IRAQ AGAIN AND FOREVER

By William Urban

Now that it appears that Baghdad won’t fall this week (maybe later), and that Iran will get its bomb eventually, and that Hamas will continue to demand the destruction of Israel, what can anyone say about this mess that hasn’t been said over and over again? There is plenty of blame to go around, but some of the arguments remind me of the proverbial cup falling off the table and breaking. Did the careless kid knock it off, or the mother who left the cup too close to the edge, or the father who put it on the table, or the distant company that should have made the cup stronger?

Many people seem confused about the news from the Middle East. This partially reflects a reluctance to read newspapers or listen to news programs. I know intelligent individuals who are proud of this. Is this a way of saying that they already know everything worth knowing? Or that they just don’t care? My class studying terrorism last year, a group of bright kids, got their information from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I guess that’s better than nothing, but I really don’t understand how anyone can get the jokes if they don’t know what the comedians are referring to. Back when I attended professional baseball games, I was told that I couldn’t follow the game without a program.

I am much less critical of people who are working two jobs who don’t vote, or even having one job and a family. But that doesn’t explain why only half of the eligible voters bother to show up at the polls. Maybe it’s a question of priorities, maybe a principled decision that they shouldn’t vote on issues they don’t understand. I can buy that. The world is complicated. I am reluctant, however, to agree with young people who say that voting is a waste of time and that their opinions have no impact.

Those arguments are not the issue. We face a major challenge to the world order and our way of life. Shouldn’t that have priority over attending a Rave event?

Those who do vote often do so carelessly. Many people just take the easy way out. For example, beloved relatives who vote for candidates based on their looks, accent or religion; or the TV addict who believes the last minute scare ads. Then there’s the aged woman my wife remembers from being a judge at a primary election — she insisted that she wanted to vote Republican and no one could make her understand that all the candidates on the primary ballot were Republicans.

This explains the American understanding of Middle Eastern issues. Over there it is much less calm and rational.

Once you cut through the details, the conflict in Iraq is partly a struggle between religious communities, partly about ethnicity, but perhaps even more about how much impact modernism should have on tribal communities. This is the subject of my next book, Wars on the Periphery, though I use examples from the 1700s to make my case, with references to modern problems.

It had been often noted that various traditions in modern Islam — honor killings, female mutilation, terror attacks on civilians, suicide bombings — have no place in the theology of the Religion of Peace. That is both true and irrelevant, because nobody in Iraq or Syria or Palestine wants to sit down for a philosophical discussion.

Many Americans are tired of being the world policeman, and ask why Middle Eastern problems should affect America. 9/11 should have taught us that this is not something we can just ignore. We might not be interested, but it will find ways to get our attention.

First of all, gas prices will go up. In January of 2008 Barack Obama told us that he would make gasoline prices “skyrocket” and that his cap and trade proposal would make the coal industry bankrupt. How high would gas have to go to make his green energy plans affordable? A lot more than the $1.91 price of early 2009. Congress, then controlled totally by Democrats, balked at the cap and trade proposal. So, with pen and phone he has since limited our production of oil and gas as best he could.

It was obvious even then that the nations which most wished the United States ill — Russia, Iran, Venezuela—relied on high gas prices to avoid bankruptcy. Iraq benefitted, of course, and Barack Obama, like Bush before him, expected the 100 billion dollars in oil exports to pay the costs of running the Iraq government — and distributions to the Sunnis and Kurds to keep them quiet. That would allow him to pull the troops out and forget about the region.

Secondly, nobody in the Middle East has been listening to our government-sponsored praise of diversity and multiculturalism. Instead, the mobs and some of the governments want unity and conformity. No dissent, no Christians, no Jews, and certainly no atheists or gays. Awkwardly, Bashir al-Assad’s Syria is beginning to look better than the rebels, but aside from his dictatorial ways and duplicitous diplomacy, he has some very nasty allies and supporters. He sponsored the murderous ISIS as long as it was only killing Americans. Then it turned on him.

Israel looks good except to the media commentators and university professors who see the Jews as the new Nazis. This truly puzzles me. I remember that Nazis made homosexuals wear pink Stars of David, and today the only country in the Middle East that allows Gay Pride Parades is Israel. Just try that anywhere else. (If you want to try, I’ll contribute a few dollars for your air fare to Saudi Arabia or Iran, but please buy one way, because I think you’ll miss the return flight.)

Third, we don’t want terrorists to have a state where they can prepare for expansion and for attacks on the West. We saw what happened with the premature pull-out from Iraq. Now we worry about the same thing happening in Afghanistan.

It’s not hopeless over there. Pakistan has finally learned that its support of the Taliban has a high price, and they are killing more Taliban than Obama ever did with his drones. The new Egyptian government stopped sponsoring jihad, and sentenced hundreds of fundamentalists to death; and the Saudis, Jordanians and Turks are aware that they cannot count on the Americans to do everything for them. Perhaps not anything.

Review Atlas (August 7, 2014), 4.