Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S FINAL GIFT TO AMERICA: OUR IRAQ QUAGMIRE
by Terry Heath, 2005

Hooray for our side! The citizens of Iraq have apparently approved their new constitution. Of course, it certainly helped the positive vote count those citizens gave the binding resolution when knowing that the election had been rigged by their U.S. influenced government leaders so it would have been almost impossible to fail. But no matter. The Bush Administration will claim this as a win and re-affirmation that their policies in that faraway country are working.

But the three ethnic groups that comprise Iraq have approved their newly written constitution. It’s only natural that we in the United States hope the majority of the Iraqi citizens readily accept democracy as their form of government. But if they don’t, and begin feuding among themselves on how best to run their country, then whom can we lay the blame onto when civil war there breaks out and ultimate anarchy reigns throughout that oil-rich Muslim land? How about one of history’s most important political figures, Winston Spencer Churchill?

How does the Iraq quagmire that the United States finds itself in some two and a half years after invading that Middle East country, to supposedly remove dictator Saddam Hussein from power and look for ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ relate to the legacy of one of the 20th Century’s most famous figures?

World War One and its conclusion created many of the problems for the world that we are still suffering from today, with one being the forced creation of the many countries of the Middle East who sells oil to the west. Iraq was one of those nations formed that was not based on any ethnic consideration of the tribes living there but was instead constituted just so the British Petroleum Oil Company could drill for oil and do it with a friendly foreign government’s blessing and pledge of non-interference.

So if there’s one individual from history that we can blame for the unpleasant situation we find ourselves at in Iraq and hope to one day extract ourselves from then it would have to be the late, great British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was he who devised that secular nation amongst others in the Middle East from nothing, except for a map and political convenience, and that forced creation has caused the western powers nothing but grief ever since.

That is the conclusion of author Christopher Catherwood in his non-fiction book entitled ‘Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq’ that has been released by Carroll and Graf. Catherwood’s work was published in 2004 and has just been issued in trade paperback. In the provocative tome, Catherwood alleges that the legendary World War Two war leader’s forced gathering of Iraq’s three major Muslim tribes into one ‘united’ nation began the problems in that region that still haunts us today.

The Ottoman Empire that previously controlled most of the Middle East from Palestine all the way south to what is present day Saudi Arabia collapsed in 1918 at the end of The Great War. Britain and France took control of those former colonies via the spoils of victory and subsequently carved up that region for their own vested financial interests. And it was Winston Churchill who personally put forward the plans of dividing up those oil-rich lands for Britain’s benefit.

Churchill was a member of the British Parliament at the conclusion of that war and had been appointed by British Labor Party Prime Minister David Lloyd George to the position of Colonial Secretary, whose job was to restructure the newly inherited region. He forced together the Sunni Muslims Kurds, Sunni Muslim Arabs and Shiite Muslims under a single ruler in that land along the Tigris River to be called Iraq (Al-Jumhurria Al-Iraqia) which meant ‘the Republic of the River Shore.’ His main goal: Establish a series of Arab states who were friendly to Great Britain and at as little cost as possible to the cash poor British Empire that was still suffering the financial effects of the just concluded four year worldwide war.

The problem we face as we try to get these same tribes to work together in this democratic form of government they’ve just approved is that Churchill’s guide for dividing up the conquered territories eighty years ago was not based on any ethnic tribal considerations into creating separate sovereign nations who would respect their Muslim neighbors. Instead, he devised a simplistic formula to ensure that the British Petroleum Oil Company made the maximum amount of profits on its wells in those lands with as little problem as possible from the locals and those he chose to become the rulers of those artificially created countries. Author Catherwood’s main argument in his thesis is that Churchill made a crucial mistake when forming those three tribes into the nation of Iraq and it appears that we, as the backers of this new constitution are about to repeat, is assume that the people of those tribes believe that nationalism is more important to them than their religious beliefs.

A previously disgraced Saudi Arab named Faisel Haishem who had been thrown out of those lands subsequently emigrated north and was personally selected by Churchill to rule the newly created country as a devoted ally to the west. He and his descendents of the self-proclaimed Haishemite Dynasty reigned over Iraq from 1921 to 1958 until they were deposed in a violent military coup with most of the royal family and their supporters being killed. Military dictators ruled the country from then on with an iron fist and that eventually gave us Saddam Hussein who took control in 1979 until his overthrow by the United States led multi-country military invasion in 2003.

One obstacle we must overcome as we try to get their top citizens to trust us and work together to give democracy a chance is that too many of the influential people in that region still hold a grudge on what happened to the Muslim people of the Middle East over this last century and even the previous millennium at the hands of the Christians. One of them happens to be our old friend Osama Bin Laden who blames the west for their exploitation of his ancestors as one of the reasons for his hatred of Christian culture. And included in that blame must be Winston Churchill and the British Government for their role in the forced creation of Iraq. That hatred was then transferred to America when we took over the influence and meddling into those Arab populated countries after World War Two concluded. Our ever-increasing need for cheap oil ensured that we would remain a major interloper and predictable bogeyman of hatred by those people as long as we remain there.

The mistrust and animosity these three Iraqi enclaves have against each other will prove fatal to that nation’s chances of having a true democracy that is patterned after the United States. And even though the majority of each of the ethnic groups just approved the constitution submitted to them by their legislators at Uncle Sam’s urging it’s obvious that they will never have a stable country with self-jurisdiction if and when our military leaves as this trio of enemies will certainly begin a civil war of revenge, retribution and planned dominance against the others once we do depart.

So is it arrogance on our part to presume that three tribes who have hated each other for centuries on differences of their own religion and culture would get along in our forced democracy on them? The only time they ever really tolerated each other this last century was when the dictators were in control and they kept everybody in line via the threat of a loaded gun, as those groups have never tasted the fruits of majority decisions, just edicts imposed on them by a king or dictator! The American people wouldn’t stand for such rigid control of a populace if that was considered as the only option we had left to pursue.

Any examples of what will assuredly happen there for us to study? Of course! Look at what happened to the different ethnic groups that were once a part of the vibrant nation of Yugoslavia. Those groups also only got along under the threat of brute force by Marshall Tito for fifty years at the end of World War Two. Within several years of his death the provinces there began a civil war onto each other that was stopped only when military forces of the United Nations had to intercede.

We must then presume, based on what happened in the former Yugoslavia, that massive chaos will develop throughout Iraq once our military leaves. So, if we leave now, it’s certain that civil war will breakout amongst this threesome of bitterly divided cultures with their neighbor country of Iran picking up the pieces to their own benefit. Can we presume that the same thing will happen three years from now or five years if our troops are then able to make their exit?

Even if we don’t leave in the short-term period of the remaining time left in the Bush Administration it’s apparent that those three ethnic groups will begin a political and military struggle against each other for control of that highly important yet volatile landmass with the United States military and government desperately trying to come up with a solution for a problem that will be impossible to resolve.

Could Winton Churchill’s forced creation of Iraq back in 1922 eventually cause the downfall of the United States one century later? The rebel forces in Afghanistan beat the old Soviet Union in 1989 and that loss contributed to that union’s dissolution into smaller, less thriving states in 1991. Will Saddam Hussein have the last laugh if it turns out that the Iraq quagmire Winston Churchill gave us leads to a final breakup of that nation’s three tribes into smaller states that are constantly at war with each other and their neighbors? And by our own meddling into Iraq’s affairs could it even lead to our own country’s ruin?

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com