'Nothing But Trouble'
"I mean rarely does an entire region of the world melt down roughly at the same time, with more moving parts all running in the wrong direction. It's going to get worse before it gets worse."
"We [U.S. presence] haven't helped matters but if I had to account for the percentage of responsibility for this broken, angry, dysfunctional region it's 90 percent them and ten percent us."
Aaron David Miller, Middle East expert, Wilson Center, U.S.
"I actually think we will see the United States become much more re-engaged in the region again".
"There are no easy answers. As I tell my students, the art of foreign policy-making is not choosing between a good and bad choice, it's choosing between multiple bad choices or a bad choice and a really bad choice."
"[Despite which, predictions in the Middle East] is a fool's errand because we almost always get it wrong."
William Inboden, former G.W. Bush national security adviser
The Islamic Middle East and North Africa aren't only coming apart at the seams, but the very countries comprising the geography are splitting apart, no longer recognizable as complete geographic entities. Libya and Iraq have disintegrated into the sum of their disparate and warring parts, each losing the iron-fisted tyrants that had kept them intact, as a result of U.S.-spurred intervention.
The conceit that if only the uprightly righteous countries of the world made an effort to point these countries in the direction of democracy by removing dictators the people would mount their own efforts to achieve liberty and opportunity for advancement adapting their societies to democratic rule, has proved wanting. And perhaps in any other culture than a tribal-based, sectarian-hostile environment that might have worked.
Tunisia, long patterning itself in a democratic, Western-oriented design, proved the exception, even as it represented the first country to be roiled by what became to be known universally as the Arab Spring. Turkey, yet another country whose society has long been Europe-linked as a causeway between the oceans-apart East and West, whose government has been secular and democratic since the 1920s has not experienced that social upheaval though it has become Islamist.
But Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen have dissolved as states, as violent challenges to state order have taken each from an intact if not completely unified country to being divided into ethnic, religious, competing, hostile entities. And just to add to the chaos, the fanatical Islamist element of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and its offshoots and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and its offshoots now vie for territorial advantage.
The Middle East has always been roiled with tribal and sectarian hostilities. And it has always treated its minorities in a hatefully disadvantaged manner, considering them less entitled to citizenship and equality under Sharia or state law than Arabs and Muslims. The burning hatred between Sunni and Shiite, the hostility toward Christians and Jews, the disadvantaging of Kurds and other minority ethnic groups has ensured the geography's instability.
Iran stands alone as the threatening Shiite powerhouse, an Aryan nation of Persians, in a sea of Arab Muslims. The Republic has, since its transformation with the Iranian Revolution, become a malign force for instability in the Middle East and well beyond. Its incitement for the formation of terrorist groups on which it could rely to do its unsettling, violent bidding, represents an outreach of power.
With a feeble, embattled Iraq now aligned with Iran, and Syria as a client state struggling to surmount a Sunni insurgency and Islamist terrorism run amok, and its proxy militia Hezbollah representing itself as Lebanon's effective military and co-governing the country, and now Yemen's quandary with Houthi Shiites inspired and backed by Iran to broaden Iranian hegemony, the intact Sunni states in the Middle East have been put on notice.
By a country whose insistence that it is entitled to acquire nuclear installations as a means by which it can ensure it has ample energy resources for the future, when it is a country whose endowment with world-class resources in oil and gas reserves make nuclear as an energy source completely redundant. No one is under any illusions that Iran's push for nuclear is not meant for the purpose of acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities.
The geography that has always been a tinder-box of unexpected explosive action, has become a hugely volatile area where states are no longer recognizable, where conflict and violence, hatred and death stalk the population in each of these afflicted countries, seeping their malignant pathology across borders into other, as yet barely affected countries whose rulers shudder at the prospect of the near future.
The simmering struggles between Turkey and Egypt, above all Iran and Saudi Arabia background the actively vicious disintegration of the failed states. While it is true that the 2011 uprisings represented frustration experienced by many young Arabs, they were as much an expression of economic frustration and lack of employment and opportunities by the vast populations of the underprivileged.
And though the youth of the Arab Spring demonstrations called for liberty and democratic rule, equality and opportunities for advancement, there has been the alter vision of other contingents of Arab youth, those who espouse the version of Islam that calls uppermost for jihad, and that has spawned the viciously self-righteous surge of Islamofascism and calls for a resurgent caliphate to triumph over the non-Muslim world of the infidels and the Jews.
What's more, the world outside the Middle East is not immune to the dysfunction afflicting the Islamic world. For one thing, the Islamic world has exported a significant portion of itself through migration to the non-Muslim world. This migration has caused a notable disruption in parts of the world where Islam had never historically penetrated. It has now, and it clamours for the non-Muslim world to become Muslim.
From Australia to South Africa, France to the Netherlands, the Philippines to China, Canada to Britain, the large and growing Muslim demographic in these countries is asserting itself, calling on Western lawmakers to recognize Islamic rights as entitled under law and the generosity of the Western social covenant dedicated to equality and fair-mindedness. Trouble arises when equality is not sufficient to meet the demands of those who consider themselves privileged.
And despite the more than adequate evidence of disequilibrium evidenced in the violence extruded by Islam throughout the world as fundamentalist Islamists engage in jihad while sanctimoniously demanding 'equality', even as they seek conquest to achieve a universal caliphate holding the rest of the world in thrall, their message is reverberating in a positive manner, calling in youth searching for excitement, adventure and 'meaning' in their lives.
Analysts are now predicting that over the next four decades Islam is expected to spread worldwide at a pace unmatched by any other major religion. In that time span the Muslim population globally will be close to matching that of Christians in numbers and share of the global population. While Christianity will remain the largest religious group with an increase to 2.98 billion by 2050 should current trends continue, Muslims are expected to reach 2.76 billion.
Each faith group is slated to attain roughly 30 percent of the world population, according to analysts from the Pew Research Centre. And should, as is entirely likely, Islamists continue to target Christians, the clash between the two religious titans may some day create an even more chaotic world globally than what is currently taking place in the Middle East and North Africa.
Labels: Al-Qaeda, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihad, Lebanon, Libya, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen
posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 06, 2015
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