One pundit this week chided Jordan’s present and previous ruler for warning that US intervention - or inattention - would cause the Middle East to go up in flames. Like several of his estimed colleagues, he affirmed that resolving the Palestinian question would have no bearing on the other conflicts.
I have always thought this was a narrow-minded view, consciously or not influenced by unconditional support for Israel. Now I think it’s part of a general failure to see the Middle East as part of a larger, global conflict, not between good and evil, but between modernity and a determination not to share it as it currently presents itself.
The pundit correctly poinits out that if we had to we could do without thr oil from the Middle East, which only represents 40% of our needs. Yet focusing on that crucial commodity, our leaders fail to see the big picture. This is a worldwide upheaval, affecting pretty much all the countries that have not made the transition to a modernity that is at once highly structured and free-wheeling.
In a speech to the UN in the seventies, Fidel Castro noted that third world countries have to do in a much shorter time frame what the developed countries did over the course of a century, but what serious deciders were listening to the upstart? Now we’re seeing the consequences of our failure to adopt policies that took into account that reality.
Whether they be desperate Africans crowded onto dinghy’s with the hope of reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa - or Malta; or the people of the Niger delta whose lives are being destroyed rather than buoyed by oil; of the inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest - or the Sunnis and the Shias in the diversely poorly governed lands of the Middle East, the message is the same: maybe we do, maybe we don’t want modernity, but if we do, we want our own version, and for an increasing number of us, that means a fair share of the wealth. (Saudi newly rich want a voice in decision-making, but even in a country where the locals don’t have to work, a rising number are poor.)
The Shia Sunni divide, which we correctly perceive as religious, is about Islam’s conflicting views of society: elitist vs egalitarian, no different from those that have always existed in every culture and historical period. The Shiite Ali was on the side of the people. No wonder, then, that while the United States desperately props up - more precisely gives infusions to - so-called democratically elected governments, the Sunnis and the Shias, Hezbollah and Hamas, al Queda and its offshoots, run riot over our efforts to imposes our brand of modernity. They surely disagree among themselves as to whether the Middle East should become more egalitarian, but by trying to impose on them a liberal order that doesn’t even raise the question, we aggravate the enmities hisrtory has accumulated.
The sooner we stop focusing on this battle or that surge, these weapons or that threat, the sooner we will be able to extricate ourselves from the present context. As Edward N. Luttwak correctly states in the current issue of “Harpers”, we need to focus on places “where hardworking populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past’, tighten our pumps and leave the Middle East to sort itself out.
But “ahead”, for those countries which have “arrived” will require a major overhaul with respect to the past. In the same issue of Harpers where Luttwak fumes, Rebecca Solnit illustrates the transformation of Detroit, an American wasteland into a new kind of city, where locally produced foodstuffs are preferred to gentrification. Getting the farm into the city not only empowers and feeds local inhabitants, it breaks the absurd logic of consuming Middle Eastern oil to haul food over long distances.
I wager the gunmen turning the globe into a shooting gallery would be for that.bq.
One pundit this week chided Jordan’s present and previous ruler for warning that US intervention - or inattention - would cause the Middle East to go up in flames. Like several of his estimed colleagues, he affirmed that resolving the Palestinian question would have no bearing on the other conflicts.
I have always thought this was a narrow-minded view, consciously or not influenced by unconditional support for Israel. Now I think it’s part of a general failure to see the Middle East as part of a larger, global conflict, not between good and evil, but between modernity and a determination not to share it as it currently presents itself.
The pundit correctly poinits out that if we had to we could do without thr oil from the Middle East, which only represents 40% of our needs. Yet focusing on that crucial commodity, our leaders fail to see the big picture. This is a worldwide upheaval, affecting pretty much all the countries that have not made the transition to a modernity that is at once highly structured and free-wheeling.
In a speech to the UN in the seventies, Fidel Castro noted that third world countries have to do in a much shorter time frame what the developed countries did over the course of a century, but what serious deciders were listening to the upstart? Now we’re seeing the consequences of our failure to adopt policies that took into account that reality.
Whether they be desperate Africans crowded onto dinghy’s with the hope of reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa - or Malta; or the people of the Niger delta whose lives are being destroyed rather than buoyed by oil; of the inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest - or the Sunnis and the Shias in the diversely poorly governed lands of the Middle East, the message is the same: maybe we do, maybe we don’t want modernity, but if we do, we want our own version, and for an increasing number of us, that means a fair share of the wealth. (Saudi newly rich want a voice in decision-making, but even in a country where the locals don’t have to work, a rising number are poor.)
The Shia Sunni divide, which we correctly perceive as religious, is about Islam’s conflicting views of society: elitist vs egalitarian, no different from those that have always existed in every culture and historical period. The Shiite Ali was on the side of the people. No wonder, then, that while the United States desperately props up - more precisely gives infusions to - so-called democratically elected governments, the Sunnis and the Shias, Hezbollah and Hamas, al Queda and its offshoots, run riot over our efforts to imposes our brand of modernity. They surely disagree among themselves as to whether the Middle East should become more egalitarian, but by trying to impose on them a liberal order that doesn’t even raise the question, we aggravate the enmities hisrtory has accumulated.
The sooner we stop focusing on this battle or that surge, these weapons or that threat, the sooner we will be able to extricate ourselves from the present context. As Edward N. Luttwak correctly states in the current issue of “Harpers”, we need to focus on places “where hardworking populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past’, tighten our pumps and leave the Middle East to sort itself out.
But “ahead”, for those countries which have “arrived” will require a major overhaul with respect to the past. In the same issue of Harpers where Luttwak fumes, Rebecca Solnit illustrates the transformation of Detroit, an American wasteland into a new kind of city, where locally produced foodstuffs are preferred to gentrification. Getting the farm into the city not only empowers and feeds local inhabitants, it breaks the absurd logic of consuming Middle Eastern oil to haul food over long distances.
I wager the gunmen turning the globe into a shooting gallery would be for that.bq.
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