Also on this day, June 28 in 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sofie, were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip while riding in their open automobile. Although the event itself was hardly noted immediately after it occurred, it did not occur in a vacuum and was the spark that ignited the powder keg of European grudges and resentments. The result was WWI and 37 million people killed or wounded. The end of the war five years later and the deliberately vengeful armistice that was designed to humiliate and punish Germany, would lead eventually to WWII. The assassination also led to the Ottoman Empire entering the war resulting it its conquer and disintegration when the war was over. The resulting carve up of a vast swath of middle eastern and European lands into new countries by the British and the French gave the world several new countries whose arbitrary boundaries were drawn to suit the west with absolutely no regard to the needs, desires, cultures and histories of the areas inhabitants. Although their historic enmities go back centuries, the current hostilities between the Shia and Sunni tribes can be traced directly back to this WWI carve up. The mess in Iraq and Syria today is a direct result of western actions that then, as now, were based on an imperial dismissal of the cultural realities of the people who live there. This willful ignorance was repeated in 2003 when immediately after the US and its allies invaded Iraq on what eventually would be proved to be totally spurious grounds, Paul Bremmer ignored the counsel of those who knew that the delicate detente between Iraqi Sunnis and the Shias that had been held together by the brutal and ruthless dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, was extremely fragile. The Baath party - made up almost totally of Sunni Muslims, prior to the invasion, controlled both the Iraqi bureaucracy and military. Bremmer was advised that the success of peace in Iraq would require the inclusion of the Baath party members in any new government and he was explicitly warned that excluding the Baath party in a newly-formed, US-backed government would result in a flare-up of old hostilities between Sunni and Shia tribes. Bremmer chose instead to dismiss the entire party en masse from every government position and the military. That single act of, again, willful ignorance in the face of solid facts and the power vacuum it created, resulted in the bloody escalation of the invasion into a decade-long war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the current chaos unfolding across Syria and Iraq with the newest incarnation of tribal resentments, ISIS, sweeping away the mission accomplished victories of the US incursion into Iraq; victories that any one expert in the history of the Middle East could and did try to tell us, were ephemeral at best. Insanity is often defined as repeating the same action over and over expecting different results. Starting with WWI and continuing today, the west, and the US, have been locked in this endless loop of insanity in the Middle East. It will not end until we demand it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand#mediaviewer/File:Franz_ferdinand.jpg
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 23:01:38 +0000
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