Those Wacky Iraqis

I am old enough to remember many Middle Eastern adventures, and I've seen Lawrence of Arabia three times. I even made a valiant effort to get through T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

In general, beware humorless fanatics, regardless of what their fanaticism is about. Unfortunately there a lot of these in the Middle East and all of them are fixated on geography: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Najaf, Mecca and Medina. Everything in the Middle East is either Holy or Oily. And let us not leave out the geography of the fossil fuels that have blessed this arid region so generously.

Suffice it to say, the Middle East was a playground where the US and the Soviets played one group against another. But face it, the Russians were not that far culturally from being just like us. They tried to make loyal comrades out of the Chinese and the people of Afghanistan. They failed. We have recently tried to make loyal freedom loving folks out of Shiites, Sunni's and Kurds. They don't understand that we were trying to save them from Saddam and bless them with a Western outlook. No, we are the godless infidel. We caught Saddam and why are we wasting our time putting him on trial? It would not have taken them five minutes to dispose of Saddam. Due process, polite political discourse, hasn't got a chance in a country where masses of people are capable of such corrupt murderous nonsense.

We have unwittingly gotten ourselves in another messy conflict born of our naivete and arrogance. The weapons of mass destruction pretext does not wash and never really did. Sure, Saddam was a dangerous dude. He sponsored terrorism and perhaps we did more good by neutralizing him that we yet know. On the other hand Pakistan already has nukes, and it is just a regime change away from being just as scary or scarier than, say, Iran or North Korea. On the other hand, could Iran be so determined to develop nukes because we scare them? And how safe is the world when enterprising capitalists in France and the former Soviet Union are selling technology to humorless fanatics?

In a less sophistocated age, it was optimistically thought that world trade would make warfare unlikely because of the economic interdependence of all nations. Would that it were that simple.