Tangled Webs

Living in a hostile world and valuing a democratic, liberal, equality-driven conscience can be a true disincentive to recognizing realities. The honest, sincere and fair-minded individual, no less national shared attributes valuing justice, can find themselves at a real disadvantage. The first disadvantage lying in the belief that if one is honest and intends to deal in a straightforward manner with someone else, that attitude will be reciprocated. And it will not necessarily be so.

Yet most people prefer to believe that they and those who surround them are earnest and decent and prepared to deal with one another on that basis to the benefit of all. That there are sociopaths and psychopaths who manipulate societal norms to suit their very personal agendas rarely occurs to people of good faith. Yet the sociopaths for whom the normalcy of good faith represents a totally irrelevant mindset, are there to take advantage to their personal benefit whenever the opportunity arises.

We thought ill of ourselves and our governments when it became clear through investigative news revelations that though Western governments strove to represent democratic ideals and to comport themselves in a manner that reflected those liberal ideals that led to self-respect and respect for others - nonetheless our elected lawmakers had relations with other countries' governments which were themselves wholly representative of dictatorships.

The kind of realpolitik that guided responsible Western governments to make accommodations with tyrants who enslaved their people to a rigid authoritarianism that profited the tyrant and his cohorts sat uneasily. Even when it was explained with great embarrassment that this kind of accommodation was made for support of the agendas of the free world governments. Usually the trade-off was recognition in trade of keeping a tight lid on drug trafficking or violent crime, or more latterly, terrorist activities.

So the iron-fisted ideologues and dictators had the chilly 'friendship' of democratic states preferring their grim tactics to those of an ideology that seemed more threatening to the advancement and security of Western states. When that accommodation was extended, for example, throughout the Middle East, and bloody tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi were courteously accepted in favour of their tamping down threats to their own existence that also threatened ours, we glumly accepted the seemingly inevitable.

And then the status quo began to fall apart. Muammar Gadhafi was an enemy of the West as long as he encouraged terrorists to strike the West; but his oil riches, and petroleum export potential, and his trepidation at seeing what happened to Iraq's tyrant changed his mind. Did the West understand fully when toppling Saddam Hussein whose deadly antipathy toward Iran keeping it in check, would result in Iran finally controlling Iraq politically? Instead of two tyrannical states opposing one another, one now supervises the other.

Muammar Ghadafi desperately tried to convince NATO that if it supported the rebels there would be far-ranging consequences, but his sinister warnings just sounded like the pleading of a desperate man - which of course they were. Yet what he warned of certainly was a potential though no one wanted to recognize it as such at the time. In the end, in Libya, as in Tunisia and Egypt, the Islamists, lurking in the background, having been kept tamped down by the tyrannical governments as threats to their own existence, prevailed.

Egypt's Arab Spring, the Islamist Springboard that brought the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists to power, has resulted in a relatively non-violent revolution. But the repressions that were common during the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak have been repeated by the Morsi government and in fact, repression of the press has intensified. Crime that was once kept in check has skyrocketed, the economy has tanked as tourism and foreign investment have plunged, and Egypt is now making common cause with Iran.

No one in the West can quite comprehend the Byzantine turnings of the Arab/Muslim mind. That Turkey, still billing itself as a democracy, yet turning inevitably more and more toward Islamism, sees President Erdogan railing against Syria's Bashar al-Assad, even as Mohammed Morsi of Egypt has done, even while courting the Iranian Ayatollahs and recreating fond friendship with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Egypt and Turkey along with Qatar support Islamist Hamas, no surprise with the Muslim Brotherhood since Hamas is one of its offshoots. Islamic Jihad is now a respected entity, along with Hezbollah, both of which are fighting in Syria for the rebels against the Baath regime.

North Africa is plunging into chaos with Mali battling its Taureg rebels aligned with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, intent on creating a wide swathe across west-central Africa, to establish themselves and eventually spread fanatical Islamism through violent jihad in their quest to conquer. This is ancient Islam re-awakened in its bid to conquer the world. Jihadists invested in martyrdom and the ideological righteousness of their need to elevate Islam above all false religions.

Algeria remains, along with Morocco, states determined to shrug off the threats to their secular governance. As much as the West would prefer Africa to look after its own interests, Africa appears disinterested in  doing the hard work it would take to vanquish the threats of jihadists. France, which single-nationedly went into Mali, entreating its friends and allies to lend it some heavy-lift aircraft for the duration of their time fighting the Islamists, still awaits the bulk of the military assistance African countries have pledged.

Though Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the Gulf States, along with Jordan fear the accelerating strength of the jihadists wanting to impose their own brand of Sharia and Islamism, began by criticizing the Alawite regime in Syria for its take-no-prisoners tactics in attacking its civilian population of Sunnis, the Arab League made no move to exert itself through the assembly of its militaries to counter the threat to Syria.  The choice gave pause: support the rebels and thus the Islamists?

Or give support to the Syrian Shia-led regime that oppresses its Sunni majority in a country that is a staunch ally of their adversarial Shia-led enemy, Iran, whose plans to achieve nuclear proficiency and an array of nuclear arms that would threaten them all, is giving living nightmares not only to the Arab League but further afield, in Washington and Tel Aviv.

It is the stuff of which splendidly sinister nightmares are made.