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She'll be dead within a month.
She'll be dead within a month.
Winning breeds confidence. Losing breeds reality.
Actually I'm a big fan of Musharraf. He's going to drag that country kicking and screaming into the 20th century (21st century might be a little too much to expect).Originally Posted by Tahoe
Have they ever had one of those over there? Ever?
My opinions about Islam are pretty much totally vindicated by the state of Pakistan.
Pakistan used to be part of British India. Indian Muslims used to pitch around the idea that Muslims needed a homeland of their own "to prevent them from being oppressed by the majority Hindus." But when the British finally left India, the leader of the India Muslim League (Mohammed Ali Jinnah) basically refused to go along with anything unless India was carved up and the Muslims were given their own homeland. He told everyone that he knew for sure there would be riots against the Muslims if India was governed by majority rule. Mohandas Gandhi, who was the intellectual father of modern India, was strongly against partitioning India. In the temples where he was raised, they read from the Vedas and the Guru Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) as well as the Quran and the Bible. India is a famously religiously tolerant society.
So reluctantly, they came up with a scheme to partition India into a secular state ruled by the majority, and an "Islamic Republic" which would be constitutionally based on Islamic law. But the thing is that the Hindus and the Muslims were basically living right next door to one another throughout the entire country (still do, in many places). So in order to create Pakistan, there was a gigantic forced migration of non-Muslims out of Pakistan and a gigantic voluntary migration of Muslims into Pakistan. And marvel of marvels, there were huge riots anyway, and anywhere from 200,000 people to 1,000,000 people died in the fighting.
Pakistan's people are the same people as India's people, and the only difference is that they are a different religion. I'm not saying India is perfect by any stretch, but India has at least managed to move past some of the horrible things (assassinations, etc.) that have plagued it over the years. Pakistan has just gone completely fubar and it's not going to get better anytime soon, and the only reason I can come up with is that they are Muslims.
Good stuff. I remember reading on this but this definately knock the rust off.
Also, the Brits (actually Churchill) wanted to divide up what we know as Iraq into 3 countries for the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, but was shot down and they made it Iraq, iirc. That would be Churchill way before he was PM, but whatever position he held at the time.
The British and French definitely set the stage for the current state of the greater Middle East. It's way too late for them to take part in the un-fucking of it all though. Not too many countries in the world really have a pure, perfectly good reason to blame colonial empires for their problems, but Iraq happens to be one of them. There was basically nothing that made Iraq a valid country at all except the fact that it was made up of some old Ottoman Empire districts that were controlled by the British after WWI.
The British also helped the Saudis set up their nation, and so all their advice as to how to deal with Iraq came from the Saudi kings. When the British needed an Iraqi in a position of power, they always selected Sunnis (based on the advice of the Saudi kings - Sunnis all the way, of course). This was a monumental fuckup that is getting people (including American soldiers) killed to this very day. I'm telling you man, this map is what the Middle East really should look like:
??? Arab Shia State??? Iran is Persians and Arab Shia State would be Shiite ???
Yeah, before the Ottomans took over, Mesopotamia was ruled over by Persians, and that's why so much of the country are Shiites. But Iraqi Shiites aren't ethnically Persian, they're Arabs. They don't want to be part of Iran - Iranians speak a different language and they're ethnically different.
This map carves up Iraq and gives the Mesopotamian Sunni Arabs their own country, it gives the Kurds their own country, and it creates a new country for Arab Shiites. It's basically the "3-country solution" for Iraq, but put in the context of the best possible borders for every single Middle East country.
Reminds me of a Middle Eastern joke:
The Iranians say that 3 languages were spoken in the Garden of Eden. When Adam spoke with Eve, they spoke in Farsi (Persian), "the language of love." When Adam spoke with God, they spoke Arabic, "the language of law." When the angels with the flaming swords ordered them out of the Garden of Eden, they spoke Turkish, "the language of scaring the shit out of people."
To you and me, all 3 languages sound like an identical throat infection.
Swami, I thought I heard the same story (india-Pakistan) about Pakistan-Afghanistan.
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