Civil, Peaceful Islam

If only hindsight could somehow warn before the decisions were made leading to a future that would represent a miserably failed venture in adequately foreseeing consequences when making choices debating and weighing what appeared required to prevent the future from happening in the way it chose to unfold. If that seems like a labyrinthine and specious reasoning, it is only because that's what it is, since we cannot foresee the future, much less the way in which culture, heritage and religion inform the choices that others make.

There was, to begin with, international resistance against the determination of the United States to mount an aggressive occupation of Iraq, under the dictatorial clutches of megalomaniacal Saddam Hussein. How could the Western agencies quite understand the toxic mixture they were unleashing of tribal and sectarian adversarial loathing, kept well in hand through the oppressive force of threats and violence by a fearsome tyrant?

On the other hand, the unexpected always seems to erupt in the Middle East, with deadly flare-ups ignited by suspicion, hatred and a penchant for bloodshed. Where ruthless tyrants see nothing amiss in the use of lethal gas to subdue an insurrection, and where their populations learn to tread lightly knowing that stray words are capable of going directly from their mouths to the ears of the state's security apparatus who solve such problems with arrest, torture and death.

Iraq and Syria, with Lebanon and Jordan teetering dangerously on the edge of falling into the volcanic crater of explosive sectarian violence, are in the throes of inter-tribal, religious slaughter. And just to ensure that the butchery continues unabated, the split of Islamist Sunni and Shia jihadis have Al-Qaeda captaining one team, and the Iranian paramilitary Al Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard captaining the other. Their fight is to the death of one or the other, but a draw is more likely.

Iraq is now governed by the alternate of the Sunni-Baathist party that Saddam wielded his power base from; the very nation with whom he fought a disastrous seven-year no-holds-barred conflict with, has gained influence in the new Iraq. Under the tutelage of Iran, Iraq's majority-Shia leaders have sidelined the minority Iraqi Sunnis who once oppressed the Shia. Senior members of Saddam's military now comprise the leadership of Al-Qaeda's Iraq branch.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is now the successor to Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, responsible for murdering coalition forces during the US "Coalition of the Willing" invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam. Comprised of the Sunni faithful of a military dispersed with contempt rather than bringing them into an Iraqi coalition of the willing, the future could be seen in the present, though no one was looking for it.

But Islamist loyalties are also extremely peculiar, and when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS announced his merger with Jabhat al-Nusra to which Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawhiri had given his official blessing, al-Baghdadi's announcement was denounced and he and his group snubbed. ISIS has earned that disfavour by fighting other rebels, kidnapping activists and journalists, destroying Shiite shrines, beheading rival Islamists.

Too miserably cruel even for Al-Qaeda when it tortured and executed children, perhaps in emulation of the Syrian regime's tactics.

Rebel infighting has been estimated to have cost one thousand lives in a two-week period even as the Geneva negotiations proceed between the regime and the opposition, with UN and Arab League Lakhdar Brahimi, frantically attempting to bridge the credulity gap between them. Even by Middle East standards this has turned out to be a complex all-way conundrum of conflicts erupting from all quarters.

Syria's butchering President Bashar al-Assad knew of what he spoke when he warned that Syria's collapse would embrace the entire Middle East, for it's on its way to metastasizing, and no one can know where it will end. The war between the regime with its allies Iran, Hezbollah and Shia Iraqis flooding into Syria, and the war between the Syrian rebels and the foreign jihadis allied with Al-Qaeda. The rebels backed by Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.