Politics

The Guardian is running a story titled “‘Apocalyptic’ Isis beyond anything we’ve seen,’ say US defence chiefs.” Now, it’s true, The Guardian tends to exaggerate. But lemme tellya: this one is no exaggeration.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years, in one of the remotest parts of a remote kingdom. We lived among the local people, who, during the 1950s, were still dwelling in conditions Europeans would think of as medieval, culturally and materially. No love was lost on Americans among the Saudis, and let me assure you, the murder of an innocent victim such as James Foley as a device to express hatred, vengeance, dominance, and menace was culturally acceptable then and it remains so now.

The West in general and the United States in specific have made so many bone-headed mistakes in the Middle East that it is impossible to keep track of them. Those stupid moves are coming home to roost now. With the ascendance of the kind of people who make it a religion to hate the West — to some degree with good reason — and the suppression of ruthless dictators who had a vested interest in keeping the peace, we do indeed face an apocalyptic threat. The Moslem extremists who are fast seizing power are fully capable of and feel justified in exploding nuclear bombs, releasing poison gas, and spreading engineered disease in cities filled with civilians, in any country on the planet. And sooner or later they will do so.

The most serious recent  mistake the West has made was to support the overthrow of strongmen like Saddam Hussein and his ilk. That is because we operate under a fundamental error: we believe, as though it were a religious tenet, that because democracy works for us it must therefore be best for everyone else in the world. And that is not true.

Democracy does not necessarily fit every culture. That is especially so for cultures that spawn groups capable of the atrocities we’ve already seen — atrocities that, you may be sure, are just the beginning. We need to butt out of the governance of other people’s countries. If a dictator is what’s needed to keep extreme jihadists under control, then a dictator is who should be in power. But stupidly, we failed to take advantage of the strongmen who were in a position to do that. When we should have continued to cultivate them, we dethroned them, or encouraged the locals to dethrone them. This was exceptionally stupid.

Our longest-running mistake in the Middle East has been to build dependence on the region’s oil supplies to support America’s enormous, spendthrift energy needs. This forced us to intertwine our economy and our politics with cultures that are not our friends and never have been our friends. Surpassing exceptionally stupid. We would have been better off to dig up all of Alaska, Canada, the Dakotas, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico than to establish the kind of dependence that we have now and have had for decades. When you compare the two evils, the former would have been less harmful to the United States as a nation and to the West as an alliance of technologically developed nations.

Our second-oldest mistake — hang onto your hats, folks, because I’m about to surpass myself in political incorrectness — was to support the establishment of Israel and maintain an alliance with it.

Think about Israel from an Arab point of view: This is a Western sovereignty populated mostly by people with European cultural roots that was forcibly planted on soil stolen from Palestine. Western allies supported its development shortly after the Second World War for a simple, truly evil reason: no one wanted to provide homes and safety for the millions of Jewish refugees from European tyranny. Instead of opening our borders to the beleaguered victims of a murderous time, we exploited a specious religious belief that a plot of territory on the Mediterranean was a God-given “promised land” to the Europeanized and Americanized descendants of an ancient nomadic tribe. After all, we persuaded ourselves, the Jews were there first.

Well. Maybe. But consider an American analogue. Let us suppose the European Union decided that Virginia should be removed from the governance of the United States and returned to the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indians, on the theory that they were there first and Virginia is, after all, their land. Imagine how that would go over! It’s just about as rational, though, as ripping out a chunk of Palestine and handing it over to the descendants of the Hebrew tribes.

Given that Israel has systematically oppressed the local Palestinians and as we scribble is in the process of killing hundreds of civilians in its own defense (2000 Palestinians vs. 68 Israelis), it’s not surprising that Arabs feel a certain resentment toward the West.

In my opinion, ISIS is the worst threat to Western civilization that we have seen since Adolf Hitler. We need to crush this outfit NOW, even if it means dropping plutonium bombs on Syria, Iran, and Iraq, killing innocents along with the criminal extremists, and letting God sort them out. We cannot allow ISIS to gain any more power, territory, weapons, or political influence — period. If stopping ISIS means killing everybody in sight, that’s what we need to do.

We need to go all-out in building an energy infrastructure completely free of any association with any Middle Eastern country, even if it means despoiling our lands, raising the price of gasoline, building more nuclear plants across the nation, and perforce limiting the amount of power we expend.

We need to quit sending military aid, economic aid, and political support to Israel, even if it means evacuating every person of European ancestry and Jewish heritage and finding homes and jobs for them in Western countries. How about Virginia for starters?

My mother was not an educated woman. But she was perceptive. Sometimes she said things that amounted to metaphor. Once, she remarked, in so many words, that “Armageddon will come out of the Middle East.”

It sounds extreme. But she was commenting on an extreme situation.

World War III will come out of the Middle East. And WW III, given the kinds of weapons we have now and the fanaticism of our opponents, could very well be the Western world’s Armageddon.

Postscript, 8/23/2014: Don’t believe me? Well then, take a look at this authoritative article by Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It appears in this morning’s New York Times. What Mr. Husain describes exactly reflects my own experience of a decade in Saudi Arabia.