The Darkness of Thoughts

Perhaps it has become a reality in the world of today. That no one country any longer, even the titular head of the free world as the only remaining super-power, is willing to take on the mantle of guide, mentor, supervisor, responsible for the well-being of all other countries. Not that any country ever did other than when it was felt that their interests might be at stake, and if they failed to act to turn events around, they might personally suffer from inaction.

Personal national interests as seen in presumed threats to their well-being usually elicited a strong response, from warning rhetoric to outright threats and finally military intervention. It's an awkward position for any country to have to take, to invoke their political/diplomatic power, their great wealth, their large military with its technologically advanced weapons systems. All of which become hugely impressive as a threat to bludgeon those incautious enough to present as annoyances.

There have been and will continue to be bleakly dark areas of the world where tyrants oppress and fail their miserable populations. The world looks on fairly aghast when events such as what occurred in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Sudan/Darfur, in Democratic Republic of Congo, in Ethiopia, in Bosnia and other unsavoury parts of the world occur, but muscular intervention simply doesn't always occur.

Iran and Iraq fought a long, viciously destructive war against one another. There were no winners but there was a lost generation of young men resulting from the deadly clash. The Arab League did nothing one way or the other. Just as now, while deploring the horrible excesses of the Syrian minority Shia regime against its own population of majority Sunni it fulminates and sits on its oil billions.

Willing to use billions to persuade the West, however, to step in and intervene. The West, having been bitten then stricken often enough before in very similar theatres, demurs. But the posturing goes on. And the truth is, Syrian civilians are squeezed unmercifully between two true evils, each representing rabidly nasty excesses of fanatical Islam; each at war with the other.

Another truth is that the entire Middle East is afflicted with a festering pathology of hatred born of tribal and sectarian dysfunction. Where tolerance is thin on the ground and anger, resentment and anomie is an integral part of the culture, an ancient heritage passed down through the generations. The hatred lies latent for awhile, then a spark lights it into a raging fire of rejection, distemper and vengeance.

Nations that consider themselves to be civil, temperate, moderate, capable of communicating and reaching solutions to impasses, find the destructive impulses that lay so close to the surface of societies that pride themselves on a facade of modernity and moderation, puzzling and threatening to their own state of being. They have attempted in the past, to help bring order and sanity to the chaos that periodically overtakes the Middle East.

And found it wanting, costly, destructive to their own stability and peace of mind. Little wonder that American President Barack Obama has found himself irresolute in the face of the complexities of  Middle East dysfunction. Common sense, the wish to bring accord from discord, the reflex of rejecting violence and attempting reasonable debate to bridge a gap between differences work in some societies, fail in others.

Tribalism, religious fanaticism, emotional instability, perceptions of honour, gender and minority and religious persecution, all those threads come together to present as a tight skein of social/religious/political failure. When a pack of ravening wild animals is embroiled in a fight to the death, the better part of valour instructs one to avoid confrontations that are certain to result in wholesale annihilation.

In the Middle East as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and within North Africa where competing tribal interests intersect with a religion whose precepts can be interpreted to legalize, normalize and promote violence in the interests of serving that religion's ultimate goal, no outside force is willing to step forward in self-sacrifice.

Although the warring factions are fully immersed in the glory of self-sacrifice as martyrs to their cause, martyrdom to that cause subsuming non-believers as a symbol of victorious triumph represents an utterly alien and hugely disturbing aspect of minds whose humanity have been twisted beyond rescue. Little wonder President Obama has no wish to assume full and lonely responsibility for action whose outcome is uncertain.

It was his wish, it most certainly was, to become Commander in Chief of the most powerful, wealthy and controversial nation on Earth, but he appears never to have imagined that his capability would face actual empirical trials such as these. Perhaps he believed too much in himself, aided by the presumptuously-early presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now he is a man who while holding that highest of high offices has committed himself as the arbiter of events beyond anyone's control, suddenly abandons his earlier stated intentions, when it becomes clear that sheer force of mind and statement accomplish nothing when belief and trust in himself has been abandoned and the world sees, senses, smells and recognizes the odour of personal failure.

Not his fault, after all. He is only human. Just another human facing an inhumane but entirely human situation that incontinent-minded thugs impersonating world leaders have presented to the world. Three leaders of three nations, Iran, North Korea, Syria have focused world attention on their willingness to disrupt world order with weapons of mass destruction. And there is nothing in their minds that would whisper a word of caution to them.

And no world leaders to convince them that their ambitions and disregard for the welfare of humanity represents an affront against anything that has meaning in this world. The two lesser world powers that have the capacity but not the willingness to join with the sole superpower and other nations who recognize the dangers they represent to the world at large, are themselves too inward-looking and prepared to overlook an impending disaster.

Or is this possibly just a bit of a nightmare, so persuasive and pervasive that we have all fallen victim to it, waiting for dawn to shed light on it and banish the darkness of such thoughts?