Basic Questions About U.S. Middle East Policy

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.