What to do about the Middle East?

The Middle East is a problem. Most people in the Middle East just want to live their lives in peace, but enough young, unemployed and unemployable men have been radicalized by now that there is a substantial class of “professional jihadists” happy to go anywhere they can fight for a cause and give some purpose to their otherwise meaningless lives, and there has never been a shortage of ruthless, charismatic leaders willing to recruit such people to advance their own power.

There was a time when we in the Western world really didn’t care if all these Middle Easterners killed each other, as for example in Shia-Sunni conflicts such as the eight year Iran-Iraq war.  It was similar to many people’s current views about gang wars – let them kill each other as long as they don’t bother us – good riddance!   But the discovery of vast reserves of oil in the Middle East made it worthwhile for European and American governments to meddle in their affairs at least enough to ensure stability on the oil markets, but that meddling only increased the resentment and fueled the revolutionaries.

Now the problem is that we can no longer contain these dangerous radicalized thugs just to the Middle East. As we have learned to our cost on 9/11 and in the many suicide bombings in Europe in the past decade, in the modern world this violence can spread like a wildfire. Not only can many of these thugs (and thugs they are!) travel freely in the Western world, but the internet allows them to find and radicalize new recruits already in place in Western nations, such as the Boston bombers.

The time has passed when we can simply ignore this issue the way we still ignore most of the ethnic violence in Africa. Modern Western civilization is too fragile and too vulnerable. We have been lucky so far that jihadists have generally picked their targets for their symbolic and publicity value. Soon enough a few smart ones will begin to pick targets instead for maximum disruption of the nation’s infrastructure, and then we will be in real trouble.

It wouldn’t take much, for example, to bring down the electric grid in much of the nation for weeks or months (think about urban life without electricity – no refrigeration, no lights, no heat, no power to pump gas, etc, etc – it is sobering). The biochemistry required to produce a significant pandemic is within reach of anyone with a little postgraduate biology training and a few hundred dollar’s worth of equipment, as the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult showed years ago. And of course if jihadists ever get their hands on a portable nuclear weapon, or even the radioactive materials required to build a “dirty bomb” (a conventional explosive used to disperse radioactive material over a wide area) it would cause chaos in major Western cities.

Thus far, besides fruitlessly trying to suppress the jihadists by military means in their own lands,  the American government has focused mostly on trying to keep terrorists and potential terrorist weapons out of the nation, or locate them if they are already in the nation.  That is a losing game in the long run, because missing even one cell could have devastation consequences. We need instead a far more proactive approach that attempts to address the root cause – the massive malaise that afflicts so many young Middle Eastern men and makes them ripe for recruiting into these movements (and fighting wars in those lands is not the sort proactive approach that will work!)

It is too bad that America seems to be swinging back to its periodic isolationist mood, though it is understandable after the long, expensive yet thoroughly inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, intelligent America policy would focus on changing the economic structure in the Middle East to eventually eliminate the huge pool of unemployed and disaffected young men that feeds and sustains these jihadist movements. That won’t be easy, because there are significant cultural issues involved and we in the West are not very good at thinking outside of our own cultural assumptions.  Nonetheless, it needs to be done if we are to safeguard our nation.

Recommended: The Illusion of Chinese Power

The June issue of The National Interest has an informative article by David Shambaugh: The Illusion of Chinese Power. Shambaugh argues that the current fad of portraying China as the new rising superpower is overblown, and that on closer examination the nation looks much less impressive. Yes indeed, it does have the largest population, the largest army, the second largest economy, etc, etc.  But for a variety of reasons these do not translate into as much global power as many pundits assume.

It is an article worth reading to put some perspective on the China hype of some other authors.

The current Sunni-Shia war

It hard for us as comfortable middle class people in a stable, relatively peaceful first world nation to come to grips with the unreasoning depths of religious hatred that are driving the Sunni-Shia war currently going on across the Middle East.  But of course we too lived through this in the centuries of European Catholic-Protestant purges and civil wars that spilled all the way into the last century in places like Northern Ireland.

For all the desperate pleas from the Iraqi government, there is little effective we can really do.  A few drone strikes and a few bombing runs by US planes are not going to make much difference in the long run.  This is a whirlwind that has been sown for years, not only by sectarian government in Iraq  but by wealthy backers of the Sunni and Shia causes in other nations, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, and by well-funded passionate preachers on both sides who have raised a generation of hate-filled fighters. And now the devil has turned, and these nations are right to fear the hatreds they have unleashed.

Frankly, I think about all we can really do is try to keep these religious thugs from spilling their terror into European and American cities. And thugs they are, whatever religious banner they fight under. We too have our religious bigots and thugs in this country, though thankfully not as many.  But it ought to be a lesson to us: religions that are sure they are right and everyone else is wrong are always a potential danger to national unity in the long run.

Recommended: The Crony Capital

Jim DeMint, Senator from South Carolina from 2005 to 2013, when he quite the Senate in disgust over Washington's political gridlock, has written a very good piece in The Weekly Standard with Mike Needham : The Crony Capital.  DeMint and Needham make the persuasive point that the reason conservatives aren't winning elections is not that they don't have an agenda that could appeal to voter, but that they don't actually do much effective about their agenda.

DeMint and Needham argue that most of the country, left, right and center, are fed up with the government's tendency to favor well-connected big businesses at the expense of everyone else, and if conservatives would actually DO SOMETHING effective about this they could win elections again.  It is a well-written argument, and though from conservative writers the point is really relevant to the whole political spectrum.

Recommended: China in Ten Words

Yu Hua is one of China's leading writers these days.  His book China in Ten Words, translated from

the Chinese by Allan Barr, is a wonderful and quite readable look at life in China these days, framed around ten popular Chinese words. Hua grew up in Mao's China, and his book puts China's current culture in the context of the events that shaped it.  Well worth reading.