You’d be right. If I’d in fact done that.
I took some pains in pointing that out as well.
Honestly, I know we’re all here for conversation and argument, but why is it always dragged down to pedantry.
OK, help me out here. How can one of the inherent problems be
if the populations of those tribes aren’t involved?
Because the clerics, at every level, are contributing to the divisions. They are as guilty, if not more so, than the authoritarians.
That doesn’t actually answer my question - how can you have tribalism be a problem if, as you say, you’re not putting it on the tribes?
Who is responsible for stoking it (my elites, your clerics) doesn’t signify for that. If the tribalism is the problem, then that means the tribes are. Can’t have any real tribalism without tribes.
I said I’m not blaming the victims. Well, not all of them and not to the same extent. There will always be tribes. The two main ones, Shia and Sunni, are the biggest and oldest problem. Further divisions within as far as which warlords and fundamentalist extremist factions (Taliban, Al Queda, ISIS, etc…) is another issue. In a society that distinguishes friend and foe based on holy scripture, or rather how it is interpreted by the clerical hierarchies, makes it impossible to achieve peace unless and until a more secular (less tribal) mindset takes hold. That can’t happen as long as these societies are ruled by elites who are often themselves religious ideologues that further divide people already driven by centuries of institutional religious tribalism. As an example, Iraq, a Shiite majority country, was controlled by a brutal Sunni regime. When toppled, payback came swiftly. But the Kurdish minorities, who where gassed by Hussein, only got to suffer some more at the hands of their new oppressors. It’s a story as old as time in the ME.
Iraq? You don’t think outside forces carry a hefty share of the blame for the state of Iraq?
Alright. I can see that your interests lie not in my responses, or the topic, but in finding ways to talk about everything but.
Like I said before, it always comes down to pedantry.
Pointing out that the real problem in a particular country isn’t “clerics at every level” but rather the large array of outside geopolitical forces who have been actively engaged in fucking up said country for over a century is hardly “pedantry”
The Middle East will never be “solved” if that primary problem isn’t dealt with first.
Sometimes. It kills me a little inside every time someone calls Turkey part of the “Arab ME”. It, like Iran, is not. Excluding Syrian refugees in Turkey, both countries hover around 2% Arab. Older definitions often excluded Turkey from the ME entirely and I still have that old factoid stuck in my head, but I’ll admit at this point it’s no longer widely accepted. Apologies for the hijack 
.
Well, I guess the west really stepped in it when it got involved in Palestine by creating the state of Israel. Wooops. Or does it go farther than that? Come to think of it, is there a place on the globe and in history in which someone didn’t meddle in something that would have been better left alone? I can think of any number of places like that.
The ME is not some sacrosanct ground which needs to be treated with any more deference than any other. Sometimes shit gets meddled with. Sometimes it can’t be un-meddled. And sometimes the problem is YOU. (Generic ‘you’, not you personally).
No, I know. Egyptians don’t like it much when you call them Arabs either. But all those countries are what we’re talking about when we talk about the M.E.
If there’s one place in the world where pedantry is embraced and not dismisses I would think it wouldn’t be the Dope.
It’s only when when Pedantry slides over into the lane of its bullying stepbrother Semantics that things get muddled.
I think that was directed at me.
But I feel it begs the question. Putting the blame on the population is only victim blaming if the population is in fact the victim. Which is the point that’s in question.
I missed my edit window.
*should not shouldn’t have
But we disagree on what the primary problem is. If I’m understanding your posts correctly, you feel the problem is local regimes and outside powers are creating ethnic hostility among the people in the region as a means of controlling them. So removing the influence of those local regimes and outside powers would eliminate ethnic hostility.
I agree that local regimes and outside powers use ethnic hostility as a means of controlling the people in the region. But I disagree that the local regimes and outside powers are creating it. I feel that the ethnic hostility already existed independent of its use by local regimes and outside powers. So removing the influence of those local regimes and outside powers would not eliminate ethnic hostility.
There’s self-evidently a feedback loop between citizen-level hostility to The Other and elite reinforcement of that hostility. If either magically permanently disappeared the other would largely fade out eventually. But perhaps only after several generations.
Arguably the elites, being a smaller, nimbler, more goal-directed group would more quickly abandon a tactic that was no longer paying off than would the citizens give up their long-cherished and -nurtured grievances.
Persistent bad situations of any description almost always consist of a mutually reinforcing snakepit of bad aspects of human nature, of human history, and of geography. The ME, no matter how narrowly or expansively defined in time, in culture, or in geography, is certainly no exception.
Given the reinforcing nature, decisively breaking any one leg of the figurative “fire triangle” is almost certainly doomed to failure. And is itself a very tall order of statecraft or of warcraft.
All aspects of the problem need to be pushed back against gently but firmly and implacably for a period of decades to centuries. That’s how entrenched interests and entrenched attitudes can be sanded down to more amenable shapes. All this might get easier over time as more folks see the future as brighter than the past.
Bickering now over which chicken laid which egg and which evil actor broke more of them is not a route to solving anything.
On this board, I’ve seen you justifiably criticize the American public - the public, not the politicians or the wealthy - for being racist, for being authoritarian, for voting for Trump, and yet, you refuse to blame the Arab public for their own beliefs, resentments and sectarian hatreds. You may think that you’re showing more respect for Arabs than for Americans, but in fact, you’re doing the exact opposite, by denying Arabs the agency you’ve given the Americans. Arabs have exactly the same right to be assholes as anyone else. Face it, Americans and Arabs (and Israelis, while you’re at it) are all exactly the same; roughly half of them are jerks.
Sorry, didn’t mean to step on you there.
But I agree with the above. To whatever extent an individual or populace embraces fundamentalist views or exhibits extremist ideologies, they are responsible and no longer purely victims.
One of these groups lives in a democracy where they get to see their vote, and hence their will, enacted. The other group, not so much. So while I do fault the Arab-on-the-street for all those things you list, that doesn’t mean I blame them for the overall situation - they’re not the ones with the power. They don’t have the agency the Americans have, I’m not denying it to them.
I’d also argue that pretty much all of those would be alleviated by setting things up such that the Arab world develops a large, collectively wealthy middle class with some degree of political power. People who are relatively well off and who aren’t merely scraping by (or worse) are a whole lot harder to engage in tribalism and fundamentalism than their poor and disenfranchised people.
Problem is, right now the Arab countries’ economies are either extraction based (usually petroleum), or generally not very robust, neither of which lend themselves to large-scale gainful employment.