The New Middle East

The "democracy" that the United States under George W. Bush was so exuberantly anxious to create throughout the Middle East, starting with Iraq has taken on a strange life of its own.  The Arab countries of the Middle East aspire to democratic action, they claim, but its a type of democracy that is peculiar and anomalous, grafted onto autocratic states, dictatorships, theocracies, Sheikdoms, bearing little resemblance to the more familiar democracy of liberal-Democratic nations of the West.

The Middle East countries have been inexorably imprinted with their own very particular culture, one born of the heritage of tribalism that simply refuses to dissolve into a more generalized amalgam of national interest.  Even while forward-looking, younger and more cosmopolitan citizens of various Middle East countries espouse the vitality and universality of enlightened liberty and democracy, their opposites in society cling ferociously to tribal adherence and democracy-stifling religious conviction.

While the other half of the youth demographic - restlessly aggravated, torn between tradition and cultural conflicts that become pathological in nature leading them to revolt and to claims of serving Islam in a manner that is more pure through ideological jihad transferring into violence and martyrdom scenarios - will have nothing to do with a political system that reflects Western values.

Wherever democracy has touched governance in the Middle East it has been transformed into something unrecognizable, still presenting to the nativists who claim it, as democracy overlaid with tribal aggressions and religious fundamentalism.  Islam is an exclusive club of religious antipathy to the very notion of any other religion bearing relevance in a geography consecrated to Islam.  There is nothing relative about other religions in comparison to Islam.

In Iraq the democratically elected current government notionally comprised of Sunni, Shia and Kurds is for all practical purposes a Shia-led government opposed to joint rule with the Sunnis, and in the country sectarian conflict and insecurity is rampant.  Violence has become a commonplace, with suicide bombers stalking those who present as obstacles to the cause of Shia, or Sunni, or extremist Islamism.  The U.S. came, it saw and it conquered. Briefly.

In Egypt, a democratically elected government of tyranny like its Iraqi counterpart, succumbed to a peoples' revolution, not a foreign invasion to unseat a murdering tyrant.  Democracy brought, as it did in the Palestinian Territories, an Islamist fundamentalist political/religious/ideological order to govern.  Islamism of mystical fanatical order, was installed in Iran in 1979 and since then 'pure' Islam has been on the march.

Saudi Arabia was founded on the Wahhabist order, and it sent out its oil-wealth tentacles across the Muslim world to train and to teach and to bring the glory of fanatical Islam to a grateful audience.  Although al-Qaeda was a product of Wahhabism, it was dedicated by Osama bin Laden to the downfall of the House of Saud, for its co-operation with the United States in developing and becoming wealthy from its energy resources.

The Muslim Brotherhood now ruling Egypt as a democratically elected government is in the process of re-establishing its brotherhood with Hamas, an original offshoot of the Brotherhood.  President Morsi is off to a state visit to Iran for diplomatic issues resolving a state of suspicion between the two.  Since his ascension and former President Mubarak's departure, the Sinai, handed over by Israel in exchange for peace, has collapsed into chaos as a terrorist enclave.

Syrians of Sunni persuasion are battling to unseat their long-time dictator, a Shia Alawite regime, close colleague of Iran, igniting yet again vicious passions of raging hatred between Shia and Sunni in Syria and Jordan and Lebanon.  Hezbollah in Lebanon, along with the Quds division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been aiding the al-Assad regime in slaughtering Syrian and Lebanese and Palestinian Sunnis.

Thanks to the support of NATO's overflights in Libya, Moammar Gadhafi is gone, his regime replaced by opposition tribal interests who pledged peace among the tribes and the religious sects but have instead continued to assassinate those whose politics they deplore, and to harass and destroy religious artefacts of those whose religious sects they disparage as insufficiently Islamic.

Libya and Syria have been helpful in distributing weapons, both conventional and non-conventional, to disparate jihadist terror groups spreading and proliferating in North Africa, making a tinderbox of a region ever more chaotic and life-destroying.  While nothing but a full-out war seems to be in the works to stop the relentless drive of the Islamic Republic of Iran to achieve nuclear weapons for itself.

In anything-but-pacified Afghanistan, where NATO troops are anxious to depart after a decade of failed attempts to tamp down the influence of the Taliban, 'insurgents' have been wearing the uniforms of Afghan troops and turning U.S.-gifted weapons on ISAF and more particularly, American military trainers busy teaching those same Afghan troops how best to counter the violence of the Taliban.

In Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda affiliates busy themselves absorbing increasing territory while training new conscripts into terror both from the region and arriving from destinations in Europe and North America where they have left their landed immigrant and citizenship status there for the greater glory of serving Allah.  More audacious attacks on 'secure' military and police stations begin to imperil the country's nuclear installations.

From Iran to Mali, Egypt to Somalia, Syria to Iraq the Arab and Muslim world is unfolding on its journey back into the past, searching out the purity of Islam, declaring its intention to destroy the kaffir, the Zionists, the infidels, to achieve the ultimate triumph of world domination.  What a dreary, disgusting, miserable prospect.