The Prime Directive applied to a Shared World
Nearly a decade ago, “radical” forces in the Middle East released dueling videos showing prisoners being executed by burning them alive. In the first, Shia rebels burned a Sunni captive. In response, ISIS (Sunnis themselves) burned four (4) captive Shia, who were identified as “spies.” [Note: Originally written September 1, 2015.]
Washington would have Americans believe that these are fringe elements, but this barbarity represents nearly a millennium and a half of civil wars (a/k/a Fitnas). Shiites and Sunnis are Arab “brothers” and adherents to the same religion. They all pray to Allah and purport to follow the teaching of the Quran (Koran) and consider themselves the rightful heirs and protectors of Mohammed’s faith.
When the internal warfare began, the combative factions were closer to the end of the Roman Empire than we are today to the birth of America. When the English monarchy began in 1066, the Islamic conflict had been waging for centuries. When Columbus (re)discovered the New World in 1492, the conflict was approaching its first millennium. At the dawn of America, more than 1,000 years of conflict had passed.
Men, who would appear to the rest of the world as being so similar, have waged war with each other without abatement for centuries. Those battles are not only fought among individuals and tribes, but also among formal governments, which engage in theocratic rule. Those theocracies blur the line between religion and civil government.
Even America’s closest Middle East allies (e.g. Saudi Arabia) are barely distinguishable from the more “radical” factions. The Saudi royal family enjoys the blessings of favorable imams (clerics), and they use the oppressive force of Sharia Law to keep the populace in line through public floggings, amputations, and beheadings. The difference between the Saudis and ISIS is only a matter of degree.
The Sunnis and Shiites have no interest in resolving this age-old conflict. The only “end” would come, if at all, with the complete annihilation of one “heretical” faction by the other. After the fall of Rome, western powers also factionalized and engaged in petty conflicts and wars resulting in the deaths of millions. We refer to that period as the “Dark Ages.” After a millennium of intellectual and social stagnation, Western Civilization experienced a Renaissance. From that Renaissance, sprang the social, economic, and political theories, which have evolved into modern society during the intervening seven (7) centuries.
While Western Civilization was enjoying the benefits and advances brought about by Classical Liberalism, nascent Democratic Republics, the Industrial Revolution, the Nuclear Age, and Space Travel, the Middle East remains mired in a medieval world with feudal lords, mysticism, and subsistence standards of living. Were it not for the development of fossil fuels, the Middle East of the 21st century would likely be little different from the days of Mohammed, who died in 632 A.D. The lives of Arabs today cast them as Arthurian players in a melodrama set in modernity.
The hubris of Western Civilization is demonstrated in the belief that peoples will voluntarily adopt the social and political “advances” once they have been exposed to them. It was this mindset, which caused prior U.S. administrations to believe that we would be welcomed as liberators. Unfortunately, many persons in the Middle East do not wish to embrace the “advances” of Western Civilization. They would rather continue the wasteful conflicts in the vain hope and expectation that they and their ilk will be the last standing. They would then gleefully declare themselves rulers of the remaining rabble and rubble.
Their “conversion” to peaceful coexistence is unlikely. Their numbers make impossible the imposition of will by force. America’s experiences of Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq show that local power brokers and the indigenous peoples quickly fill any vacuum with familiar choruses of hate and the instigation of tribal conflicts. It is the world and life that they know, and they are not likely to change in the near term.
The bigger danger is that America and Western Civilization generally get dragged into the morass and that we are forced to relive the Dark Ages. Western Civilization experienced its own growing pains but outgrew such adolescent thinking. The ways of life of fundamentalist Islamists, as dictated by Sharia Law, do not provide a source for advancing our own society. Inclusion of such teachings, attitudes, and actions need not be defended in the interest of “diversity” of thought. Instead, the resulting oppression, barbaric behaviors, and abuses of human rights should be unabashedly condemned. They should serve as cautionary tales and provide a backdrop against which to compare and contrast the advances of our own society.
