Editor,
The Middle East will only become stable once Western white powers leave the region. They have been colonizing, ruling and now occupying and generally brutalizing the lives of people there for a century; And a salient example is Iraq.
Iraq was invaded by the Brits as far back as World War I while squabbling with Germany and other European powers for rule over that region. Then Britain ruled and exploited Iraq since 1920, installing a puppet “king” of the Hashemite family. Even after Iraq’s independence from the Brits, Britain sent troops to Baghdad during World War II and forced upon the Iraqis a new government, claiming this was the way to keep Germany from possessing the country. Not surprisingly anti-Western hostility reached a boiling point among Iraqis, and Hashemite rule was abolished in a revolt by their General Qassem, but he in turn was ousted by a CIA-built coup in 1963. Saddam Hussein came into power, and in yet another example of the US taking one side and then the other, the US effectively sided with Hussein and set up a CIA office in Baghdad in the early 80s during the protracted war between Iraq and Iran, then had him killed relatively recently.
All this history shows that the Iraqis have every right to be left alone now, and the only way is for these US-led occupiers to get the hell out of there. They are seen in large part as a re-colonizing wave.
Instead, we now we have had the US and other white majority nations playing the Shia in Iraq off the Sunni, flooding that nation too, with arms to this and that side, and keeping the fires going instead of just singling out proven terrorists and hunting them down as common criminals to be brought before a court of justice that meets American standards, which is right here in the US.
So can you blame Iraqis from generations of this subjugation to now be joining the throngs of desperate refugees fleeing their own country, and, as karmic blowback, be landing on the shore of their former colonizer?
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
