A Good Question

There are days when it is difficult to see any long-term future for the human race. Stories abound of both our collective and individual acts of brutality that attest to the fact that purely animal urges prevail within us far too frequently. The scintilla of hope that something better is possible is offered, paradoxically, by collective and individual acts of kindness and compassion that also occur on a regular basis.

The problem, it seems to me, resides in our refusal to tame and regulate the bestial side of our nature, its most frequent expression being found in the behaviour of those who claim to represent us, our governments. Too many of us are content to simply throw up our hands and say these things are out of our control, and then go on to divert ourselves with the latest technological toy. Neil Postman wrote about such in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I am, however, frequently buoyed by letters to the editor that amply demonstrate that there are those among us with insight, clarity and the capacity for analysis and are willing to challenge the insensate among us. Two such letters I reproduce below:

Husband of terror victim cut PM's call short, Jan. 22

I sympathize with the families of people killed in the Burkina Faso terror attack but I can’t help wondering about suggestions that Canada should step up bombing in Syria in retaliation. The Canadians were killed in Burkina Faso. Would it not be more satisfying retribution to send our planes to bomb Burkina Faso?

But who do we blame for the attacks? If the killing of a few Canadians in Burkina Faso justifies bombing attacks in Syria, then surely the killing of Canadians in Burkina Faso was justified by the killing of Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq and Syrians in Syria. Turnabout is fair play, they say, and at this stage we of the Western world are ahead by several hundred thousand killings. Let’s hope ISIS and other “terror” groups don’t try to even the score.

We could also note that bombing has never yet won a war. Hitler’s blitz did not knock England out of World War II and when economist J.K. Galbraith studied the effect of allied bombing on Germany, he found that German arms production had peaked in late 1944.

We had air superiority, but the Korean war was a draw. The Americans dropped more bombs in Vietnam than they had in World War II, but they lost the war. The bombing of Cambodia helped Pol Pot to take power there.

It’s lots of fun to bomb an “enemy” and it’s very profitable for the corporations that make the planes and the bombs, but the evidence suggests that bombing builds, rather than breaks, resistance.
Western governments have spent billions of dollars on the series of wars that George Bush Sr. began and Jr. continued, but we’re a long way from peace. Does anyone else notice that the flood of refugees coming to Europe from Libya, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria are coming from three countries that the U.S. “liberated” from governments that people did not see the need to flee, and one that was for years a client state that, in one case at least, tortured a Canadian on the orders of American “security” forces.

Maybe the best way to end terrorism would be to stop provoking it.

Andy Turnbull, Toronto

Respectfully, Westerners have no business in countries such as Burkina Faso, a state that is frequently rated among the worst countries in the world. Suggesting Prime Minister Trudeau is wrong to pull fighter jets in the fight against terrorism is unfair and just plain folly as incidents such as the recent deaths of six Quebec residents in the terrorist attack in Burkina Faso are literally a daily occurrence across the width and breadth of the African continent as well as many other territories in the world.

People who visit such countries in the name of faith-based altruism do so at their peril, and should not expect the governments of their home states to be held accountable for their misfortune. Tough, unsympathetic words? Perhaps, but that is the reality of the world we live in.

States such as Burkina Faso must forge their own destiny. Westerners who wish to help others in the name of faith would be better served if they looked in their own backyard first before disseminating their brand of religious altruism abroad.

Louis MacPherson, Bowmanville

Both letters will, no doubt, provoke a flurry of outrage. The truth often hurts.

Avoiding Another Imbroglio: A Mound Of Sound Guest Post

This note from the Mound of Sound accompanied the post that follows:

Some of the course material I’ve been going through lately got me thinking about the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. I got thinking about them in the context of water and food security as well as climate change. Our corporate media really drops the ball in these situations. They look for one convenient villain, give it the pack journalism treatment, and then serve it up for public consumption. I have been writing for some time about growing tensions between Iraq and its upstream neighbours, Turkey and Syria, over conflicting demands to the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Today I got out the maps and looked at water security in the context of the anticipated breakup of Iraq. The map that I have appended reveals how a hostile, Sunni breakaway state could wreak havoc on the Shiite south.

NATO’s former Supreme Commander Europe (Saceur) recently urged NATO states to come to the rescue in the turbulent Middle East. He didn’t overtly suggest that NATO forces be deployed on the ground in Syria or Iraq but he did argue that we need to reinforce and secure our fellow NATO partner Turkey against the insurgent forces just over its borders.

Two words that need to be kept in mind today – “mission creep.” Yes we have a clear duty to Turkey under the NATO charter, at least if it actually is attacked, but we must not allow that to extend into military campaigns beyond Turkey’s borders. The Middle East is becoming a cauldron of unrest and instability that they’re just going to have to sort out for themselves. As Western forces demonstrated so clearly in Afghanistan and Iraq, deploying “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” into that theatre yields lousy results and may even make the situation worse in the long term.

The Middle East appears to be at full boil with civil war raging in Syria and Iraq, suppression of democracy in the Gulf States, the reinstatement of military rule in Egypt, insurgencies blossoming across North Africa. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Unrest in the region could get far worse before it gets any better and the worst could last for generations, especially if outside states begin manipulating proxies in the region to expand their own geo-political spheres of influence. Cold War II could be waged along the Sunni-Shiite divide. No thank you.

Religious extremism is just one of the stressors fuelling instability across the greater Muslim world. Add to that the Iranian Shiite and Saudi Sunni sectarian rivalry. These religious tensions are compounded by the ongoing impacts of Western meddling in the wake of WWI when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire according to their European interests without regard to ethnic, tribal and religious realities on the ground. It never worked except at the muzzle of a gun. We needed monarchs, royalty real or imagined, and tinpot dictators to wield the sort of brutality needed to keep our newly demarcated states under control. Syria, Iraq and Iran are all products of Western meddling in the Middle East just as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are all Britain’s doing in South Asia.

We get a lot of news reports about the civil war raging in Syria and Iraq today. The situation is so confused that it’s unclear whether it’s actually two civil wars or just one civil war being waged against two state actors. Our focus is drawn to Sunni Islamist radicals alternately known as ISIS or ISIL or al Qaeda in Iraq. Today the narrative of Western choice is that this is really all about the long-festering religious dispute between the Shiite and Sunni factions of Islam and today it’s the Sunni extremists poised to destroy Christendom (see, it really is all about us).

Back in 2003, the Muslims we feared were the Shia. Remember Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army? Remember the Badr Brigades? They were the intractable nasty shits that absolutely, positively needed to be wiped out if we were ever again to have a peaceful night’s sleep. So what happened? Well, the majority Shia got control of the Iraqi government and Muqtada decided to go back to his real passion – eating. His gang got absorbed into the new government’s security apparatus and got busy oppressing their former Sunni masters. Another squall in a much larger, more powerful storm yet to pass through.

Climate change is also playing a big role in destabilizing the Middle East. The crowds of young people who flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square might have been after democracy and an end to military dictatorship but they probably would have been crushed pretty quickly if it hadn’t been for a lot of their countrymen being furious at the government over high food prices and food insecurity, nepotism and the lack of opportunity, and various other complaints. Grievances are like a bag full of magnets. They attract and become attached. We look at the top magnet and say, “well, see, there’s the problem.”

Climate change actually sparked the brutal civil war in Syria that continues to rage. Drought triggered famine that triggered unrest among Syria’s Sunni majority. They weren’t getting a fair deal from the Alawite (Shia) government of Assad and they finally had enough. The al Qaeda bunch joined in after the uprising was already well underway. They piggybacked their religious war atop what was really a food security-driven civil war.

It should come as no surprise that climate change is also a significant stressor in the unrest in Iraq. The ‘fertile crescent’ of Iraq depends on the waters of two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. From those rivers was born the ‘cradle of civilization,’ ancient Mesopotamia. It is from their waters that Iraq irrigates its farmland. Those rivers are fed from the mountains of eastern Turkey, an area also hit with drought. The rivers pass through both Turkey and Syria and, when a region is plunged into drought, it’s never good news for the downstream countries, in this case Iraq. The Euphrates leaves Turkey to bisect Syria before passing into Iraq. The Tigris enters Iraq where Turkey and Syria meet Iraq. Within Iraq, the rivers pass through the Kurdish north and the Sunni central part of the country. The majority Shia are concentrated in the south, the end of the line for the Tigris and Euphrates. This map should give a pretty good hint at what could lie in store for the Shiite south if the Sunni extremists in central Iraq get control of that territory.



If, as many expect, Iraq dissolves along sectarian lines, this could leave the Shiite south at the mercy of their historic, Sunni nemesis in central Iraq. It could go pretty hard for the Shia at the bargaining table. Shiite Iraqis might have no choice but to seek the protection (and muscle) of Iran and, should that happen, all bets are off. The Shiite-Sunni divide could just be the next Iron Curtain for Cold War II between the Russians and Chinese backing Iran, Shiite Iraq and Syria versus the West as reluctant defender of a gaggle of rapidly destabilizing Sunni states. No good can come to us or them by allowing ourselves to be drawn into that sort of quagmire.

The conflicts underway and those to come in the Middle East will likely be multi-generational, another good reason for us to keep our distance. As we showed in Iraq, Afghanistan and, before that, Vietnam, we don’t do wars without end. To us, ten years is a stretch. and, if we ever needed a reason to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels, this one’s a dandy.

America: A Superpower Of Near-Demonic Dimensions

So says Noam Chomsky in this 2003 video produced for the BBC. I find little with which to disagree in his analysis: