So I’m looking at the news today, and its just one of those days where I feel like we are at the top of the Middle-East roller coaster looking down again.
And of course we’ve been talking about the possibility of the US bombing Iran extensively though I see nothing new about it today. This article on the subject is interesting. The author notes that the alternative to Ahmadinejad is not much better. This author is pretty married to the idea that the Middle-East is going to melt down in a serious way, and has been beating that drum for years.
What do you think? What confluence of events would it take to cause a region wide meltdown? What series of unfortunate events would it take to make a warzone from Kandahar to Riyadh?
ME Meltdown? I hope so. The whole place is an ugly great swamp of death and repression. With a bit of luck the whole place will cleanse itself with fire we can be rid of it.
Genocide, the solution to all of life’s problems, huh ?
And your position makes no logical sense. If ME genocide is such a good idea, then why is ME “death and repression” a bad thing ? And if death and repression ARE bad things, why do you want more of them ? You seem to be saying “Death is bad, so we need more !”
No, not genocide. Just a nice, juicy war. Let all those God-boggled zealots who like nothing more than whiling away the hours contriving imaginary reasons to kill eachother just have at it with the most powerful weapons at their disposal. The problem in the Middle East is Islam, and the only way to get rid of that poisonous ideology is for the sectarians who love squabbling over it so much to kill eachother off.
Death and repression is a bad thing everywhere, no matter who it happens to. It is always ugly and it is always unjust. But it will keep happening forever in the Middle East until our species rids itself of the poisonous ideology of Islam. That will only happen if the region is allowed to eat itself until the people finally step back and say “Enough is enough”.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the only people who got killed in wars were the murderous repressive zealots?
Since, unfortunately, that seems to be far from the case, I’m afraid I can’t get behind The_Magralopterix’s proposal for a wholesale religious cleansing of the Middle East in a “nice, juicy war”.
And unless I’m misreading his/her intent, The_Magralopterix seems to be claiming that the entire religion of Islam is a “poisonous ideology”. That statement sounds to me like sheer religious bigotry, and I don’t see it advancing the debate in any useful way.
I think they’ve been trying this strategy for like 2,000+ years. Surprisingly, the strategy of having a war to sort thing out hasn’t panned out. Maybe all they need is one or two more though…
Not to be a jackass, but the last time I looked at a map, Pakistan wasn’t in the Middle East. Any of the events described in the OP could result in a lot of people dying, but how does that meltdown spread to Riyadh, or Amman or anywhere else?
Well, Pakistan borders Afghanistan and Iran, and Iran borders Turkey and Iraq. If a big regional conflict were to erupt, you are right that it would probably not center on the Middle East per se. At the moment, Iran is an oasis of stability with trouble on both sides.
One human being in six is a Muslim. That has been so for centuries, and it will be so, I’m sure, a hundred years from now. Do you really expect a regional war to produce widespread apostasy?! There have been many great wars in the Islamic world, yet Islam endures. Islam is not going away. (I wish it would, but I hate all forms of Abrahamic Yahvism – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism just because it produced the other two.)
Trust me, I checked a map before I posted. I’m not saying there couldn’t be any kind of border-crossing conflict between those countries, I’m just not seeing why people in Riyadh or other Middle Eastern countries just start going nuts as a result.
You do know that the 4 largest Muslim nations aren’t even in the Middle East, right? Here is a list. Do you advocate going to war with each of these nations?
Chaos, suffering and desperation tend to make religion stronger, not weaker; note what’s happened in Iraq. It’s almost a feeding cycle; suffering and evil make religion stronger, which in turn causes more suffering and evil, which makes religion that much stronger and so on. A “nice war” would fit right in; it would simply make the survivors that much more fervent.
All religion is poison. I see no reason to consider Islam worse than any other; it’s just more powerful in the regions it dominates, and wars won’t make it weaker.
The difference is that Xtianity already went through this. It got bad, with at least one sect-on-sect campaign of extermination. Finally the disagreements led to a treaty called the Peace of Westphalia, which started a kind of long-term cultural accomodation.
Islam is repeating Xtian mistakes. It hasn’t got to Westphalia yet. Maybe in 200 years it will.
The northeastern provinces of Saudi Arabia have a Shi’ite majority. If Iran tries to form a Greater Shi’a Empire out of itself, Iraq and the Gulf States (also mostly Shi’ite-majority), the Saudi Shi’ites might decide to join with it and rebel against their Sunni Wahabbist government.
As a countervailing force against Pan-Shi’ism, there’s ethnic nationalism. There are (Shi’ite) Arabs in southwestern Iran – Khuzestan, a/k/a Arabistan, a/k/a al-Ahwaz – who are restive under Persian rule and dream of independence. (Hussein invaded Iran ostensibly to “liberate” them.) And there are Kurds in northwestern Iran and northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey; and Balochis in southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan; and Pashtuns in northeastern Iran, northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan; and they all want independence, or at least there are substantial independence movements among all of them. The Azeris of northern Iran have been quiet, AFAIK, but a movement to secede from Iran and unite with the Republic of Azerbaijan is not hard to envision.
So, there’s any number of ways a “meltdown” in one country could spill over into others.
Given that Pakistan’s “uncertainty” involves the hope of a democratic revival in the face of naked Islamofascist aggression, I’m not sure what the problem is.
Given that any proposed bombing of Iran would be intended to maintain the status quo for the foreseeable future until circumstances shift to favor the anti-hardliners, I’m not sure what that’s about, especially given as it seems unlikely at this time.
Given that Turkey’s beef with the Kuids (outside of the Turks generally acting like racist jerks) is pretty contained to a thin slice of far-northern Iraq where the PKK (?) operates, I’m not sure how that even comes close to a meltdown.
The problem is that Musharraf is in power now, wants to keep it, and is hostile to and opposed by both of those forces.
No, I don’t think that would be the intention. Crippling the military is not “maintaining the status quo.”
If the U.S. and Iraqi governments are committed to a united Iraq, they can’t ignore it when a third country violates Iraqi sovereignty in a “thin slice” of the country.
I’m not saying there couldn’t be any kind of border-crossing conflict between those countries, I’m just not seeing why people in Riyadh or other Middle Eastern countries just start going nuts as a result.
No, I don’t think that would be the intention. Crippling the military is not “maintaining the status quo.”