Iraq

The war in Iraq, and the American occupation, ended a few days ago. Almost immediately, it seems, all hell has broken loose. The very next day the Iraqi President, who is a Shia, ordered the arrest of his Vice-President, who is a Sunni, on terrorism charges. The Vice-President has gone into hiding in the autonomous Kurdish area, and the Kurds, who traditionally mediate between the Sunnis and the Shias, won’t give him up. And there are the usual bombings.

It’s a farce. You couldn’t have made it up. Under Saddam Hussein, you had the minority Sunnis suppressing the majority Shias. All the American attempts at democracy, and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, always seemed likely to result merely in the reversal of this equation: namely the suppression of the minority Sunnis by the majority Shias. That is precisely what has started to happen the day after the Americans formally relinquished their role.

You could argue, though, that as the Shias are in the majority, they won’t have to try quite so hard, or have to be quite so brutal, in keeping their opponents under control.

It’s a family feud. You’d have thought that as they were all Muslims, they could get on. But no. Look at the way Catholics and Protestants treated each other in Europe a few hundred years ago. (Or even in Northern Ireland now.) We are talking a medieval mentality, and perhaps family fights are the bitterest of all. Sunni Muslims are in the majority overall in the Middle East. A friend who is a Sunni, a quiet, friendly chap, once informed me in very relaxed terms that Shias are not real Muslims. It was a simple fact for him. He did not need to adopt a fanatical attitude to tell me this.
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Geopolitically, the Iraq invasion has led to a shift in the balance of power between Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion, the only major Shia country was Iran. Now its neighbour Iraq is a Shia country. Iran is almost nuclear-armed (although we don’t know how much damage the recent air strikes, which were played down, caused) and likely to dominate its oil-rich but fragile neighbour. By invading Iraq, all America is likely to have achieved is another dictatorship that will be the friend, instead of the enemy, of its own greatest enemy, Iran.

Talk about irony, defined as ‘a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result.’ It is a great, modern story of human folly.

America’s larger motive was to maintain control of the Middle East, a vital energy source for the country. It’s secret motive was access to the Iraqi oil-fields: that may be the one thing it has achieved out of all this, but to what extent and for how long?

Sovereignty was formally handed back to the Iraqis on 28th June 2004 at 9.26am. I noted that chart (you could argue for other ones, like the first elections) about 6 years ago, as it seemed very descriptive of what was likely to come.

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The chart has a Grand Trine made up of the Sun, the Moon and Angular Uranus. This is a country (leader plus people, Sun and Moon) that is naturally unstable and divided (Uranus.) That’s it, really, reading over.

The Sun is at 7 degrees of Cancer, and over the next year will be experiencing the full force of the Uranus-Pluto square. The one thing you can be sure about is that in a year’s time the government that is in place will not be the same as the one they have now. If the President, Nouri al-Maliki, remains, he is likely to be more of a dictator than a democratically elected leader.

But what else can you do? When a country is made up of warring tribes – as is Afghanistan – often the only thing that will work is force. Dictators are sometimes a necessary evil.

Not only is Uranus-Pluto hard-aspecting the Iraqi Sun. Neptune is concluding a square to the MC and beginning an opposition to the Asc. When you see a person going through transits of this intensity, you know they are moving not just from one phase of their life to another, but probably to a totally new life.

We can expect events to unfold very quickly in Iraq over the next year, and probably not in the way the Americans would have wanted. They began the war at about the most inauspicious time possible. It almost makes you think George Bush must have consulted an astrologer.

As a member of the 15 families who secretly rule America, he needed the war to be as expensive as possible in order to benefit the military-industrial complex. Joke! I'm not really a conspiracist! Read the comments section in a day or two and I'll probably have said why.

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The time to begin things is in the cardinal signs, the time to establish is in the fixed signs, and the time to let things fall apart, to go with the flow, is under the mutable signs. The Iraq war was begun with the Sun at 29 Pisces, the most mutable degree of the (in a sense) most mutable sign, the end of the zodiac. The worst possible time to start something. And the Angles were mutable as well, with Saturn-Pluto running along the MC-IC, telling of death and destruction that is out of control (mutable.)

This war came to an end as Uranus stationed within a degree of the Pisces Sun. What you really want is an ending under Saturn: properly thought through and done at the proper time. A Uranus ending is anything but this, but the Americans probably didn’t have much choice, not after such an inauspicious start.