Facts and Factions in the Middle East

When I was a young teenager, living as the son of an American diplomat, in Beirut, Lebanon, expectations of a better “Western-style” life rippled across the Middle East. American and British movies were everywhere, Western style was in vogue, and even those 1960s black and white TV sets often showed American and Western television programs. Iran was a bastion of bubbling modernity. Beirut was heavily Westernized. Cairo was grappling with growth in a sea of distracted poverty. Sunnis and Shiites seem to have put aside their centuries-old feud – Sunnis believe in the literal reading of the Qur’an while Shiites see it as a mystical tome that can only be read in interpreted by the most senior clerics – to live peacefully, side-by-side.

Leaders – like pan-Arabist Gamal Abul Nasser – found value in keeping Palestinians from assimilating into local Arab countries. He needed a bogyman to distract his constituents from his failed policies and abysmal poverty. By keeping Palestinians in their “refugee” camps – with powdered milk, open sewers and lots of barbed wire – he could blame Israel for just about anything he wanted. Palestinians were encouraged to rail and rage at Israel, to train their sons to “recapture the homeland or die,” and the anti-Israeli mantra kept more than one failed Arab leader in power for far longer than anyone might have guessed. We are today living with “blowback” from those serious miscalculations.

Mired in this mess was the harsh reality of power elites siphoning billions and billions (make that trillions) of dollars – money that could have been used to build schools, hospitals and massive new businesses that really could have solved the underlying economic problems – either because of the nature of the political structure (monarchs tending their wealth) or, more frequently, raw corruption that has seen money vaporize into well-protected Swiss (or other “banking secrecy”) accounts. During the Cold War, leaders accepted financial largesse from Soviet and Western pockets, playing each side against the other. Corruption crushed hope.

Slowly, many local Arabs and Persians began to realize that the promise of a better “Western” style life simply wasn’t going to happen. The West seemed content to push wealth into the hands of the few, ignoring the rest, if the leadership would simply embrace Western political policies. Most of the people now knew they were going to remain poor.

A new, rising level of both Shiite and Sunni fundamentalism drilled down on this notion of “nothing but poverty in this world.” In 1979, the modernist Iranian Shah was toppled and replaced with a Shiite Islamic Republic. New radical Muslims raised their voices across the entire Middle East. Saudi and Qatari (as well as other regional powers’) “guilt” money funded some of them. Rich regional leaders sought to buy peace from these nascent and increasingly powerful extremists. The radicals extolled the nobility of poverty, explaining that a failing pursuit of Western values was simply a distraction that would prevent the faithful from achieving passage to the afterlife. Madrasa schools created both literacy and hatred of things Western. A rising tide aimed at pushing out Western values to embrace this new Islamic explanation of life began to dominate the Middle East. You can even see this concept in the names of some of the new terrorist groups. Boko Haram (Nigeria) literally means “forbidden Western education and values.”

The situation has been exacerbated by the Great Recession and further slammed by global warming droughts that have rendered once rich farmland into desert dust. Millions of angry and further impoverished farmers have shunted their anger into the new fundamentalist tide that has swept the entire region. The Arab Spring, the rebellion in Syria, the rise of the Islamic State, the re-empowerment of the Taliban in Central and South Asia and even the “nothing left to lose” vile attacks on Israel emanating from Hama-controlled Gaza (notwithstanding the most recent “permanent ceasefire”) are all evidence of this macro-trend: a new clash of civilizations.

And as much as these rising tides of religious zealots terrify us in the West, as we are deeply repelled by beheading and genocide, many of the incumbent leaders in nations in and around the Middle East are more immediately threatened. Virtually every one of these militarist Islamic terrorist groups is focused on removing these incumbent leaders and replacing them with religious “republics.” As horrific as life in a repressed community might be, to many, the resultant stability and “ceasefire” is a whole lot better, in their eyes, than dire poverty with no hope or choice, literally under the boot of some corrupt “elected” or “monarchical” leader.

As Israel responds to Hamas attacks with powerful and devastating counter-attacked, the silence of the regions’ most powerful Arab leaders, the lack of criticizing Israel, is deeply significant. Israel is no longer the big threat. Americans are even talking about cooperating with the murderous Syrian Assad regime to defeat the vicious Islamic State. As Muslim fundamentalists (operating under an alliance labeled as the “Libya Dawn”) have captured airports and major cities in Libya, the response of some of the regional players has been even more pronounced, perhaps even embarrassing to U.S. policy-makers.

“Twice in … seven days [in late August], Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have secretly launched airstrikes against Islamist-allied militias battling for control of Tripoli, Libya, four senior American officials said, in a major escalation of a regional power struggle set off by Arab Spring revolts.

“The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates, both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied to American diplomats that their military played any role in the operation, the officials said, in what appeared a new blow to already strained relations between Washington and Cairo.

“The strikes in Tripoli are another salvo in a power struggle defined by Arab autocrats battling Islamist movements seeking to overturn the old order. Since the military ouster of the Islamist president in Egypt last year, the new government and its backers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have launched a campaign across the region — in the news media, in politics and diplomacy, and by arming local proxies — to roll back what they see as an existential threat to their authority posed by Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.” New York Times, August 25^th.

This is just the beginning. Will there be 9/11-style attacks against Western targets? Most certainly these cannot be ruled out. Dirty bombs or gas? Who knows? Is locking down our border with Mexico the answer? How about the vast unwatched stretched of our border with Canada? How about U.S. and U.K. citizens who are joining ranks with the Islamic State? Can we avoid putting our own boots on the ground in a new, joint effort to crush the Islamic State? Maybe not. We wasted our military credibility on stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps even fomenting that Islamic State, but we are now facing a much more real threat than what we fabricated in our excuse to invade Iraq. This regional powder keg will test American strategists like nothing they have seen before.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as voters we need to familiarize ourselves with the real issues in the Middle East that may well define our own survival.