The West Inside the Middle East

A compilation and analysis I have developped on the evolution of the Middle East with an emphasis of the local collaboration with the foreign interférences in the region.

Middle East Changes and the National Interest of the Western Powers

Compilation and Analysis

Introduction:

In the Middle East, the reasons for anger have not changed. The only difference after the Second World War was the instrumentalisation of the violence which took on a religious drift, as the movements of independence were conditioned by a puritanical claim against the Westernization of morality that was considered at that time as a depravity of the whole Muslim society and Islamic values.

In short, the Muslim state faces a Jewish state, because on both sides since the creation of Israel, these politico-religious dilemmas fuel confrontations in the Middle East. Religion in Israel as well as in Arab countries becomes the central reference for distinguishing and defending the interests of the state and the power in place as well as a justification for resistance against the external enemy, which is no longer considered only as an enemy of the nation but an enemy of and by the religion.

Arab Middle East and the National Interest of the West:

Conflicts in the Middle East are related to certain periodic interventions.  These confrontations were organized from outside with the connivance of local tribes with the involvement if not the blessing of regional coalition of governments.  For them, these conflicts were sustained for the strategic objective that is to preserve their national power and neutralize local dissidents. Additional factors are of historical dimension or they were caused by territorial disputes and claims.

The Sykes-Picot treaty and the Division of Middle East

We hear a lot today about this treaty, in which the UK and French (and Russian) Empires secretly agreed to divide up the Ottoman Empire’s last MidEastern regions among themselves. Crucially, the borders between the French and British « zones » later became the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Because those later-independent states had largely arbitrary borders that forced disparate ethnic and religious groups together, and because those groups are still in terrible conflict with one another, Sykes-Picot is often cited as a cause of warfare and violence and extremism in the Middle East.   But scholars are still debating this theory, which may be too simple

Source: Financial Times

Petrol and Power in the Middle East:

Source: Philippe Rekacewicz / The Diplomatic World

The Middle East produces about a third of the world’s oil and a tenth of its natural gas. (It has a third of all natural gas reserves, but they’re tougher to transport.) Much of that is exported. That makes the entire world economy pretty reliant on the continued flow of that gas and oil, which just happens to go through a region that has seen an awful lot of conflict in the last few decades. This map shows where the reserves are and how they’re transported overland; much of it also goes by sea through the Persian Gulf, a body of water that is also home to some of the largest reserves in the region and the world. The energy resources are heavily clustered in three neighboring countries that have historically hated one another: Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The tension between those three is something that the United States, as a huge energy importer, has been deeply interested in for years: it sided against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, again against Iraq with the 2003 invasion, and now is supporting Saudi Arabia in its rapidly worsening proxy war against Iran.

Since the middle of the past century, Cold War became the driver of conflicts in the Middle East with the Palestinian Question as the center of dispute for legitimacy between the so-called Arab countries.  At the same time, the existence of rich reserves of petrol have also exacerbated the reasons of disputes and conflicts.  Oil became the prime factor in defining and dissolving regional and international alliances for the Middle Eastern governments.  The Gulf War and the subsequent invasion of Iraq can be traced to such determinations.

Petrodollars and Petro-Power in the Arab Middle East:

The Administration of President Richard Nixon and previous American leaders did not observe a fiscal discipline and aggravated the international conjecture which impacted in depressing the value of the Dollar.  Faced with deteriorating balance of payment, the United States Treasury came under the attacks of European financial institutions who demanded gold for their dollars. .The continual combination of these internal and external factors could have led to the  destruction of the U.S. currency.  In fact, America’s excessive deficits became the motivation for further international expansion.  Therefore the US confronted with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement needed to stimulate a global demand for the dollar without having to pay for it in gold.

According to the agreement, the United States would offer military protection for Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The U.S. also agreed to provide the Saudis with weapons, and perhaps most importantly, guaranteed protection from Israel.

The Nixon-Kissinger team had their terms for the Saudi Government as follow:  The Saudis must agree to price all of their oil sales in U.S. dollars only. (In other words, the Saudis were to refuse all other currencies, except the U.S. dollar, as payment for their oil exports.)  The Saudis would be open to investing their surplus oil proceeds in U.S. debt securities.  Through this agreement, the petrodollar system provides at least three immediate benefits to the United States.

• It increases global demand for U.S. dollars
• It increases global demand for U.S. debt securities
• It gives the United States the ability to buy oil with a currency it can print at will  

By 1975, all of the oil-producing nations of OPEC had agreed to price their oil in dollars and to hold their surplus oil proceeds in U.S. government debt securities in exchange for the generous offers by the U.S.  This petrodollar agreement and the related system of recycling of the petrodollars have successfully reinstated the dollar as  the World Currency of favors and preserve the dollar from collapsing considering the continuing excessive deficits in the US.   Moreover, the petrodollar system have facilitated the access to an unprecedented wealth that created large reserves of petrodollars for the conservative Arab governments of the Middle East.  

The deluge of petrodollars have enabled them to purchase arms, extend their influence toward other Arab and Islamic countries, to deter any dissension or progressiste governments in neighboring countries and to finance conflicts in other countries to preserve their own version of Islamic and their own orientation and Sunny identities.

The Middle East, the Stage of Warlike Performances:

Planting bombs and using deadly projectiles as fertilizers in distant lands can only increase the sedimentation of already existing divisive religious trends and diverse and unresolved ethnic conflicts.  The escalation of these destabilizing factors has been the landmark in the Middle East since the Fall of the Sick Man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire.   Since the aftermath of the First  World War, the Middle East never witnessed a period of regionally sustained peace.

These characteristics were the determinations of the international policy by the Western World and the Bloc of the Soviet Union.  Despite, the passing time and the disappearance of the Red Threat, the Middle East have not escaped the trap of the proxy periodical wars and the local conflicts.

“The “interventionist” Europeans often push the Americans towards more aggressiveness, as was the case of the UK against Iraq in 1990, of France against Libya and Syria in the 2010s. This autonomous action of the two traditional European imperial powers remains, however, fully within an American-dominated system. They lead, at best, at the margins. European opposition – France and Germany against the Iraq War, Italy, Poland and Germany against the Libyan War – tends to be purely verbal and “benevolent.”

The excess of violence used within the limits of the related uncontrolled acts of wars and reaction to wars by what is defined by one side as Resistance Acts and the other side as Terrorist Acts express in itself the two side of the story that have not found a common ground even in controlling their own warlike and violent responses to the issue how to deal and implement a peace process of negotiation and establishment.   The rigid positions of both parties remain the platform and the base for the eclosion of violent acts, punitive wars and implementation of embargo and economic sanctions.  Under such defying conditions, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is spreading its destructive methods as justification and as regional hub for the increase of the regional militarisation and the continual intervention of foreign powers to save  their acquired strategic positions and  therefore it became finally as the disturbing factor for the entire Middle East political and ideological landscape.

This unresolved litige and conflict between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Government remains at the Heart of the Middle East’s lack of stability and peace because it is a divisive issue and inconciliable problem that has effectively the 2 ingredients for a continual renewal which are also the landmark of the Middle East Institutional Panorama: the Religion mixed with the Revendication and the pursuit of the international Recognition of Statehood by each of the opponents.  The cohabitation these local unstable situations and unsettled revendications are also shaped by various foreign interventions and disparate alliances against nature.  

Within these deteriorating conditions, opposing sides of this conflictual equation can only contribute and identify their interests in the presence and in the production of a culture of extremism to cement the ranks of their respective supporters and followers which in return aggravate the political and institutional instability and provoke the refugee challenge.

The Emergence and the Rise of Puritanism in Form of Salafism:

Most Muslim nations experienced the wholesale borrowing of civil law concepts that took place in parallel to the disappearance of the Islamic jurist system.  In fact, European colonialism started the demise of the Islamic Law as the foundation of the Islamic societies.

In most Arab countries, civil society is not robust. Consequently, there is a tendency to produce political parties that lack effective checks and balances. A more vibrant civil society, therefore, can help to produce political movements that are less authoritarian.

Noble as the cause was, the destruction of Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorship by a spontaneous uprising and a Western intervention has just wreaked havoc in Africa’s northern half. This map attempts to show all that came after Qaddafi’s fall; that it is so overwhelmingly complex is precisely the point. The place to center your gaze is the patterned orange overlay across Libya, Algeria, Mali, and Niger: this shows where the Tuaregs, a semi-nomadic ethnic minority group, lives. Qaddafi used Libya’s oil wealth to train, arm, and fund large numbers of Tuaregs to fight the armed uprising in 2011.

When he fell, the Tuaregs took the guns back out with them to Algeria and Mali, where they took control of territory. In Mali, they led a full-fledged rebellion that, for a time, seized the country’s northern half. Al-Qaeda moved into the vacuum they left, conquering entire towns in Mali and seizing fossil fuel facilities in Algeria. Criminal enterprises have flourished in this semi-arid belt of land known as the Sahel. So have vast migration routes, of Africans looking to find work and a better life in Europe. At the same time, armed conflict is getting worse in Nigeria and Sudan, both major oil producers. Qaddafi’s fall was far from the sole cause of all of this, but it brought just the right combination of disorder, guns, and militias to make everything a lot worse.

Concluding Notes:

At the level of social culture, Western standards of consumption, modes of production and moral values alienated and destroyed the foundations and the notion of the Islamic Ouma and its traditions inherited from the practice of the Prophet and from the Koran.  Large factions of the Islamic societies have considered and felt this aggressive penetration and acculturation as an alienation and as a direct threat to their beliefs and way  of life.

All  the new Islamic Schools of Thought became mixed with ideological expansion of the notion of National Interest beyond the geographic boundaries.  The notion of Jihad became identified in the war against the atheism of the Communism and their left-leaning regional Arab authorities.  Such dual ideological identification by  the Conservative Arab and Islamic Governments seeking the strategic support of the West while fighting against the same Westernized ideological Values have also increased the conflict between the Islamic World and the Western powers while developing between them financial and business transactions.

Additionally, the reduction and disappearance of the Red Threat and the dislocation of the Soviet Union have left a vacuum in the map of ideological conflicts.  The jihadists became a reserve of militants made of committed fighters for hire and they became the substitution to the weakened progressiste Arab governments that have collapsed under the double cover actions and direct intervention of Western powers and their regional conservative Arab Governments.

Within this new frame of duality of conflicts a drive toward direct intervention of the United States and its Western Allies became the answer for the continual instability of the Middle East.  A new form of strategic collaboration based on the communality of National Interest between Western Administrations and Islamic Governments have directly provoked the rise of the Jihadist movement.  These Jihadist protagonists aimed their attacks against the ones who financed them and against the ones who armed and trained them.

In other words, the Salafist and the Jihadist Movements in its drive for independence and sovereignty returned its weapons against the ones who incubated them as response to the Communist Threat and became offensive against the regimes who have supported their growth. 

Donald Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and agreed to move the US embassy therePalestinian children look at vandalised graffiti depicting US President Donald Trump

Recents events in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza are the result of such evolution. The result made the Middle East to became the theater of economic and ideological conflicts which favored its emergence as the « most belligerent area of the world. »

4/26/2016