September 8 2013
The Mess in the Middle East
Civilization started there. Will it also end there?
Last week I started to brush up on the Syria question. In the New York Times in just one day I found 29 articles dealing with the problem, the huge problem of which Syria is but a symptom. I read most of them, but found no magic key.
To fathom the basis of the situation we have to go back a few years. This week, re-reading Johan Huizinga’s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages I came across an interesting passage. In the last paragraph of the first chapter, summarizing the 14th century with its Black Death, its 100 year war (1337-1453) Huizinga wrote – and I translate- “The world is an evil place. The flames of hate and violence burn high and injustice rules the day; the devil with his black wings overshadows a darkened planet. Humanity, constantly on edge, expects the end of everything. Yet people refuse to turn from their evil ways; the church fights back but her preachers and poets cajole and admonish in vain.”
In that same period, seven centuries ago, the Middle East was the place to be: Jews, Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, all were one happy family, so unlike Europe. Science flourished, art thrived. It truly was a “Golden Age”: in contrast with Europe the Middle East was incredibly advanced.
When we look even further back 2-4,000 years ago, at ancient Mesopotamia, the Garden of Eden, Persia, Greece, Rome all located around the Mediterranean Sea, then we see that recorded history started there. The name Mediterranean indicates this: ‘the centre of the earth’. Today, in the 21st century, by a quirk of providence, the focus is again on the Middle East because there’s where the bulk of the crude oil is buried, the stuff needed to grease the technological system we have designed.
There’s something about oil that is more than mere inflammatory. Cursed are the countries rich in crude. Where there is oil the few benefit and the masses miss out: Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, Guinea, Saudi Arabia, all are prime examples of plutocracies, lands where the rich rule thanks to the soil being carbon-saturated.
Why did the Middle East Golden Age disappear? Calcified religion. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”, Karl Marx wrote some 150 years ago. Stagnated religion, religion that has lost its soul breeds fanaticism. Fanatics are people who have lost direction but are redoubling their efforts.
Stale religion was not the only reason for their cultural collapse. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I, the victors, France and England, arbitrarily redrew the boundaries of the Middle East without taking into account the situation and religion of the various tribes. Over the years only dictatorial regimes were capable to maintain a semblance of normality. Now, with Climate Change devastating agriculture in Syria, throwing people off the land and robbing a generation of honourable labour, tempers are flaring. Constant hot weather does that to people. No agriculture means no food, no work, lots of unemployed young bodies, anger, resulting in uprisings and revolt. Climate Change is also stoking religious fires, as tiny differences in Koran interpretations lead to murder and vendettas.
I experienced something similar while attending a small Christian college. There I witnessed such hatred as well. The sons and daughters of ministers who had left the Reformed Church because of a dispute involving some facet of children’s baptism refused to be present when teachers, not of their persuasion, opened the school day with prayer. I believe that the tensions of being occupied then by a foreign power, was a contributing factor. These religious schisms, coming to full play during the war 1940-45, have never been solved. Actually the differences have grown, more splits have occurred and most people in the Netherlands sick of the sectarian strife simply abandoned the church.
The entire Middle East too is under extreme tension not only due to the religious divisions, but also because of the daily struggle for food and the rising cost thereof, the impossibility to provide work for its restless army of young people and the oppression by dictators who favour their own tribal allies.
It seems to me that the Middle East religious divisions are intractable. There is no solution when there is an unwillingness to be tolerant. Johan Huizinga, the author of In de Schaduwen van Morgen (In the Shadows of To-morrow) writes somewhere that Onderwijs maakt onder-wijs. The play of words cannot be duplicated in English. It literally means that a little knowledge- failing to see the entire picture- is dangerous. The Lord himself, addressing Job (Job 38:2) said “Who is he that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge.” T.S. Eliot famous question comes to mind: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” That certainly applies to religion which has become pietistic, supplanting genuine biblical insight. Bonhoeffer calls it pious secularism.
In the Middle East life is religion, religion is life. One’s existence is defined by a certain view of the Koran. Of course the West is no different. Canada’s Prime Minister’s religion is Economic Growth, which he has in common with all of the G20 leaders, whose official doctrine is Capitalism, a system that cannot function without cheap oil, and it so happens that the cheapest and best of the crude lies in the deserts of the Middle East, now occupied by warring factions.
In Syria the opposition is dangerously divided making it impossible to form a stable government in the place of the Bashar al-Assad regime which itself favours its own tribe of supporters, the Alawites.
Meanwhile, the strife appears to be spreading. Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is spiking upward. Reports in The Times and elsewhere have said that many Iraqis fear their country is sliding back to the worst of the chaos experienced in the last decade. Even Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain and Kuwait could be infected. It could become a regional religious war similar to that witnessed in Iraq 2006-2008, but far wider and without the moderating influence of American forces.
All this reminds me of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618-1648, a series of wars principally fought in Central Europe, involving most of the countries of Europe. It was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history.
Initially, it was fought largely as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. Over time it developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of the time. When that happened the war became less religious and more a rivalry for political domination degenerating to further warfare between France and the Austria- Prussia powers, the old Habsburg Regime. The war saw the devastation of entire regions. Famine and disease not only greatly decreased the population of the central Europe, it also bankrupted most countries.
It could well be that the Sunni-Shiite conflict will follow that same pattern, starting out as a dispute between two or more tribes and then involving Turkey, Iran, Israel, and perhaps eventually the USA, Russia and China.
Back to Syria. I don’t believe that Assad is to blame for the poisoned attack. He was gaining the upper hand and the opposition was being pushed back. Cui bono: who benefits from such a chemical event? Certainly not Assad because such a monstrous act would lose him whatever goodwill he still possesses. Who benefits? The opposition does. By blaming the regime in Damascus it aims to involve the USA. It is a plus for Israel as well. Its motto is the old Roman one: Divide et Impera – divide and rule. The weaker Assad is the better for Israel; a feeble Syrian leader poses no threat. Who else benefits? The American military, whose budget faces drastic cuts. Who else? The American government under the threat of a debt ceiling.
The entire episode reminds me of Henry Kissinger, adviser to numerous governments. He probably whispered this scenario to the Israeli secret service, the execution to coincide with the meeting of the G20 in Russia.
Never forget that there is oil and gas here. Qatar wants to sell its natural gas to the world. So does Russia. Russia and China want to undermine the US petro dollar, which gives the USA licence to print money ad infinitum. This is about hard core geopolitics, resource wars and monetary control, period. The USA is dead set to defend the Petrodollar hegemony at all costs, and above all else. Without it, its financial system collapses. The powers in Washington are starting to realize that the entire western world’s monetary banking system, which has dominated global trade and finance over the past 100 years, is rapidly coming to a critical point.
Here’s what Jim Willie writes, somewhat bombastically: “The massive, unsustainable and decidedly unhealthy debt loads, carried both publicly and privately by all our seriously sick western societies (+Japan), will soon metastasize the malignant experiment of free flowing money induced by the carcinogen of incessant debt financing, which we all boorishly feasted and overindulged on, into a colossal carnivorous cancer on mankind, causing a caustic calamity of epidemic proportions. Make no mistake. One thing you can count on is that the grand masters playing this global chess game are very well aware of this unequivocal and salient fact. They are well prepared and setting up to make their geopolitical counter moves. The pending tomahawk missile strike at Syria is the most telling, overt and obvious move to date. Why else would they be prepared to take such an inane, insane and absolutely absurd risk over a couple of opened canisters of bad gas, ask yourselves deep in your psyche. When things make zero sense with this much at stake, you can be sure something else is afoot.”
Just as there is no solution to the Middle East Mess, neither is there a solution to the debt debacle the West faces or Climate Change. Of course there are solutions. For the debt problem the simple solution is to become frugal, to save money, to lower our standard of living, and pay off the balance. Politically that is unsalable. The same is true of reducing Green House Gases. Go back to a simple life style and live environmentally within our means. That too cannot be sold to a spoiled electorate.
So we are stuck. Given our unwillingness to do the right thing, given our political system that is always promising and can no longer deliver, the real danger is war: when all else fails, fight.
In 1914, June 28, just about 100 years ago, a few bullets from a pistol killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek. Thirty-seven days later the world was at war, which lasted four year, killed 15 million young men and injured 20 million more, many permanently disabled.
Today the world is again at a threshold just as in 1914 the year, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th Century ended. Then the old rulers had become tired; all empires were in decline. Today’s state of affairs resembles that pre-World War I situation. Now too everything is up for grabs. Nothing is sure anymore: jobs, working conditions, pensions, the weather. In 1914 a radical student, an anarchist, lit the fuse that engulfed the world. In the aftermath Russia collapsed, emperors were exiled or killed, Germany saw hyperinflation, the world experienced the Dirty Thirties during which Hitler rose to power, ending the armistice of 20 years -1918-1938 – and concluding the war that had started in 1914, and that, before it ended in 1945 with the atom bomb, also gave us the Holocaust and another 60 million casualties.
Civilization started in the ancient Middle East. Will a guided missile, the equivalent of the bullets fired in Sarajevo, aimed at the powder keg that is the Middle East, where the enemy of my enemy is another enemy, have identical consequences for Our World Today and unleash the war to end us all?
Pray for peace. Support efforts to help the refugees.