June 23, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Emperor Bush’s Spartacus: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi
 
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
 

Cicero

The time of the 176th Olympiad in 71 B.C.E. was far from being peaceful for the Roman Republic. While rebel general Sertorian was raging in Spain, King Mithridatic was causing problems in the East, and pirates unbridled on the entire sea. Meanwhile, the Roman Republic had to deal with its third slave uprising led by Spartacus who allegedly had served as an auxiliary in the Roman army in Macedonia. Having deserted the army, Spartacus was outlawed, arrested, and sold into slavery to the gladiatorial school of Lentulus Batiates in Capua.
 
In 73 B.C.E. Spartacus escaped with about 78 gladiators, seizing various gladiatorial weapons at the school, and camped on Vesuvius to be quickly joined by other rural slaves. The group brutally overran the region plundering and pillaging everywhere they went. The Senate sent a praetor, Claudius Glaber to put out the rebellion with some 3000 raw recruits hastily drafted from the region.
 
The Roman forces were almost completely annihilated by Spartacus, who was leading almost 100,000 escaped slaves to move north into central Italy pillaging and killing along the way. At Picenum Spartacus defeated the consular armies, then pushed further north and crushed the proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul at Mutina. However, the rebel group could not escape Italy so they returned south continuing their rampage. In 71 B.C.E., the slaves gained one more minor victory against part of Marcus Licinius Crassus' forces, but were finally wiped out by Crassus' legions in a major battle in southern Italy, near the headwaters of the Siler River. It is believed that Spartacus was killed in this battle, but there were so many corpses his body was never identified.
 
Error of judgment induced the Roman Senate to take the uprising too lightly at the outset and by the time Rome determined to take firm steps, Spartacus' ranks had considerably swelled and the state's finest soldiers were serving abroad. The Third Servile War, which was known to be one of the three major slave rebellions of ancient Rome, eventually took ten legions to suppress. Spartacus' revolt sent a clear to message to the Roman people that slaves would not always be going along with their destiny, but could turned into a dangerous force to shake up the empire.
 
It is no doubt that in today’s world Spartacus and his rebels for what they had done would definitely be labeled as “terrorists”. Indeed, Spartacus used the dissatisfaction of the Roman slaves under ruthless oppression to build a sabotaging force that terrorized the Italian Peninsula for three years. The death of the terrorist leader Spartacus along with 6,000 of his followers did not put to an end the rage fueling the revolt. Death of leaders, be it Spartacus, Stalin, Che Guevara or their clones does not automatically solve the fundamental social problems even though their political opponents like to use this to espouse their own successes.
 
Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was a terrorist of the worst kind to the majority of the people of the world except the jihadists; his death was an important milepost in the battle against horror that had seized the country of Iraq.
 
However, it would not spell the end of terrorism in Iraq, which would simply go on and on until the various groups come to realize that they are destroying their own society. Zarqawi before his death had trained an entire school of foreign jihadists, just as if Zarqawi was trained by bin Laden.
 
With the two of them out of picture, there are still more than 300 of the same group roaming the world filled with the same hatred.
 
Emperor Bush and Pro-Counsel Rumsfeld may have felt well justified to trumpet about the victory over the death of Zarqawi, but they should not make believe that this marked the beginning of the end of his form of terrorism. Just like the Roman Senate applauding Generals Pompey and Crassus at the death of Spartacus while neglecting the underlying causes for his rebellion, the United States is busy celebrating the defeat of a symbolic terrorist leader without scrutinizing the fundamental reasons behind the robust support for dictatorial regimes in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the problems of Palestine.
 
The peoples of these regions are seeking their own form of freedom. We may disagree on the theocratic version of government they chose, but it is their right to chose. Trying to rebalance these countries into sectarian nations may not be a realistic solution at this point of time to a deep-rooted conflict more than a dozen centuries old.
 
Indeed, it has been a long story, one that is far from being just black and white. From the seventh century on as the Arabs conquered much of North Africa and the Middle East from the Byzantine Empire these areas became Moslem theocratic pieces of their Empire. It is interesting to note that when Jerusalem capitulated to a minor Arab officer named Khalid ibn Thabit in 638 C.E. and when the Dome of the Rock was built, the early Jewish Midrash hailed the Muslims as the initiators of Israel’s redemption for rebuilding the “House of the Lord”.
 
However, when Jerusalem became open to all religions and even the Jews participated with the Muslims at the Dome of the Rock, things have changed. The theocratic Muslim empires went into deterioration while the Jewish people of Israel and the Muslims became combatants. Today, the areas are plagued by the resurgence of the Muslim theocracies coupled with mounting hatred between them and Israel.
 
Nevertheless, history will likely prove to all that no theocracy -- be it Christian or Muslim -- is truly sustainable as people become more educated. Similarly, Muslim and Israel hatred must and will be abated as each realizes, and accepts the inevitable of living with the other, as they used to do in the past, for neither would rightly have a claim that deserves the destruction of the other.
 
As a third party, the United States should take a broader, history-based perspective in helping with the situation, focusing on true resolution of the conflicts instead of giving a unilateral support of either side, and making it worse for both.
 
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Editor’s Note: In the 1952 movie “Five Fingers,” James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name “Cicero.” His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn’t believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is “Operation Cicero.” The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.