The End of Iraq?

I saw the cover of the latest Time Magazine as it arrived in the mail today. The Mail lady brought us the mail to our door because of a package in the mail today. As I looked at it Iraq was burned away in fire and in the center the letters "The End of Iraq" burned into my thoughts.

But, as someone who has studied what is happening in the middle east ongoing I agree, "It is the end of Iraq" at least as we know it. There will be Kurdish Iraq as one nation. There will Be ISIL Iraq and northern Syria combined and there will be likely "Iranian Iraq" the way all this is shaping up now. There are now De facto 3 Iraqs and neither Assad or Maliki has the support to take back their lost land. Both of them will be lucky to keep the land they still have left.

Without going back to World War I it is easier for me to go back to Assad's father and Saddam Hussein. When Assad (with the help of Russia and Iran and Hezbollah) massacred Sunnis unmercifly who wanted freedom in Syria this all began and it brought it all to this point.

It reminds me a lot of how our own Civil War began only instead of plantation slave owners and northerners who were beginning the industrial revolution about then, we have Sunnis being oppressed in Syria and Sunnis being oppressed in Iraq. Then we have the Kurdish (mostly Sunni Kurdish) fighting for their own oil wells and lands to the north and east of the Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.

What will happen next? That likely depends a lot on the U.S., Europe, Russia and Iran and Hezbollah and ISIL. I think Maliki government is a dysfunctional one presently in Iraq. So, until Maliki is gone and replaced by someone who actually works for Sunnis and Kurds in addition to Shias, 3 Iraqs are going to exist in the long and short run.

So now, we have (The end of Syria) (At least as we knew it up until about 3 years ago), and the end of Iraq (at least as we have known it since World War I.)

I think the real  problem we face in the middle east (as westerners: Europeans and Americans, Canadians and Australians) is "Trust".

All our cultures have been building up institutions of trust since the Magna Carta in the 1200s. There has been no such "Trust Building" unless you consider it to be within the confines of the Sunni Tradition or the Shia Tradition in the middle east.

Forgetting this, Westerners are completely naive about what is really going on. Because without trust   and trust building institutions ongoing no democracy can long exist. We are presently seeing this in the Maliki government and the only ones even close to getting it right might be Turkey but even there democracy is very fragile, especially these days.