Time And Time Again

The wealthiest countries in the world are now located in the Middle East. They have garnered untold wealth because of their ability to harvest the results of ancient geology. The petrocarbons that produced oil in abundance has enriched them beyond their wildest dreams. Saudi Arabia has been enabled, by Western-sourced investment in extraction and refining to sell to the world at large refined oil to operate its world of transportation, manufacturing, heating, agriculture; the entire infrastructure of modernity.

Western money has financed Saudi generosity in establishing its brand of Wahhabi Islam through the building and staffing of madrasses throughout the Muslim world, and inclusive of the world of the West as well. Vast sums of oil money has been disbursed to fund the building of schools teaching the Koran to young pupils who have no knowledge of Arabic, but learn the texts by rote in Arabic, and the message they deliver of pure, jihad-inspired, Sharia-led Islam.

The Gulf States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, all have limitless financial resources. With those resources they also consume much. They have built modern cities and equipped them with the furnishings of some of the tallest, most impressive buildings the world has seen. They have converted the desert upon which they sit to oceans of green and they have brought the heady perfume of success to the arid world of tribal dissonance.

These countries not only focus on embellishing the grandeur of their surroundings, but they take care as well to take advantage of advanced technological weaponry with which to equip their armies through frequenting the huge sales markets of the world's arms manufacturers. Frequenting European manufacturers of arms and vehicles of war, ships and gunships, artillery guns and small-arms, the deadlier the electronics' precision the more desirable.

For the most part, the concern is to ensure that their own populations are kept in check. Since most of the sheikdoms, theocracies, kingdoms and autocracies are led by Sunni Muslims who comprise the vast majority of Islam, required to ensure that the minority Shia demographic among their populations do not become too threateningly restive without adequate repercussion. This is the scenario that plays itself out in Syria today, but in reverse proportions.

A minority Shia government rules a majority-Sunni population which has decided it will no longer tolerate the intolerance of its minority rulers. And there is the kernel of a story. One where it is seen that wealthy Arab League countries fulminate and agitate over the situation of a Shia-led government butchering its Sunni minority, where it barely noticed a Shia majority being settled back into place by a Saudi-Bahrain military coalition.

The unspeakably worrying situation where a coalition of Shia-led Islamist countries, upstarts of historical dimensions, are led by a nation whose leadership has decreed that it will become the first Muslim (non-Arab) state in the region to possess nuclear weaponry. Whose stated target is yet another Middle Eastern country, but not a Muslim one. Yet the niggling suspicion that they might be next in line of attack, concerns the Sunni nations.

The general consensus among the Arab League is that it is unconscionable for a government to wreak havoc among its own. Particularly when its own are largely of the Sunni sect which most of them represent among themselves. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have pledged themselves to support the Sunni rebels battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Funding their need to acquire weapons similar in vintage to the regime's, but without those heavy-duty tanks and aircraft that a government possesses.

Their troops have never been dispatched to Syria to counter the actions of the Syrian regime's military strafing and bombing of their own. But they have expended prodigious energy and time and diplomatic overtures to cajole, plead with, threaten, and entice the United States and NATO to become involved, to institute a no-fly zone, to gather their troops on Syrian soil in defence of the millions of Syrians whose lives have been intolerably upended.

This is no new initiative. This is classic Arab behaviour when it comes to their own interior and internecine problems; engineer the entrance of the Western powers to bring order where disorder reigns. But there is nothing ever predictable about what might occur in the Middle East; the unexpected always raises its leering head. And when conflicts become ever more complex, and the people take offence at the presence of "foreign" Western elements tainting their environment, well...

Then charges of imperialism, of Western deviousness, of invidious plans to take over the limitless natural resources of the Middle East to enrich the West ring from the rooftops in despair and rage. While the Saudis settle back comfortably and watch quietly from the sidelines. And the spectre of Hate arises yet again, ensuring that the populace is in agreement that there are times when the West is fully deserving of the terror brought to their shores by Islamist jihadists intent on revenge.

Revenge that can never be complete until that time when Islam has fully prevailed and the false prophets of the West have been revealed and replaced by the Prophet Mohammed's delivered and honoured injunction to invite the world to share in the blessings of Islam.