed-corn caps in the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They've identified other contenders for the "first
farmer" title, too, in Asia and the Americas. One thing is for sure. With a surplus of food like never before, the people of Mesopotamia (Greek for "land between the rivers") flourished.

Getting Wet and Keeping Dry -- Villages & Cities
As long as lunch was on the hoof, nobody had much incentive to stay in one place. Farming, for the first time, gave people roots, and semi-permanent villages sprang up with the crops. Still, successive plantings sucked the life out of the soil, and people eventually had to pick up and move to a new garden spot. The farmers of Mesopotamia had an advantage here: river water, and plenty of it, fed the alluvial land. The trick was controlling it, both to water the crops and to keep it from flooding the village. So people learned the art of irrigation, dikes, and dams. Add in crop rotation, and you've got villages built to last throughout Mesopotamia.

You've got one more thing, too: government. Maintaining complex irrigation and flood control systems took organization and specialization. You grow the food, and I'll dig the ditches. And Uncle Gilgamesh will collect the taxes to pay my salary and maintain the public works. By 3500 BC, the world's first city-dwellers lived in Mesopotamian burgs where thousands of people did dozens of different jobs--and where anyone would have recognized the old joke about death and taxes.

Circle Time -- The Wheel
Fred Flintstone aside, the wheel was not a Stone Age tool. As Mesopotamian villages gradually morphed into cities between 5000 and 3500 BC, the people closest to the Persian Gulf, called the Sumerians, achieved particular prominence. By 3500 BC, some Sumerian Sam (or Samantha) had figured out how to make a wheel. A Sumerian pictograph from around 3500 BC actually features the wheel in an infomercial-style before-and-after shot, showing a wooden sled side-by-side with a virtually identical wheeled "sled."

Inspiration seems to have come from the potter's wheel, which appeared in Mesopotamia around the same time. All early models of the wheel consisted of three planks of wood clamped together with two crosspieces and carved to roundness. By 2000 BC, deluxe models had spokes. Oxen were sold separately.

One-Two-Three, ABC -- Cuneiform
Around the time the wheel became something to write home about, Sumerians learned how to write home. Thank the accountants, not the English majors. City life had gotten complicated, and merchants and tax collectors could no longer just remember who paid how much for what. So they started keeping simple accounts--tallies and tokens designed more to jog the memory than anything else. Soon, would-be writers started using pictographs to represent objects, and the pictographs, in turn, evolved into linear marks denoting not only objects but the sounds of spoken syllables as well.

Scholars today call the Sumerian symbols cuneiform--from the Latin "cuneus," or wedge--because scribes made wedge-shaped characters by pressing the slanted end of a reed stylus into wet clay. When finished, they fired the clay to harden it. Thousands of these clay tablets survive today. The earliest tablets simply list commodities in various amounts next to people's names.

Playing Nice with Others -- The Law
By 2100 BC, people were writing more than receipts. They were recording the law, allowing legal precedent to pass more easily from one generation to the next. Tribal rules surely existed for thousands of years. But the communal complexity of city life expanded both the need for rules and the number of situations calling for a rule in the first place. The law simply outgrew oral pronouncements.

The first known legal code comes from the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who founded a dynasty at the city of Ur in 2112 BC. The most famous comes from Hammurabi, who started his rule in Babylon in 1792 BC, after the Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians upriver. Hammurabi didn't look kindly on criminals. Bad guys were as likely to die as face a fine. But he did apparently try hard for social justice. Those captured in the king's wars were guaranteed ransom, farmers hurt by drought or flood could ignore their debts, and wives abandoned by husbands got alimony and child support. True to writing's original purpose, many of the laws regulated commerce. Rule #105: Always get a receipt!

Michael Himick
June 8, 2005

Baghdad

By Denis Mueller

It could be called the cradle of civilization. The Mongols destroyed it; the Ottoman’s controlled it for four hundred years, the British shaped its boundary and tried to control the city and the country’s oil. It was perhaps the cultural center of the world in the 8th and 9th century and now the attention of the world is on it again.

The city of Baghdad was at the center of the world in the 8th century and was called, among other things, the city of peace. When the Islamic empire began to crumble it was soon overrun by Mongol hordes. In 1258, Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu wrecked the walls of the city and a mountain was purportedly built of the skulls of the scholars and city leaders. The city was fought over by the Mongols, Persians and Turks until the Ottoman Empire conquered it in 1638. The Turks then ruled it until World War I.

During World War I, it was invaded by the British but the initial assault ended up with disaster when General Charles Townsend's army marched from Basra to Baghdad only to be defeated by the Turkish army at the battle of Ctesiphon. The British were forced to retreat and endured a 147-day siege until they finally surrendered.

In the march back nearly half the British force died from the brutality of the Turks. But the British soon returned and captured Baghdad in 1917. It became the administrative center for the British Empire in the Middle East. It was the British who then created the country of Iraq. King Feisel had been driven out of what is now Syria and Saudi Arabia when the British made him the King of the newly formed country of Iraq.

The British filled Baghdad with businessmen, bureaucrats, teachers and all of those who would be needed to administer the country. It was in many ways little more than a British colony until the Iraqi military overthrew the British. This would lead eventually to the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Hussein, at first, was welcomed by the Americans who saw him as a buffer against Iran. In a quite brutal war with the Iranians, which saw the use of chemical weapons, a stalemate resulted. Hussein, who in many ways, had done the dirty work for the corrupt rulers of the Arab world, then invaded Kuwait. Kuwait had long been seen as a province of Iraq but was established as a separate country by the British.

Iraq was defeated by UN forces and forced to surrender which brings us up to date. We will see and hear much more about Baghdad in the next couple of years but it has never been a friendly place for conquerors. We should be very careful. This war may last a long time.

Sources: Bill Glauber, Chicago Tribune

I am, most assuredly, not a fan of Patrick Buchanan and his far right wing political opinions. However, in the following essay, he makes much more sense than I thought possible. I suppose it just goes to show that even right-wing ideologues like Buchanan can get it right (no pun intended) once in awhile.

Another Undeclared War?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Is the United States about to launch a second preemptive war, against a nation that has not attacked us, to deprive it of weapons of mass destruction that it does not have?

With U.S. troops tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistanis inflamed over a U.S. airstrike that wiped out 13 villagers, including women and children, it would seem another war in the Islamic world is the last thing America needs.

Yet the "military option" against Iran is the talk of the town.

"There is only one thing worse than... exercising the military option," says Sen. John McCain. "That is a nuclear-armed Iran. The military option is the last option, but cannot be taken off the table."

Appearing on CBS' Face the Nation, McCain said Iran's nuclear program presents "the most grave situation we have faced since the end of the Cold War, absent the whole war on terror."

Meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bush employed the same grim terms he used before invading Iraq. If Iran goes forward with nuclear enrichment, said Bush, it could "pose a grave threat to the security of the world."

McCain and Bush both emphasized the threat to Israel. And all the usual suspects are beating the drums for war. Israel warns that March is the deadline after which she may strike. One reads of F-16s headed for the Gulf. The Weekly Standard is feathered and painted for the warpath. The Iranian Chalabis are playing their assigned roles, warning that Tehran is much closer to nukes than we all realize.

But just how imminent in this "grave threat"?
Thus far, Tehran has taken only two baby steps. It has renewed converting "yellowcake" into uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous substance used to create enriched uranium. And Iran has broken the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals at its nuclear facility at Natanz, where uranium hexafluoride is to be processed into enriched uranium. But on Saturday, the foreign ministry said it was still suspending "fuel production."

However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared, "There are no restrictions for nuclear research activities under the NPT," the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Iran has signed.

Here, Iran's president is supported by his countrymen and stands on the solid ground of international law. Yet Secretary of State Condi Rice said last week, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment."

Is Condi right?
Unlike Israel, Pakistan, and India, which clandestinely built nuclear weapons, Iran has signed the NPT. And Tehran may wish to exercise its rights under the treaty to master the nuclear fuel cycle to build power plants for electricity, rather than use up the oil and gas deposits she exports to earn all of her hard currency. Nuclear power makes sense for Iran

True, in gaining such expertise, Iran may wish to be able, in a matter of months, to go nuclear. For the United States and Israel, which have repeatedly threatened her, are both in the neighborhood and have nuclear arsenals. Acquiring an atom bomb to deter a U.S. or Israeli attack may not appear a "peaceful rationale" to Rice, but the Iranians may have a different perspective.

Having seen what we did to Iraq, but how deferential we are to North Korea, would it be irrational for Tehran to seek its own deterrent?

And, again, just how imminent is this "grave threat"?
"We don't see a clear and present danger," Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA has just told Newsweek.

Some put the possibility of an Iranian bomb at 10 years away. Con Coughlin, defense and security editor of the London Telegraph, writes that the 164 centrifuges in the Natanz pilot plant could enable Iran to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb - in three years.

If the threat were imminent, Israel, which invaded Egypt in 1956, destroyed the Syrian and Egyptian air forces on the ground in a surprise attack in 1967, and smashed an Iraqi reactor before it was completed in 1981, would have acted. And with an estimated 200 nuclear weapons, Israel is fully capable of deterring Iran - and of massive retaliation if she is attacked by Iran.

Iran has attacked neither Israel nor our forces in the Gulf, and the Ayatollah Khamenei is said to be reining in Ahmadinejad. So it would seem that Iran does not want a war.

Congress thus has the time to do the constitutional duty it failed to do when it gave Bush his blank check to invade Iraq at a time of his choosing.

Few today trust "intelligence reports," War Party propagandists, or the word of exiles anxious to have us fight their wars. Congress should thus hold hearings on how close Tehran is to a nuclear weapon and whether this represents an intolerable threat, justifying a preventive war that would mean a Middle East cataclysm and a worldwide
depression. Then it should vote to declare war, or to deny Bush the power to go to war.

The "Bush Doctrine" notwithstanding, if Congress has not put the "military option on the table," neither George Bush nor John McCain can put it there. That is the Constitution still, is it not?

91326 (Northridge Weather Forecast, CA)

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