QUOTE: The hollow state problem

"We cannot build a state that has another state inside it, we cannot build an army that has armies inside it."
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Diwaniya during a June visit. Iraq is far from alone on this.

Comments

[ramsis]

John
I find this quote interesting in that this problem seems to be one shared by lebonon and the palestinian territories as well as iraq. http://beirutspring.com/blog/2007/06/20/lahhoud-to-arab-delegates-second-government-off-the-table/
It seems to me that this is just the overall strategy of ahmadinejads plan sow anarchy throughout the region.
Ahmadinijad to the french foreign minister last year, "The path to God has to go through chaos"!

[adam]

Ramsis,

I think you may have fallen for some of the Neo-Con gibberish currently being spoken about the Middle East. The Neo-cons really don't have a clue about what they're talking about.

Looking at the blog that you're referring to it merely notes that the Lebanese president thinks that a national unity government is a good idea. What that means is that he likes breathing and lives in Lebanon. Lebanon is an incredibly divided nation and still suffers from many of the issues that the 1980s combination of Israeli invasion and civil war failed to resolve. The 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing did not help matters as it made the Lebanese government look completely ineffective. The current optimistic model for Iraq, by the way, is another Lebanon, so its not all doom and gloom.

For those with long memories (back to March this year) there was a conference in Riyadh which discussed the disasterous Sunni-Shia relationship. For Lebanon the big agreement was that the Lebanese would agree to UN examination of Hariri's murder (in return for some Lebanese cabinet seats for the opposition). The deal was aimed at Syria which everyone blames for the assassination (like we used to blame Lockerbie on Syria, then Libya, now its clear the Libyans are innocent its Syria again). Naturally this deal was "unacceptable" to the US who had a hissy fit about the opposition in Lebanon being given anything. Oh well, so no-one got anything. You might wonder about the reaction to the most senior Middle Eastern leaders about US meddling in their affairs... Or maybe not.

Lets look at the Lebanese arming option - another Neo-Con idea. The intention is to arm some people (undefined people, but we'll assume that its the Lebanese army) so that they'll fight Hezbollah. US-proxies the Saudis have already been providing money, weapons and equipment to the Lebanese army. The Lebanese army, you'll recall recently attempted to overrun a refugee camp in their own country and were so inept that fighting raged for weeks so the boding for them defeating the people that beat the IDF is not very high. However the good news is that the Saudis also gave money to quite a lot of the more extreme Sunni groups as a potential counterweight to Hizbollah. It was these groups that the Lebanese army were attempting to overrun. Its still something of a shock to the US government that its tools appear to have agendas of their own. From the Saudi perspective its more or less assumed that in any showdown Hizbollah will defeat the Lebanese army. The peculiar beauty of Lebanon is that Hizbollah didn't let the people running the refugee camp flee from the army as it was better for Hizbollah to have the Lebanese army eliminate a future potential enemy and for both the warring sides to waste their new toys.

Now lets look at the quote - I was suprised at seeing it. Firstly it appears on a US blog that appears fairly extreme right wing. And it doesn't appear in any newspapers. Then again its not a quote, its a paraphrase from person or persons unknown. I suspect that its made up.

I am aware that this doesn't mean much to the far-right in the US and they'll repeat it until the cows come home, so we might as well look at it here. Its a simple statement about the coming of the 12th (Hidden) Imam. The Imam returns after a period of chaos, defeats evil, brings back Jesus, and shows us how to live happily for some years. Then its the end of the world.

The return of the Imam is quite possibly the most important religious item currently being discussed in the Middle East. One of the funkier rumours in Iraq is that the entire US invasion is intended to locate and kill the 12th Imam. It explains why the US round up so many Iraqis - they're looking for someone. Many Iraqi Shiites now believe that the hidden Imam will now come back as the Mahdi who will restore the world to justice in preparation for the Judgment Day.
Moqtada al-Sadr is, incidentally, one of these people hence the need for his Mahdi Army - they're trying to stop the US from killing the saviour.

Before you laugh and say how crazy that is bear in mind that the christian fundamentalists that run Bush are also convinced that we're heading into the end times. Their agenda is to eliminate the Palastinians, re-build the Temple and let the end of the world begin (yee-hah!).

Shiites believe that Muhammad should have been succeeded by his descendants. The 12th Imam, went into hiding in 874 AD after the death of his father. During the "minor disappearance" the Twelfth Imam sent letters to the Shiite community (his Lesser disappearance) . Then, nothing, for a thousand years (the Greater disappearance). The Shi'ites believed that he hid himself in a cave below a mosque in Samarra. This is one of the most sacred sites in Shi'a Islam, and the faithful gather here to pray for the return of the Twelfth Imam. Prior to 2003 it was traditional for a single white horse, sadlled, without a rider, to wait outside the Mosque in case the Imam came out and needed to ride somewhere. Today its traditional for it to be truck bombed.

Yes, the Da Vinci Code does take this idea and make it Christianised, but the bottom line is that its the Hidden Imam that is the secret one.

Its a tribute to how ignorant the US military are that they let these shrines be destroyed - they are critical targets like the White House, or the Vatican. Inside Iraq such bombings merely increase the tempo of the Civil War. Outside Iraq the destruction of shrines has an major impact. Ahmadinejad is personally devoted to Twelfth Imam. The upshot is that a lot of important people in Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia blame the US for the desecrations. This is part of Powell's simle statement to Bush 'You broke it, you bought it'.

So is this quote true, probably not. Does it mean anything major, yes, but not in the way that the American far-right would believe.