The Middle East has always been a time bomb. It still is.
From the time the Jewish people migrated into the area now known as Israel, a few thousand years ago, until now, this area has known war without end. The Bible has a passage containing Moses' use of spies to scout the Holy Land before they occupied it. (In North America, we did the same thing, but we didn't just conquor the indiginous people, we eliminated most of them.)
Now, the Arab crescent is boiling over with unhappy young and disadvantaged people who have known only kings and dictators. Is it possible for democracy to succeed in such places?
In the United States, I believe we hope so. In fact, I'd bet most of the world hopes that the kings and dictators will be replaced with tolerant governments. Would this be good for the United States? Would it make a permanent peace with Israel possible? It's very hard to say.
My personal opinion is that the current unrest in the Middle East was inevitable. It is a repeat of history not just from that region, but from the world over. Look back to the mid-nonteenth century's revolts in Europe, where Prince Metternich played a prominent role. From the mid-1840's to World War One, there was a time of conflict in Europe between the rich and poor leading to a few mostly-failed revolutions. During the Great Depression (the one in the 1920's and 1930's, not the current one), global conflict between the rich and poor intensified. World War Two ended that conflict, but it's happening again all over the planet. What's happening in the Middle East is more visable that what's happening in the United States, but greed for power among the rich and a desire for a decent life among the poor will always set the stage for violence and change.
History repeats itself. It's not that we don't learn lessons from history. It's that greed and power are what motivate those who seek to govern. The real lesson is in our DNA. We're built like this.
Expect the worst to happen. Be surprised when, or if, it doesn't. As for me, the current unrest is marvelous fodder for spies and their roles in political power shifts. As a fiction writer, it's time to sit and watch.
After all, the Middle East has always been a time bomb.
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Yeah! Unfortunately, my intuition tells me that these conflicts will ultimately end the world as we know it.
ReplyDeleteFewer people will survive and the misery index will go through the roof. The plain fact is that the human race is unsustainable.
Before it was truncated into the Arab crescent, it was known as the Jewish bagel.
ReplyDeleteHere's why there is not a single democracy that is not in reality a military or strong man dictatorship of one sort or another in the Muslim world, not to mention outright non-constitutional hereditary monarchies: Islam began and purports to return to the ideal of the Caliphate, just such a dictatorship, based on the model bequeathed to Islam by its founder, and run under his Sharia law. It would be what they call the "Dar al Islam," the Islamic World. Mohammed was given 10,000 years to deliver the world to Allah by the archangel Michael, whose voice is alleged to have dictated the Q'uran to him and likewise guided him, as well as his descendants, throughout his career and subsequent world history.
The current score, after only 1400 years, is that Islam has subsumed one third of the world's land mass and one fifth of its population. That's well ahead of schedule and why Muslims believe they are succeeding and divinely guided. In fact, of all the areas that have fallen to Islam, in all of history only the Iberian peninsula and Israel have ever escaped its thrall, a tiny fraction.
Sharia law forbids the public criticism of Muslims by Muslims, in general, and of Muslim government leaders, in particular. They are the leaders by the will of Allah, inherent in their constantly used phrase "inshallah," and therefore no more subject to error than anything else they believe. Muslims do not admit that their divinely guided descisions are ever wrong for that reason and when things go wrong, the problems are always blamed on the "unfaithful," whom they term Kaffirs. It is part of their beliefs that if everyone submitted (Islam) to the will of Allah, there would be, in fact, no errors and the world would become a living paradise.
It is the reason they have a practically non-existent learning curve and why they seem to have permitted so many incredibly despotic regimes througout most of their history. It is why they have never had a single genuine popular democracy. There must always be a strong man (who must be a man.) And it is the reason I do not believe they will ever develope secular democracy, as we know it. The whole concept is forbidden by Islam. Their sexism alone prohibits full participation by the majority, which is female.
Lebanon, by the way, is a mixed Muslim-Christian nation. All other Islamic entities that profess to be secular, such as Turkey, Indonesia, or in Central Asia, are military dictatorsips. Islam eschews democracy, per se. Probably the closest they will ever come are Islamic Republics, where secular parliaments are only rubber stamps for religious dictatorships, such as in Iran.