THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS
The hoily mess in the Middle East
November 16 2014
Idleness is the source of all evil.
History started in the Middle East, and it did so with a bang. The bang was the killing blow to Abel’s head. The killer was his older brother, Cain, the first child of Adam and Eve. Ever since that time war and bloodshed has been the maker of history. Lamech, Cain’s offspring, was typical. He boasted: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me; if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times. (Genesis 4: 23-24). Apparently this ratio still applies there today: in the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 30 Israelis were killed and 70 time as many Palestinians. Quite a contrast with Jesus who uses that same number: we have to forgive wrongs not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Thanks to Lamech’s bragging we now face feuds forever and ever with the result that the Middle East has been floating in a flood of blood until this day. In ancient history matters there got so bad that Yahweh drowned its entire population, save for Noah and his family. Can this happen today? Yes. If the Massive Solar Flare of 1859 (the “Carrington Flare”) that melted electrical transformers everywhere, would hit now, it would have the same fatal effect as Noah’s Flood. It would effectively stop all electrical transmission, paralyze daily life and starve the Western World in a few days.
After the Flood came the Tower of Babel drama. There God thwarted human communication to prevent the first – not the last – human overreach. The confusion of tongues then led to widespread emigration, as the world was largely unexplored and uninhabited, and deserts basically non-existent.
Overgrazing and overpopulation were to become the prime cause of desertification, now the norm in the Middle East and rapidly gaining elsewhere. Violence against creation and violence between people go hand in hand. The Middle East was the first densely settled part in the world and also the first area to suffer environmental degradation. It seems to me that, in order to provide ‘lebensraum’ for its people, the spread of Islam – basically a black/white religion (follow the rules and you go to heaven, easily replacing Christianity) – can be traced to escaping its polluted lands for greener pastures, which in the early Middle Ages were found in Eastern and Southern Europe,
The Crusades – 1096 to 1291 – were the first of a series of religious wars. The Popes then, supposedly possessing the keys to the kingdom of heaven, promised the Crusaders, upon joining up, carte-blanche forgiveness for their past and future sins, resembling the exact Koranic assurance of heaven for any Moslem warrior. The Crusades were followed by the Black Plague which killed some 30 percent of the then European population of an estimated 60 million.
Religious Wars
Where the first religious war was between Islam and Christianity, the second one occurred in Europe between two branches of the Holy Catholic Church, its Roman Catholic wing and the Protestant part. It lasted from 1618-1648, and affected half of Europe’s people. That prospect now looms for the Middle East, adding to the chaos there and preparing the ground for another pandemic.
Wars always lead to abuse, especially of nature. The current conflicts in the Middle East are also a direct result of lack of water, overpopulation and no meaningful employment. There’s a Dutch saying that “ledigheid is de Duivel’s oorkussen”, which resembles our saying “Idleness is the root of all evil”, including the waging of wars. I wonder what will happen in California where there is a looming lack of water, and in Brazil, where in its largest city, San Paolo with 20 million inhabitants the pumps are also running dry. Both California and Brazil are slated to become deserts due to the persistent drought in the Sunshine State, while in Brazil the landscape has been stripped of 80 percent of its natural forests. Natural forests act like giant sponges soaking up rain and gradually releasing it. They also protect watercourses and maintain water quality by reducing sediment and filtering pollutants. Can Phoenix be far behind or Las Vegas? Both desert cities rely on far away, ever scarcer water.
The oily mess in the Middle East.
Two of the Middle East’s three biggest oil?producing countries, Iran and Iraq, have a Shi’a majority, while Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly Sunni, with a restless Shi’a minority concentrated in the country’s oil?producing east, a dangerous situation, a deep religious divide.
What separates Sunni from Shi’a is a succession dispute that erupted after the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D. now almost 1400 years ago. Those who accepted Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s father?in?law, as the rightful successor became known as Sunnis. Those who believed that Ali, Mohammed’s son?in-law, was properly the successor became known as Shi’ites. They’ve been fighting ever since, now coming to a head.
The seeds for war were sown in 1911 with Winston Churchill who was First Lord of the Admiralty, responsible for the Royal Navy. He set out to bring the Royal Navy’s aging fleet into the 20th century, switching its engines from coal to oil. Hence his interest in the Middle East, the trustee of the largest pool of oil in the world, with Saudi Arabia leading the count controlling a quarter of the world’s oil reserves.
Now, in 2014, the world is totally addicted to oil. No wonder that the world’s attention is concentrated on the Middle East, and particularly on Saudi Arabia, where young adults, those between 15 and 30 years old, make up half of the grown-up population and, despite the country’s oil wealth, close to 30 percent are unemployed. Corruption there is endemic, 50,000 princes and their relatives are on the state’s payroll, leading wasteful lifestyles, while the bulk of the population live in servitude. While siding with the USA in fighting the notorious IS- Islamic State – its ultra conservative Wahhabi clerics propagate the spread of hatred of the West. Of the nineteen 9/11 attackers, fifteen were Saudis.
The Danger of Religious zeal
Nothing inflames minds more than disputes involving religion. Actually Religious fervor is a world-wide phenomenon. Hardliners, those who know exactly what God or Allah wants, battle the modernizers. Rome, with Pope Francis, is not the only example. Conflicts like these rage between believers in Baghdad, in Tehran, in Riyadh, in Jerusalem and in Washington. Religious passion has been portrayed by W. B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming,” where he wrote When “the centre cannot hold, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” We, in the West lack all conviction, largely having abandoned religion in favor of material welfare, now rapidly disappearing. The ‘worst’ is all too evident in the atrocities committed by the ISIS followers.
The present trouble started in 1918, at the conclusion of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, controlling much of the Middle East, fell apart. With England and France being the so-called winners of this war, they demanded compensation for the enormous human and material losses they suffered, so between them they carved up the Middle East without any regard for tribal and other ethnic considerations, including the approval to have the Jews return to the Holy Land, without making provisions for the people already living there.
Now, after 100 years the countries created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire cry for tribal, religious, and ethnic recognition. With no democratic legacy, there’s no chance at all that this process will result in peaceful coexistence. Expect explosions. Expect more chaos. Expect a dangerous mix of oil and religion, the most lethal combination possible. The battle lines are set. Already the Shiites, centered in Iran, boast that they control four Arab capitals: Beirut, through the Shiite militia Hezbollah; Damascus, through the Shiite/Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad; Baghdad, through the Shiite-led government there; and Sana, where the pro-Iranian-Yemeni-Shiite offshoot sect, the Houthi, recently swept into the capital of Yemen. In all these places the Shiites dominate the Sunnis.
Over against them is Turkey, with the largest army in the Middle East, a Sunni nation, and Saudi Arabia, also on the Sunni side, with the largest oil deposits, and the richest nation by far. At present the situation is still fluid, with Syria engaged in a civil war with no definite outcome in sight, and the Kurds wanting an independent nation, fighting both Turkey and Iraq for self-control. In the midst of it all is Israel, where the unrest among its Arabian population is growing, completely surrounded by simmering fires. In the meantime the stage is set for a massive Sunni-Shiite all-out war.
So how about us in the Western world?
We still need the oil there, even though today there’s a surplus of the stuff, thanks to ‘fracking’, the new word that is derived from the word fracturing, a process involving in crushing rock to free the tight oil in there. It is a very expensive procedure and highly polluting, because it takes a lot of energy, sand, water and chemicals to free the fuel that delivers our daily bread to the local store. A low oil price kills this bonus which has propelled the USA to become the largest oil producer in the world, for a short time anyway. Once this rapidly depleting source is gone, it is back to the Middle East, still the major source for the lowest cost oil.
The story becomes complicated
Right now the USA and some other countries, including Canada, are bombing supposedly only ISIS targets. ISIS is the fanatical movement that wants to return the Middle East to pre-modern religious conditions, a male-dominated society where no emancipation is tolerated, operating under the banner of the Sunni religion. “No boots on the ground” has been the Western slogan, knowing too well that the wars waged by the USA and others in Iraq and Afghanistan have been total failures. Will a bomb here or there do the trick? The perilous part is that the two most populous nations in that region, Iran and Turkey, are on opposite sides. Turkey is a member of NATO, another complication, but it favors ISIS which both the USA and Iran opposes. But the USA and Israel are against Iran for its effort to become a nuclear power. So the matter involves the choice between two evils: either Iran is punished for developing nuclear capability, or Tehran is asked to side with the USA in its fight to topple the ISIS radicals. Israel is dead-set against Iran proclaiming that its very intention is to wipe Israel from the map. Will that pit Israel against the USA?
Apart from oil, the Western world is not threatened by all this Middle East turmoil. Also we in the West have enough troubles of our own. Basically the West sees ISIS as nothing more than small groups of highly motivated and trained fighters, who, by passionate and brutal means fueled by Islamic radicalism, have managed to do immense damage to advanced societies, thanks also to clever user of technology.
Because ISIS is motivated by ‘religion’ it is impossible to eradicate this danger. Ideology and religion always trump rationality. That was the case in Europe during the Thirty Year War, and that is the case now. The millions of refugees, displaced in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, are the victims, and soon the UN will be powerless to feed these people as their numbers multiply and the conflicts in the Middle East accelerates. Don’t for a minute expect for token bombing to have any effect: just as the blood of martyrs has always fueled the advance of Christianity, so Western involvement in this solely Arab civil war, will only aggravate the anger and draw the battle lines even more clearly.
There is the explicit danger that what is taking place in the cradle of civilization will become the start of a War involving the entire world. Once the battle lines are more clearly defined, when Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran openly enter into the fray, the fate of the entire world is in the balance as OIL becomes the ultimate treasure. The world cannot function without the fuel that originates in the Middle East. At the same time the Western world has sucked itself into a spiral of debt that threatens its social cohesion. It is simply impossible to continue the Welfare State in an era of deflation and economic collapse, witness its powerlessness as Russia takes over Eastern Ukraine, as the economies of Spain, Greece and Italy experience downright depression, as the economies of Japan and China succumb to excessive debt, and as Climate Change worsens and threatens our way of life.
History started with a bang to Abel’s head. History will end with a bang to the very source of energy on which the world depends.