The US and the Iraqi Shi'a

In my last post, I quoted Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal's statement about the US and Saudi Arabia:  “We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait.”

I commented that this statement didn't seem to make much sense.  A joint US-Saudi war "to keep Iran out of Iraq" after the Gulf War of 1991?  What could that possibly mean?

Juan Cole had a speculation on that question in an Informed Comment post of 09/25/05:

Saud al-Faisal also let it it slip that Saudi Arabia and the United States actively helped Saddam Hussein to put down the Shiite uprising in spring of 1991. He said, "We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason." ' How else can this statement be interpreted? (my emphasis)

That really seems to be the only way to make any sense of that statement.  Even if Old Man Bush's administration and Saudi Arabia didn't exactly fight "a war together," it does suggest that there may be a big untold story from the Gulf War about why the US didn't do more to support the Shi'a rebellion.

It may be that Old Man Bush was much more suspicious of the Shi'a than the current administration.  Bob Dreyfuss has argued that the neoconservatives driving Iraq policy in this administration put great faith in the Shi'a Muslims, at least in Iraq.  Apparently the new book by journalist George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (2005) lends support to that notion. Gary Kamiya quotes him in The road to hell Salon 10/07/05:

"Shiite power was the key to the whole neoconservative vision for Iraq," Packer notes. "The convergence of ideas, interests, and affections between certain American Jews and Iraqi Shia [i.e., Jewish neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Iraqi scamster Ahmad Chalabi] was one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War ... the Shia and the Jews, oppressed minorities in the region, could do business, and ... traditional Iraqi Shiism (as opposed to the theocratic, totalitarian kind that had taken Iran captive) could lead the way to reorienting the Arab worldtoward America and Israel."

In their appalling 2003 book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum were certainly hostile enough to the Shi'a/Islamist regime in Iran:

On the basis of our present information [presumably at least as accurate as the Iraqi WMDs that Perle warned us about so often], we are not going to be able to stop [the "mullahs" ruling Iran] by bombing their nuclear facilities.  The Iranians have learned a lesson from Israeli's [sic] 1981 destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor and have scattered their nuclear program through their huge country, which is twice the size of Texas.  In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than the wapons.  The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons.  The regime must go.

But they put more hope in the Shi'a in Saudi Arabia.  And they were very distressed over the lack of religious freedom they have in that country:

And while the people of the west [in Saudi Arabia] are almost uniformly Sunni, one-third of the people of the Eastern Province - to whom the oil might well have belonged had the fortunes of battle turned out a little differently in the 1920s - are Shiites. ... The construction of Shiite mosques is not permitted, and the testimony of Shiites is often disregarded in court.  Shiite children are required to attend Sunni schools.  Shiite leaders have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and on occasion murdered.  It is not bigotry alone that explains these Saudi actions, but also their fear that the Shiites might someday seek independence for the Eastern Province - and its oil.  Independence for the Eastern Province would obviously be a catastrophic outcome for the Saudi state.  But it might be a very good outcome for the United States.  Certainly it's an outcome to ponder.

So maybe Dreyfuss is right about the neocons' enthusiasm for at least some of the Shi'a groups.

How spectucularly misguided that may be is a whole different discussion.