Toward Better U.S. Middle East Policy

I have limited time today to write so this incomplete note; A month prior to the Islamist assault on the U.S. Embassy and C.I.A. station at Benghazi Libya Senators Graham and McCain extolled military intervention in Libya as a reason to militarily intervene in Syria. Evidently they did not comprehend the situation of sandals on the ground in either Libya or Syria. Before military can work to bring about a non-violent peaceful transition to democracy within a global Facebook webpage empire the U.S. need airdrop in crack Democrat Party liberal elites to supervise and coach the inexperienced neophyte godless atheist young professionals who must locally lead their underverse Muslim brothers and sisters to full liberal accountability as good citizens.

American leadership apparently were clueless about Syria before supporting military escalation of that conflict that led to the deaths of a quarter of a million people or so. They didn’t like Assad because he is authoritarian-yet there were reaso0ns for that such as that any middle eastern Arab government must be authoritarian if it is to exist-even an ostensibly democratic one for some time if it is to survive and put down attacks form dissident elements within and extraneous violent military interventions from without.

Americans perhaps didn’t realize that when Syrian boundaries were invented by the British in the aftermath of the First World War Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were thrown into the same bag as it were. Historically Middle Eastern sects and tribes of patristic societies were not all that comfortable with one another unless forced to live bucolically under authoritarian rule such as that of the Ottoman Empire or Saddam Hussein and his Baathism. The minority Alawite population needed to have an authoritarian power to let itself exist along with an antagonistic Sunni majority. For the U.S. to support democracy in Syria was fundamentally to support religious democide and purging of a religious minority. U.S. leadership should instead support a reconciliation of the British-set Syrian boundaries such that each party gets a fair viable portion of Syria. I believe that Jordan should rule the Sunni portion for a century.

Many war-mongering leftist corporatists of the Obama administration and media seeking war and removal of the Assad government did not realize that besides securing a Syrian peace-that now would require an authoritarian Alawite government for the Alawite-Shi’a-Christian part of a divided Syria simply to reduce the number of Sunni truck bombers for a century since the area is saturated with liberated c-3 and c-4 from Iraqi and Libyan arsenals-the U.S. should support just those nations it has a real responsibility for such as Israel, Iraq, Syria and possibly Kurds in a state of their own, with military support. The Sunni nations otherwise must find their own natural balance and battle it out for-themselves. America can only practice constructive engagement and be a good example if possible.

American foreign policy following the end of the cold war hasn’t always been enlightened. When President Clinton for example used a political rohipnol to get Boris Yeltsin to relinquish its soft southern parts as Vladimir Lenin had done before at Brest-Litovsk to Germany, the opportunity for long-range positive progress with Russia in economic and security issues was forfeited. Apparently the urge of Butch Street to snatch and grab land while they could was irresistible. They may look enviously at the remainder of Russia’s natural resource wealth and choose to engage negatively in the long range using military power and sanctions to make unreasonable demands upon Russia such as being happy to give it all up in the south and not share Ukraine even to the Dnepr. Russia also has Syrian allies and that was a point against them too when the United States sought to follow a Pollyannaish policy of Arab transition to democracy non-violently.

It may be that some U.S. leaders resented Bashir Assad’s support for insurgents in Iraq. Yet most of the Middle East hated American military intervention there and regarded America as overly supportive of Shi’a in Iraq. For many Sunni conservatives the Shi’a should not exist at all and should rather become Sunni. Assad was however an Alawite leader in a majority Arabian Sunni state. He needed to walk both sides of the line in a tightrope act to keep Iranian friends and Sunni too happy enough. He erred in supporting the insurgency of course.

Iran may have been pleased with the harm to U.S. interests of the insurgency in Iraq yet simultaneously concerned with suppressing it enough to cooperate with the U.S.A. U.S. leadership may have help precipitate the Iraqi invasion of Syria that left more than a million dead and a little payback might have been regarded as being in order. The U.S. may have felt that Iran got its just deserts for taking the U.S. embassy hostage during the Iranian revolution. And Iranians hated the U.S.A. a little for the Eisenhower administration’s support of the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty to the Peacock throne early subverting the Iranian democracy in the process.

Plainly where the U.S. intervenes militarily beyond its own areas of existing special interest it just throws accelerant into the fire of Arabian confusion, chaos, populism morphing to Islamism etc. It ISIS were to become an established government anywhere the Reagan doctrine might contain it and more easily destroy its leadership if it comprised a threat to the U.S.A. or other N.A.T.O. countries. Human behavior and degrees of Muslim fundamentalism are variables and constants too. N.A.T.O. should defend Europe against Muslim infiltration, yet also constructively engage the Middle East to restore the 95% of Syrian refugees that live in the Middle East to get out of the camps and return to Syria.

Conflated theories about causes of conflict in the Arab spring wars and the worth of military intervention should not be allowed to bring the U.S.A. to throw more munitions and temporal targets that vanish and reform like some kind of amoeba composite. The desire for populist revolt against authoritarian regimes finds resonance with not only emergent godless atheist yuppies but with Islamist radicals that can politically organize best in the sanctity of mosques. The Arab Sunni states will need to balance themselves with evolving forms of states. When the U.S. intervenes it just resets the entire cycle of authoritarian, aborted democratic movement/fundamentalist revolt and so forth. In practice democracy exists in Arab states when a military that is westernized supports it. The military intervenes domestically whenever Muslims become too powerful and want to move toward theocracy. The formation of democratic political institutions is challenging and requires long-term tech support to just grow out of isolated economic and social submission to repress government, royalty or global oligarchs.