Wednesday 4 February 2015

Lost and disoriented: The West's policy in the Middle East

I have never imagined that I would see such low levels of human depravity since Joseph Mengele skinning children alive and sewing them together to try and create Siamese twins from living people. Today I watched a video of ISIS terrorists setting a man alight with what is their version of pomp and ceremony.

What is the world coming to? Does anybody know how to stop this? Does anybody have a vision and policies that will work in the Middle East? Certainly not the USA and their allies in my personal opinion. They are passengers in a runaway train just like the rest of us. Unfortunately, that runaway train is our entire world.

Nobody is saying it in as many words but to anyone with half a brain it is clear that the USA'S policy in the Middle East is in a pathetic and confused shambles. Past decisions have lacked vision. They have also been steeped in dangerously overconfident ignorance.

If we look at the history of Al Qaeda and now the Islamic State, the bottom line is that it is American money and support that has been incubating the most problematic terrorists. When they are chicks, the Americans are busy pampering and feeding them, but when they grow damaging beaks and claws, the Americans start crying foul.

 I remember that Dubya's rhetoric in the run-up to the 2001 invasion of Iraq. It was all about fostering democracy and exporting American ideals to Iraq. If things had gone according the vision he espoused, Iraq by now would be a liberal democratic society bordering on becoming the 52nd US state.

Nobody foresaw the quagmire of tribes and sects butchering each other that it is now. It is a place teeming with two cent tribalists threatening to export terror to the entire world, turning the USA into an Islamic province in their own words.

American politicians can be excused for their ignorance. America is a migrant society where virtually nobody belongs to a tribe. Consequently they do not understand the power of tribal loyalties, and the magma-like simmering of long standing tribal rivalries and sects. When such simmering grievances erupt, it is with volcanic violence.

Rwanda is an example of how quickly and seemingly suddenly tribal and sectarian violence can escalate. Tribal mistrust can last for generations. It cannot be swiftly puffed away by lofty ideals like democracy and liberalism. Tribal differences passed from generation to generation for centuries by word of mouth are difficult to erase.

Conflict has a way of quickly finding these tribal fault lines and tear them apart rather. Divisions rarely persist along the lines that outsiders may have wanted or imagined. Look at how the conflict in Iraq and Syria has quickly found the sectarian fault lines, rather than be idealistic struggles of democrats against oppressors. Oh, not to forget Libya too.

I have been trying to wrap my small mind around the issues of the Middle East. It might not be big enough to cover a very big problem but my simplified understanding is as follows.

The Americans have a history of buying oil from Sunni Saudi Arabia. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Shia led Iran humiliated them. The Sunni Egypt and Jordan signed a peace agreement with their close ally Israel. The Shia led Syria refused. To me it becomes understandable why the Americans have been pandering to the whims of the Sunni sect for the past three decades.

Unfortunately that has drawn the Americans into a sectarian conflict in Western lifestyle and ideals are the perfect symbols of decadence and sin loathed by the more extreme side. The West is not a role model for these extremists as Dubya fooled himself into believing, but the ultimate target in their effort to wipe out what they see as decadent and sinful lifestyles blocking the road to their version of religious Utopia.

Instead of privately reigning in wild allies, the West they stick by them. I do not mean Israel, but allies like Saudi Arabia. I do not know if the West have noticed that Saudi Arabia is the only state that beheads convicts. It is the role model of an Islamic state which ISIS are trying to better.

It seems, for the West, everything is fine when Islamists are beheading hundreds of Arabs, migrant workers and the occasional teenage girl. It only becomes a scandal when exactly the same principles are used to behead a couple of Westerners.

Saudi Arabia has been beheading convicts for decades without as much as a murmur of protest from the West. Indeed, the other day I saw a photograph of Prince Charles, resplendent in garb typical of a Saudi be-header, busy hobnobbing with the elite.

Beheading should not only be reprehensible when done by ISIS. All people who respect human dignity should oppose it whenever it happens, and never appear to condone it.

Right now the most efficient way to fight ISIS would be to get the Syrian government to regain control of its territory. However for some twisted reason, the West would rather have a three way fight, whose outcome they do not know. Their strategists may think otherwise, but I have as much faith in them as I have in a n'anga (witch-doctor) promising to attach back the head of a dead person and bring him back to life.

Why the Western educated Bashar is such anathema to them I do not understand. They hate him so much that they would rather take their chances with some tribal morons who have little knowledge of the world beyond their desert hideouts. That is what ISIS are. ISIS came out of the rebels the West are now busy calling 'moderate'.

Yes Bashar is a dictator but I think it is easier to manage him than it is to manage ISIS. Besides transition in Syria can always be pressured onto him through negotiations. That transition might not yield exactly what the West wants, but whatever it will be I am willing to bet that it will be a better animal than ISIS.