The Obama doctrine of providing overt and covert support
for Middle Eastern revolutionaries in Libya and Syria presents questions that
don't have simply answers for many Americans. I will go over a few of the
points .
Before the First World War Turkey's
Ottoman Empire ruled most of the Middle East and North Africa-even Iran was
under its authority. Saddam Hussein and Al Qa'eda both wanted to restore a
unified Arabic or Sunni empire, caliphate or modern state in the Middle East.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war for the Arabs was an opportunity to bring that to
fruit starting with the destruction of Israel. Though that didn't work out for
the Arabs the goal of creating a larger Middle Eastern Moslem bloc of nations
remained in the forefront of Arab thinking so far as I know.
Though Nasser and Sadat were gone a
secular drift in Egypt continued with Mubarak. Because the Moslem Brotherhood machine-gunned
to death Anwar Sadat in a parade stand the Mubarak regime and the Egyptian
military continued to keep the populous Moslem Brotherhood repressed a little.
Egypt would have a preponderantly secularized state somewhat like that of
Turkey. With the post 9-11 new world order of terrorism the Mubarak government
probably was more repressive in keeping power and putting dow2n terrorism.
Institutions that develop those practices tend to develop inertia of their own
developing a logic of pervasive civil oppression in concert with the need to
defilade real terrorists. Paradoxically the state itself can become a public
enemy.
President Obama's policy of support to
remove the corrupt secular Khaddafi regime of Libya and support for the removal
of the Mubarak Regime in Egypt followed by the support for Syrian
revolutionaries aided by Al Qa'eda and several Sunni States presents the
prospects for accomplishing a Sunni belt from Turkey to Algeria with just
Israel the sole island of religious pluralism. If the Alawite Government of
Syria is removed it would perhaps stimulate a kind of theocide of the hybrid
Shi'te sect those people practice, the very real dangers for continuing purges
of the Alawi people from Syria is something some might expect as well.
The administration may be concerned
with the history of the Assad government allowance for terrorist to journey
through the nation on the way to Iraq. It isn't certain that it could have
prevented that, yet Iraq's Bathy party had its origins in Syria's Baath party
of Afflack-they may have viewed U.S. developments in Iraq as some kind of
danger to their own political survival.
Yet the question of what U.S. foreign
policy is remains unanswered. The United States has removed its military forces
from Iraq and Iraq is experiencing continuing terrorism against the Shi'a of
Iraq. It is known that the United States since the revolution against the Shah
and the later Iranian Hostage crisis has had a firm anti-Iranian foreign policy
that for some seems to be a self-fulfilling policy of bad relations. I will
write a little about that...
In the 1930s I believe it was, the
United States had an economic adviser that helped design the Iranian
economy-the U.S.A. was on good terms with Iran having never had a history of
conflict or perfidy with it, while the British and others were exploiters and
schemers of long standing.
Eisenhower was perhaps too busy
managing world affairs to get involved with support for democratic populism in
Iran-we tended to support the removal of the left-leaning Prime Minister
Mossadeq and prop up the Shah who had already left the country only to return.
The Shah had a grand vision for the
role of Iran in the Middle East working to let it become a unifier something
like Saddam Hussein believed he might lead. With deep American military support
and aloof to Iranian in-country politics while pre-occupied with the Vietnam War
the U.S.A. viewed the region through cold war lenses. U.S. oil corporations and
staff in country had something of a separate and aloof attitude toward 'the
natives'. We did not work enough to eliminate the torture of the SAVAK
organization.
After the end of the Vietnam conflict
without a plain victory for the United States the international communist and
revolutionary movements were emboldened to work against governments such as
that of the Shah often with support from the left. It is one of history's ironies
that the left in Iraq and Iran were mostly liquidated after they helped depose
the government of their day. Ayatollah Khomeini let his hard-line supporters
purge the Tudeh (Iranian Communist Party).
After the end of the Cold War for more
than a decade thousands of pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium were stored
unguarded and likely plundered by hidden nuclear arms speculators. Forward
thinking revolutionaries could have sent hundreds of pounds of plutonium to the
United States in ordinary shipping containers for before 9-11 most U.S. ports
did not screen well for radioactive materials.
The economic value for wmd
entrepreneurs and political revolutionaries of fissile materials in the U.S.A.
or anyplace buried like treasure to be sold later would be very high. Iran too
as well as Saudi Arabia may have made purchases. The secret world of 1990s
plutonium, enriched U-235 and biological agents is one of the darker mysteries
of the present generation. Only those caught are generally known to legal authorities
while the successful are secretly holding their bomb materials like hoarders of
gold, if they exist.
Some wonder if Iran might have made a
purchase-it is known that Iranian agents were in Kazakhstan at a plutonium
storage site in the 1990s. What difference to American security or financial
interests will a Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi Syria make in the decades
ahead? Is the idea of pressuring the Shi'a of Iran through formation of a Sunni
Near and Middle East on its borders a good idea?
The Allies of the United States in
Afghanistan in the Northern Alliances are mostly Shi'a. What are their long-range
prospects if U.S. policy is toward the elimination of the Alawi and the
degradation of the Shi'a politically speaking in a quantitative context regarding
nation? Obviously Pakistan is Sunni and radicalized with support for Kashmir fighter against Indian and Hindu interests, and I suppose President
Obama living in Indonesia experience a Sunni version of Islam rather than the
Shi'a variety.
Can the United States lead the world
toward a better future with a pursuit of classic 'great game' policy possible
in favor of supporting nations with vast oil and gas reserved in a global
warming era with demographics against a sustainable policy of resource
consumption expansion globally? Wouldn't it be a better idea to exploit
transformative economic renewal development toward pragmatic infrastructural
efficiency in the United States and then provide nationally transformative cultural
technology to Middle Eastern nations instead of the implements of war?
In failing to upgrade and humanize the
U.S. national economy toward a post-modern ecospheric and social
hyper-efficiency U.S. foreign policy interests suffer too as they seem
inevitably to lead toward temporal pursuit of illusory goals that pass off to
the future the generation of the new illusions of rational policy objectives.
