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.
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