There is a tendency for Westerners to overstate their own importance in the Middle East, which are also informed by inter-state, intra-state and extra-regional groups and actors that are neither European nor American.

The real regional meta-story that is playing out right now, in my opinion, is the inevitable collapse of the post-imperial order. It was caused not by any grand state actors (or by Twitter) but by a single Tunisian street vendor. He upended the unsustainable patterns of rule that have characterized the region since the withdrawal of the European powers after World War II. Nobody knows what comes next, and there is no good model, yet, of American statecraft to inform a regional posture.

The story made me shake my head, but not because of anything to do with of any sinister implications that it raised about the military-industrial complex, but because it looks like Keystone Kops. The Syrian civil war is a proxy conflict between the (Sunni) Gulf States and (Shia) Iranians with the Russians alongside the latter. It takes the form of members of ISIS killing Quds Force commanders, and it ignited without much help from the West. Which side would you pick?

You forgot the weird Turkey vs the Kurds almost war thing. And the weirder thing of the Israelis almost protecting ISIS forces from Assard/Hezbollah. Or the bizarre Iraqi Mosal campaign where Iraqi backed Iranian militias almost had (or sometimes did have?) US Airforce backing.

Anything is possible in this war.

The Turkish state seems to have only a problem with the militant Kurds in Turkey and Syria but not the ones in Iraq as it seems that they get along very well and the Kurds in Iraq even allow Turkish forces to launch airstrikes in the region of Iraqi Kurdistan and for their troops to hunt down PKK members over there with the help of Peshmerga, the de facto Kurdish armed forces in Northern Iraq.

So, saying that the Turks are at complete odds with Kurdish militias all over the region is not entirely correct.

The are multiple Kurdish factions on all sides of all borders. The don't always get along, either with each other or with Turkey. I also believe that there is a multitude of views towards the Assad regime.

AFAIK they all fight ISIS though.

The talk was in NPR, you can search "Henry Barky NPR Kurds".

There's always been tension between Kurdish nationalist factions and they even had a brief civil war[1] between Iraqi Kurds in the 90s (Talabani vs Barzani) and there's rivalry between the Peshmerga and the PKK esp. in the area where the Peshmerga deems its territories in Iraq where some PKK members challenge their authority there but despite all of this, some Kurdish nationalist love to portray the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds as an ethnic and not a political one as it garners more support and sympathy for their cause and make Turkey look like the bad guy in this conflict.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Kurdish_Civil_War

That's one aspect I find very confusing - Turkish attitudes towards ISIS aren't exactly hardline (eg frequent reports of ISIS supply routes over the Turkish border), and so it isn't clear to me what terror attacks by ISIS in Turkey would gain.

Except terror of course - that's always a thing. And I also understand that ISIS command and control isn't exactly centralised, so it could be random people somewhat aligned.

Another alternative is that they are more tactical in nature - maybe Turkey closes a border route, so ISIS bombs Ankara? I don't know enough to know if this makes sense.

Either way.. confusing.

For goodness sake, we'd been trying to topple Gaddafi and the Syrian regime for half a century and getting exactly nowhere, then as you say one Tunisian street vendor makes a desperate gesture and in the chain reaction from that the whole region falls into chaos. That's history for you.

As for IS, the reason they're such a nuisance isn't so much due to the invasion of Iraq, it's due to the power vacuum in north western Iraq caused by the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. The fact is the surge worked, but all of that was willingly thrown away.

"A bit of air support" is a strange characterization for destroying the Libyan government's entire tank fleet in the middle of an Islamist uprising. "Mainly keeping out of it" is a strange characterization for supporting a coup in Egypt that toppled a democratically elected government. Also, we never, ever, ever, ever talk about Bahrain, where the US supplied arms through Saudi Arabia against the uprisings and: >By 2014, 5,000 Saudi and Emirati forces and almost 7000 American forces were positioned "less than 10 miles from the Pearl Roundabout, the center of the country’s protest movement."

We have surrounded the middle east with armies for more than a generation and armed the worst governments in the area. "Mainly keeping out of it" is a gross mischaracterization of what we do there.

I don't recall any major role for the US in the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt except just saving their interests whether in the Presidency or the military but saying that the West orchestrated the whole thing is just blatantly false and totally dismisses the sweat and blood we Egyptians scarified to get rid of dictatorship and take all the credit for themselves.

Now to ISIS, we could argue that ISIS was a byproduct of the Iraq invasion in 2003. ISIS was born out of the Iraqi Insurgency and the Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia under the leadership of Abu Mosab Azzarqawi.

So yeah the US invasion of Iraq contributed indirectly to the rise of ISIS in Iraq first and then to expand in the neighboring Syria and eclipsing Al-Qaeda as the "hottest" Islamic terrorist organization in the world.

"The Syrian civil war is a proxy conflict between the (Sunni) Gulf States and (Shia) Iranians with the Russians alongside the latter."

Would be appropriated to say "with the Americans alongside the Sunni"? Is this, then, a kind of proxy-proxy war?

Because it seems to me that we always heard how bad are the Iranians but very little about how bad are the Saudis and company.

And the purpose of this article seems to be to demonstrate that the Americans don't have any clue which side they are on.

The Iranian government has literally been chanting "Death to America" every week since 1979. Our relationship with Saudi is much, much more complex.

Fuck that. If anything had happened in Iran before Mosaddegh was overthrown by USA that would constitute a defensible justification for that action, I'm sure you would have told us already. Instead, here's some innuendo. Gosh that chanting is bad.

Also, implicit in your criticism, such as it is, is the notion that the chanting is representational of the Iranian population. It is not; most of the country has lived for long enough under the 'revolutionary' rule of the IRGC that they are actually more disposed towards the West than you might think.

Regardless, you asked why the U.S. was tilted towards Saudi in its conflict with Iran, and I was trying to provide a summary: that is an outgrowth of regional balance-of-power politics as much as anything else.

I wasn't the one who initially asked why USA traditionally favors Saudi over the Ayatollahs, but frankly your response to that query is an exercise in question-begging. They wouldn't chant "death to America" if that chant weren't rhetorically useful. It wouldn't be rhetorically useful if USA hadn't intervened to remove an elected Prime Minister.

However, by invading Iraq, we introduced a new humongous source of chaos to an already chaotic situation. Chaos and destruction cause historical events to become even less predictable than they usually are and impossible to control. What is predictable is that they tend to support the worst in people and suppress the best. I think it's quite safe to say that the cure was worse than the disease (Saddam, at least), and we are responsible for that. History tells us that this usually happens when people try to solve problems by invading countries.

In other words, I think we shouldn't pretend we can predict outcomes of chaotic situation. One thing we can be guided by is that the things we feel are bad (war, oppression, genocide, etc.) cause more chaos and create far more misery than the politicians and the public doing the bad thing imagine when they convince themselves it's necessary/worthwhile/inevitable. Also, no situation is so very bad that you cannot make it worse (as apparently astronauts like to say).

While governments have professional analysts, they don't do all that much better than chance even on direct predictions and then what they do share with the public is filtered by their biased interests.

Not only do we not know, for example, if the chaos after an accelerated arab spring was a better outcome from the perspective of maintaining western financial/political interests at a cost of preventing a more gradual transition into stable democracies. But more importantly, we also don't know if government analysts had that hypothesis and they still chose to interfere.

Personally, I don't think western democracies will continue to function with that type of secrecy of knowledge combined with increasing computational modeling/prediction capabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project

For full datasets, I'm not sure if they provide it since not all researchers are good about open data. You could look at open prediction markets which are directly observable but they wont give you any insight into how professional analysts compare with the crowd.

Imagine if Trump realizes that he can't rule all of America, but he could totally rule Southern States. So he devises a plan to divide the states and cause a rebellion. Eventually he manages to persuade some Nothern States officials that they are better off without Southern States and that they implicitly or explicitly agree to divide the USA between them. That's a more accurate version of what Miloshevic did.

So the Enterprise just leaves that system of two stars hosting two societies that have developed a symbiosis relationship (one exploiting the other based on lies) without exposing the lies even though they can give a better solution. The only thing they tell them is that "Maybe you'd discover that there are ..options"

The Prime Directive was a great idea; I really wonder what exactly spurred Roddenberry to come up with that. But TOS was chock full of episodes where Kirk brushed aside the Directive and intervened anyway, frequently by blowing up some big computer.

If you like, you can go on dailymotion.com/video and search for it.

WTF? I completely disagree; ST:TNG (and TOS) is a breath of fresh air compared to modern TV. No over-the-top ultra-violence, no half-second-long Michael Bay-style shots, no requirement that you've followed the series religiously and are watching the episodes in order; it's a great way to relax and watch something enjoyable. It's also nice that all the characters are hyper-competent; this is a nice break from the real world which is full of incompetent morons. If I want to see "dark, gritty realism", I'll go walk around a ghetto or something.

For example, there is this one episode that develops a bit strange. Piccard shouts "shut up Weasley" and blindly ignore the fact that Data is acting weird. Of course that's the plot, but I don't find it convincing.

Also, the episode Hide and Q (I like Q character), it's a bit trivial in script writing compared to today understanding. However, Q comes back at the end of the next generation and make a profound appearance (he puts Piccard on a trial because he is interested in Piccard as a superior human which is a nice thing because he and the Q continuum regards publicly human as an inferior species).

I just say that there is "some" plot holes but overall, it's still something I'd stick to.

Recall that rebellion against Qaddafi started in Benghazi and then spread and then he fought back and was about to put the insurrection down when a no-fly zone was imposed.

With Syria, it all started as more or less peaceful demonstrations as a part of the Arab spring. The financing of rebel groups by western powers started much later once the war already commenced.

Really? Clinton on Qaddafi: https://youtu.be/mlz3-OzcExI

ADDENDUM regarding "US+European" involvement in Libya and Syria (as I was on mobile and had time constraints as I wrote the above):

Libya

'The Libyans were emotional because the U.S. and its allies had toppled leader Moammar Kadafi in a military campaign that averted a feared slaughter of Kadafi's foes. Obama administration officials called the international effort, accomplished with no Western casualties, a "model intervention."' (http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-us-libya-20140...)

Syria

This USG cable (https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html) written in 2006 (!) lists a number of "vulnerabilities" and "possible actions" - almost like a playbook - on how to change Syrian regime. (background info and analysis of the cable: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33180-wikilea...)

In case of Syria, Asssad blamed the protests that followed the execution of the teens squarely on Israel, so you can't be right.

For once? France is one of the most trigger happy developed nations next to the US. They've been involved in more than two dozen major conflicts since Korea, and far more smaller operations, many in which they were they main or only foreign force.

The difference is that the conflicts France tends to get involved in are less flashy and/or shorter and more targeted. E.g. a standing counter-insurgency force of 3,000 in the Sahel, isn't very flashy. Helicopters and fighter planes and a few thousand troops in Côte d'Ivoire got some coverage when they helped depose the former president, but it was over quickly, and so on. But they have active combat troops in at least a dozen countries right now.

"Contrary to Western media reports, Qaddafi did not initiate Libya’s violence by targeting peaceful protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty International have documented that in all four Libyan cities initially consumed by civil conflict in mid-February 2011 — Benghazi, Al Bayda, Tripoli, and Misurata — violence was actually initiated by the protesters. The government responded to the rebels militarily but never intentionally targeted civilians or resorted to “indiscriminate” force, as Western media claimed. Early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten, citing “more than 2,000 deaths” in Benghazi during the initial days of the uprising, whereas Human Rights Watch (HRW) later documented only 233 deaths across all of Libya in that period."

http://journal-neo.org/2014/06/22/the-truth-of-libya-finally...

And who has armed protesters/rebels there in early 2011... those same rebels who have stormed the US embassy on September, 11th 2012? (interesting date... it must be a coincidence)

America's secret plan to arm Libya's rebels

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/americas...

You may be asking yourself, why would USG and its NATO allies (yes, French government primarily) do such thing (topple Ghaddafi)? One hint is hidden in recently published Clinton e-mails:

FRANCE'S CLIENT & QADDAFI'S GOLD

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659

[...]

Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.

This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals, Sarkozy's plans are driven by the following issues:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi's long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.)

[...]

So much for "the West" just trying to avoid being blamed for atrocities in Libya.

More interesting e-mails: H: LOTS NEW. FRENCH ECONOMIC GRAB/LEVY/Q & OBL/AQ BASE IN ALGERIA. SID

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/11647

H: LOTS OF NEW INTEL; POSSIBLE LIBYAN COLLAPSE. SID

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6551

[...]

French, British and Egyptian Special Forces troops are training the rebels inside of western Egypt, and to a limited degree in the western suburbs of Benghazi.

[...]

GERMANY LOANING $144 MILLION TO LIBYAN REBELS (AP)

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/27323

(2) On Syria: I assume you are referring to Daraa protest and arrested children (who were released afterwards)? Not even MSM (mainstream media) spoke of an execution. Information about that came from Rami Abdul Rahman, a guy who heads up the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and sits in London! Not the most credible source. A more balanced view:

Syria: The Hidden Massacre

http://mideastshuffle.com/2014/05/16/syria-the-hidden-massac...

Besides (and this relates to Libya, as well), do you really think that a protest and arrest lead to a civil war? For a war to be fought you need weapons, trained people, communication equipment, structure, food and medical supplies, organizational structure. We are to believe the protesters had all that? Another hint of the real cause for the war in Syria is this:

Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/newly-declassified-u-...

Funnily enough the first target NATO bombed was the man made "river" to the desert aquifers. So much for bringing democracy to Libya.

I hardly doubt that the US is clean of this.

I don't think that's true. The most anti-communist population in the world is by far in the US. I guess the close second are the Islamist, thanks to US policies to use Islam against Communism.

I live in Turkey and this picture is very clear. Islamist rule my country and the number one reason is that this is US policy. They systematically gain power after an US-backed coup in 1980. That coup killed the left-wing and secular right movements. Only winner was the Islamists, a minor radical movement at that moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

So, yes, western interventions play a big role here. When they try to fight one enemy, they create other monsters.

Not to say that this is only applicable to US. France at the height of its power committed similar things in Algiers (destroyed a third of population). France, Russia and Germany divided up Poland, later on Germany sent her jews to death camps outright.

Thanks for this.

Whether or not you agree with those actions, or the whole system, is a matter of politics. I'm not condoning anything, just trying to explain the potential reasoning behind the decisions. I do hope that radical islamism runs its course in the same way that communism did. One big complication is that there are a lot more foreign powers involved in the Middle East than there were in the Soviet Union. It could be harder for them to find their own way while being manipulated by so many other hands.

– Joseph de Maistre

Seen from a systemic perspective one could argue that "every country gets the government they deserve" and by meddling with that "order" we created even more chaos.

Meddling with systems is something we are pretty confident about unfortunately (think about the recent findings regarding Greenland sweet water accelerating global warming).

The multitude of motivations behind our actions ultimately don't matter, what matters is the root cause - believing that we can or should "meddle" in the first place.

We notoriously think we understand but as "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" we usually suffer from collective Dunning-Kruger effects all the time.

Imagine that right now, on some point of the globe, there's a popular rebellion against a dictator who is, without a shadow of a doubt, suppresses the people, kills his political opponents, and tries to indimidate other countries of the region with his military machine.

Hell, just imagine it in North Korea (but forget about the big China brother for a second, to make this situation a more simple example).

Would you honestly tell that you support the dictator in this conflict, because otherwise the whole situation will turn into a bloody civil war, and he's the only hope for stability? That when those western-looking, english-speaking, democracy-loving rebels are gassed and killed, western states should not intervene?

Well, may be you are — but then any website with political hivemind similar to HN will downvote you to the oblivion.

---

You also may be forgetting one other factor at work in the Middle East — Russia. While it's not USSR kind of superpower it once was, it still has deep ties with arab world that it nurtured for the whole second half of twentieth century. It had established good relationship with many authoritarian regimes and terror groups in the region: Khomeini, Hezbolla, Assad and Hamas. And dichotomy of "chaos vs dictators" is exactly what Russia wants for Middle East: dictators are easy to deal with, they're much more ineffective as oil producers, and, of course, the whole dilemma greatly legitimizes Russia's own political system as well.

What we are dealing with in the middle-east are dictatorships that keep a lead on ethnic tensions, very much like in Yugoslavia. I would expect that any diplomat would have predicted tensions between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Exactly like similar tensions exist in Saudi Arabia and will most likely blow up if the regime becomes unstable.

Well, there's just one small issue: people. Have you met them? Do you honestly think that inhabitants of North in South Korea actually want to live together as one country? That southerners want their first-world economy to support the shit-poor north for several decades? That northerners want all their lifestyle and ideals that they have been taught from the crib, destroyed? That these people are ready to trust each other in general? Hell, even northerners who defect and run to the South encounter a lot of hostility — can you imagine what the shitstorm happen when millions of them will cross the border in search of better life?

In the 1900s, Russian left wingers were educated, nuanced people who were trying to lead the country to a brighter future. 20 years later, Russian left wing consisted of ruthless fighters who burned down entire villages, performed brutal performed mass executions of thousands and built the biggest terror machine world have ever seen. These were, for the most part, the same exact people.

That's a drastic oversimplification. The majority of the Russian Left was made up of SR (which later split, but for the sake of it they can be treated as one group), and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks split the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (with the other part being the Mensheviks) roughly down the middle, but the moderates outnumbered them substantally.

Already shortly after their coup (the czar was arrested in the spring; the interim government was SR led from the summer; in November the Bolsheviks decisively lost the election to the the Constituent Assembly, and that's when they struck - there was no revolution, but a coup d'etat against a more moderate socialist government that had the support of the people), the Bolsheviks started getting rid of the parts of the Russian Left that had opposed them, and soon groups were actively fighting them in the civil war, while others were fighting to stay out of prisons or to avoid being killed, and some forged uneasy, temporary alliances in the hope of survival. Soon their parties were illegal. As Stalin gained control, the purges intensified, including purging the Bolshevik party itself.

The Russian left changed because the moderates (including communists/marxists) were imprisoned or murdered for opposing the Bolsheviks, until there were hardly any left.

The Bolsheviks, or at least their leadership, largely remained the same people, but in 1900, and all the way to at least 1917, they were by far outnumbered on the Russian left by their future victims.

That was my entire point — people who are saying that US was funding future Al Quaeda in the 80s are just as wrong in the nuance but are just as right in general. Bolsheviks were the logical conclusion of radicalization of the left. Revolutions devour their own children, after all; just like Mensheviks, just like the _real_ democracy-loving anti-Assad protesters. All of them either die, or become the radicalised, grotesque and horrible plagiat of the original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

But FWIW US didn't start intervene in middle East policy in 2001. They have half century of destroying in any imaginable way.

BTW the way you are dividing ethics show you don't have clue what you are taking about.for example Kurds vs Alawites? Really ? These are allies most of the time.

And another thing you completely missed is the idea of West intervention in middle East weakened liberal politician position in middle East.by intervening you are basically proving yes.liberals are our puppets.

And I don't know you have read or watched any documentary (beside midia establishment fantasies).fightig against West and taking "revenge of our people" is best propaganda for Isis in recruitment process.

(By people they refer to who have died in iraq, afghanistan invasion, or when US did support dictators which some of them brutally tortured people/journalist)

Welcome to real world , and turn off your CNN

Look at the border between France and Spain, there are big mountains there. Now look at the border between Egypt and Libya, a straight line in the middle of nowhere. How is that possible?

"if a finger had to be pointed at anyone it should rather be Saudi Arabia,"

Who is the best ally and supported of the Saudi royalty? One of the more backwards regimes in the world.

What about Iraq?

What about Iran? from wikipedia: "In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected as the prime minister. He became enormously popular in Iran, after he nationalized Iran's petroleum industry and oil reserves. He was deposed in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, an Anglo-American covert operation that marked the first time the US had overthrown a foreign government during the Cold War"

Not accepting how the west have messed in the area has become a kind of a reflex.

USA and West political intervention in middle East created mojaheddin at first place dude.because they thought they need these guys against Soviet.no one in that time cared about people of middle east, when they was creating these monsters.do you know any history? Mujahedeen was small group of people in caves.when USA made them hero's.

You can look at times when people in middle East lived together peacefully for hundreds of years.Jew , Christian, Muslims and go on. And remember this was time when slavery and lynching was cool thing to do in your society.

P.s. I am not saying middle Eastern people are better or worse. This is complete nonsense. People are homo-seipans and all of us are animals. There is no bad or good. But they will become bad when you make their lives miserable. When there is no education.

Only because Chomsky says so is like saying: Jesus said so.

I'd like to follow the logical arguments myself.

btw.: I do think, that the western interventions, the capitalistic land-grabbing, the weapons trade, the support for partisan groups, because of mutual political enemies and so on are (at least) some of the reasons this powder keg keeps exploding.

Non the less are the underlying ethnicities, animosities that go back generations and different believe systems (like sunnites and shiites) at least as much to blame.

Only doing finger pointing in the direction of the big bad wolf called US of A is too easy, too simplistic (imho) and will not lead to a better understanding.

I do not believe in such a simplistic logic when it comes to world politics. Most of the time there is a multitude of influencing factors at play. These have o be understood like in a multiple regression analysis (just a metaphor).

The west, lead by the US, has been destabalizing the middle east since the 1940's in order to pillage their natural resources and it continues to this day. This is their clear motive, stated in writing.

Here [1] is an FOIA'd email to Hillary's private server from a French aide where they are found casually talking about overthrowing Gadaffi in order to look after their interests in global oil markets, regional monetary dominance, and to make their military look good for the sake of internal political posturing. This email changed the way I saw the world so much.

I used to hear people say this sort of thing and think, "Well, it's the internet. Lots of crazy people out there. I guess what they're saying is plausable, but I don't believe that our government is making such a conscious, concerted effort." But it's hard to look at an email like that, served from a .gov domain, and think that the cheap oil we get from destabalizing this region is just a pleasant side-effect of pursuing an honest humanitarian goal.

And this isn't something new. It started with the Red Line Agreement in the 20's, where we entitled ourself to middle eastern oil. This became another agreement and into another, but the point is that we wanted their oil, and their political climate was in turmoil. All it takes is one nationalist movement to shut down a pipeline and our economy goes to hell.

Turns out there's a very simple solution: throw muscle at it. Don't risk someone unfriendly getting into power by reducing power all-together through destabalization and make sure that those who are in charge are effectively puppets.

[1]: They actually retroactively took this email off foia.state.gov, so a cached version will have to do... : http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

This region has been robbed of its ability to develop. The governments are dysfunctional by design. Is it any surprise that the people would start to identify more with their church than their government? It's local. It has set values and rules.

I'm not saying this accounts for centuries-old conflicts. But Sunni and Shia get along without killing each other in other parts of the world-- what's different about the middle east?

    > But Sunni and Shia get along without killing each other in other
    > parts of the world-- what's different about the middle east?

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00maplinks/over... http://thegulfblog.com/tag/sunni-shia-middle-east-map/

I.e. where else in the world is there a mixed Sunni/Shia population? Nowhere? Isn't that what's different about the Middle-East in this regard?

With that being said, 15-20% of the Shia Muslims in the world live in the Americas, believe it or not. [1] Granted, all the Muslim sects together make up a minuscule portion of the population of the Americas, so it's reasonable to argue that this isn't a fair comparison.

The difference in my eyes is that Muslims in the Americas have governments they can depend on for arbitration.

[1]: http://shianumbers.com/shias-in-americas.html?m

Of course they aren't tracking down and killing each other in the US, because they're both minority groups and probably rarely even run into each other.

That doesn't say anything about whether they would be doing so if they were both in the majority and their sectarian conflicts were the dominant aspect in society.

    > The difference in my eyes is that Muslims in the Americas have
    > governments they can depend on for arbitration.

You can't both say that Sunni & Shia conflict happens in certain areas of the world because of US foreign policy, and also suggest that Sunni & Shia conflicts would arise between Muslims living in the US who aren't subject to US foreign policy.

When I reference a person like Chomsky or any other scientist (which is well respected scientist) I am not referencing to his character.I am referring to material and position which he takes (for example in his books, which is based on logical inferring, or factual evidence)

I don't think any good will come out of this discussion because you keep nitpicking.But for further information you can read Chomsky's,Finkelstein's and serius scientifics book.

>I do not believe in such a simplistic logic when it comes to world politics. Most of the time there is a multitude of influencing factors at play. These have o be understood like in a multiple regression analysis (just a metaphor).

I 100% agree with this part.but I don't agree with make matters complicated. This is fact and simple. USA did support Mujahedin for many years. And go on.

careful I am not saying USA is responsible for all things in middle East.but they are major part in this fucking mess they created. And after they left middle East we can start to talk (without any military intervention from outside) and push for reform in middle east.And I would personally beg/appreciate for providing cultural material.( I don't know. Internet. TV shows. Thing like this , which shows people how people live in West)

Me being "seriously ridiculous"? Maybe - but I see Chomsky (and others) being thrown around as a killer phrase more and more. Not to further any discussion, but to end it with a final bang.

So no, I will not refrain from comparing these argumentative structures to religious arguing like it happened in the medieval times during different fractions of "the faith" for example. Great thinkers were back then also used as pars pro toto of their writings. And were also used as "arguments" - so yeah, I (on purpose) showed the flaws in your argument.

This last part by the way is just me interpreting your own argument against you. Probably totally misrepresenting you in the process and misunderstanding you as well. As you by the way did with my argumentation.

I totally agree with your view, that western intervention in the middle east did make matters way worse on the whole. I do strongly believe that we should reign them in (will not happen) and should not hail them as the source of freedom and democracy in the world (will also not happen). I am cynical and I do believe that the western (so called) democracies will be further doing their thing and we, the western people will further be supporting these systems without knowing most of what happens in the dark and unknown to us.

I do not agree with you calling me ridiculous though. As I strongly believe every "well respected" scientist has to have his writings and thinking strongly challenged for progress.

> the big bad wolf called US of A

The whole zombie genre (probably anything post-apocalyptic) is based on the premise that the US would immediately collapse into reactionary, extremist militant gangs often out to impose a new state.

What other country goes to the other end of the world and topples governments? Does China drop bombs on US militants? Set up military bases in Canada? Of course the US gov't is the global hegemon, like the big mafia boss, regardless of what propagandized inhabitants think.

It's like firing a dev who introduced a bug. Sure you can fire him, but you haven't fixed the problem. Fix the build.

...and is all the rage in the Middle East today.

It is a little bit disgusting, the same people who created this fuckig mess, the same people who supported brutal dictators, the same people who created Mujahedeen at first place , now came and claims ,

"Oops , we didn't mean to create this mess.maybe some thing wrong in your people's gene?"

No people are people.They do bad thing when there is no education , when there is no economy.when there is no future. When you humilate their existence.

Do you wanna see bad thing? Take trip, and go to one of trumps rally , when they literally yell at black people: " go to your fucking continent, what the fuck are you doing in my country? "

And in the end you are the one looking bad and not having reached any goal. If you can't win with arguments, but try to do it with statements and ad hominem attacks you will probably never convince anyone here.

The big positive example here is how the French and German `Erbfeindschaft' seems to be over. But perhaps that was never an ethnic conflict?

Does anyone have a nice lists of resolved past ethnic conflicts? That might be instructive.

The process whereby nations are built from multiple ethnic groups, and then nationalism and international tension is replaced by international co-operation seems to me to be one that we can't say reaches a stable state. The Cold War hasn't been over for that long, the European financial crisis has revealed some pretty ugly attitudes between various European polities.

Perhaps the democratic peace thesis is right, however it is also possible that France and Germany kick off again in our lifetime.

    The last major war of religion there was from 1618-1638

The interesting 1632 series of books is set just after the sack.

(Thanks for catching the typo.)

Islamism is not new to the region

> the rise of Islamism is a global phenomenon

Is it? I have yet to see an islamist political party in the west.

While the philosophies are around 100 years old, this doesn't mean the Middle East has embraced those philosophies for the last 100 years or that it does today.

There has been a measurable trend to right-wing conservatism and religious affiliation in the Middle East which can be seen not only in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but also in Israeli society, and in Lebanon. This shift has happened over the last twenty years or so.

The US is allies with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and it's in their interest that no significant power forms in there.