All lies and jest (Paul Simon)... all massacres. Ten years since the Iraqi state was dismantled. Ten years since the great lie – a lie that has multiplied into many. The most dangerous of them was the claim of spreading democracy. The most awful of them was that of turning Iraq into an oasis and a model for the new Middle East. From George Bush Junior to Tony Blair, and from Silvio Berlusconi to his Spanish counterpart José Maria Aznar, they all lied deliberately. They lied, and we believed them. The exposure of their lies and the absence of any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq did not prevent them from carrying their plans through. Conservatives and Democrats, Leftists in labor governments, or right-wingers in colonialist governments – they all made light of us, of our peoples and of our feelings. Under the slogan of saving us from dictatorship, they destroyed everything. They stole our archaeology and our history. They tore apart our geography. We helped them fragment our society and our civilization. They returned us, and we obediently returned, to a pre-state condition. We restored the glory of our tribes, clans, confessions and sects. We lost our states and did not gain our freedom. We restored the worst of our past to destroy our present and our future. Our history is advancing upside down. The struggle for power justifies everything. They (the Americans and the West) want our wealth. They do not care about the religion of our rulers, their sects or their confessions. All they care about is for them to be their obedient followers. They ally with Islamists to confront Iran, and they ally with Iran to confront the Taliban. The Islamists are demanding military intervention in Syria. They have risen to power in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. They have not departed from the policies of those they had rebelled against and toppled. They gave America what it wanted. They mobilized Takfiris (Islamists who brand others apostates) to confront anyone who would oppose their policies. Turkey, which not long ago was an enemy, has become a supporter. Israel, our main enemy, has become a friend to some. Ten years since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in Turkey. Enough time to reveal his true nature and his efforts to restore the glory of the Ottoman Empire. All of his statements never fail to assert such a goal. The glory of the Ottomans had been at our expense. They kept us in the Dark Ages, while the West, our savior from the tyranny of the Sultan, drew our borders to fit our sects and tribes (Sykes-Picot). The new Sultan mixed between nationalism, religion and membership in NATO: fierce nationalism to strengthen the ethnic cohesion of the Turks in the face of other peoples, religion to obscure his nationalist ambitions and confront the Left and the military on the domestic scene, and NATO to be affiliated to advanced countries and wave threats of the arsenal and political cover at his disposal in confronting anyone who would oppose him. Yet neither his religious cover nor the West's arsenal has been able to protect him from the revolution of the Kurds, which has been ongoing since the 1980s. It is a revolution that threatens all of the ambitions of the new Sultan, who did not take it into account when he participated in the assault on Libya and embraced Syria's armed fighters. The Sultan adopted the “Arab Spring", and the Kurdish Nowruz took him by surprise both inside and outside of Turkey. He was thus forced to seek reconciliation, impelled to do so by Kirkuk's oil and in order to prevent the spread of Damascus's “Spring" to Anatolia. Yet such a way out is only temporary and will not convince the Kurds, even if Öcalan himself were to order them to lay down their weapons. Thus Ghassan Hitto has been handed over control of the areas of Syria contiguous to the Sultanate's borders. The Kurdish Nowruz is besieging Iraq and Syria... and Turkey as well. The Arab movement which had started as a spring revolution has turned into a terrifying hurricane threatening everyone. And lying remains the truest of facts.
