Today, as the "Middle East" takes center stage in our modern discourse about war and warriors, one question often dominates our perspectives. Why is this conflict?
Modern millennial liberals blame former President George W. Bush's presumed over reach following the tragic Sept. 11 attacks of 2001. Others, from the conservative "right" disregard this as an over reaction based on faulty intelligence and while touting the strategic successes of post 9/11 era, blame President Obama's less aggressive stances on foreign policy. These views are often expressed by political ideologues who categorize this posture as apologetic. Both perspectives may have merit. But are either view points expressive of a cause to our current conflicts.
Some might argue that ideological conflict between religious factions is to blame, and that as these differences harken back thousands of years, no solution is possible.
But, sects of Islam as well as modern Christianity and Judaism have coexisted in this area in recent history.
In fact, they did so during the existence of the last Middle Eastern Islamic Caliphate. Most might know this as Ottoman Empire.
In fact, I purport that the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I might have predicated today's conflicts.
Like other "Central Powers," the Ottomans were dissolved and the map redrawn following the allied victory in WWI. The Caliphate that had existed for hundreds of years, was destroyed as the result of a poor choice of allies by the emperor and the resulting severity of consequences levied by European allies following their defeat of the Central Powers.
Like most wars leading into the 20th century the underlying issues of the war were practical. Economic expansion, the preservation of old and powerful aristocracies and growing nationalism, as well as a long period of peace that fed the glorious dreams of young warriors and leaders alike, were much the cause of the Great War. But, as is the plight of the conquered, the blame for such an unprecedented loss of life was laid squarely on the defeated.
It has been nearly 100 years since the end of WWI. Civilized western society often points to the inequitable settlement of that war as a significant contributing factor in the development of the resentments that precipitated World War II, and perhaps the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party which perpetrated the most heinous act of genocide in history.
But could this same settlement of WWI be to blame for the 21st century Middle East conflicts?
To answer this question, it is first necessary to take a wide view of the events of the past century, and a significant look at historical conflicts that predate our current era.
To begin, it is important to remember that the wars that gave birth to the Ottoman Empire spanned more than a century themselves from the late 1200's until the mid 1400's, during which time the empire was carved up into smaller fiefdoms or nations. The end of European crusades had left disparate factions and colonial powers. Following the fourth crusades by Islamists into Eastern Europe which dealt the final blow to the Byzantine empire, establishing modern European Christendom yielded a Turkish dominant Sunni Islamic Caliphate throughout the once desperate Islamic world.
This, perhaps overly simplified explanation of the results of the Ottoman-Byzantine wars, does establish what would be for nearly 800 years a peace, all be it tenuous, between the West and Middle East. In that time small pockets of the caliphate were colonized, plundered and abandoned, all while trilling no significant world wide footprint. This went on just as many self contained European conflicts, as well as the American Revolution and the fledgling democracy's own civil war, and middle eastern politics played an arguably less significant world role than those two events.
In the Early days of the Great War, the empire sided with the central powers. Some scholars believe the goals of these powers and the early days of the war was to preserve the status quo. While some can argue that this status quo, and the existing aristocracies that relied upon it were becoming antiquated as new political ideologies such as democracy, modern socialism and what would eventually become Russian communism amidst the Great War, struggled to gain ground. It could, however, also be argued that this status quo held by that same aristocracy had been able to hold the lines of a religious and ideological war to a tenuous peace for 800 years, essentially ending the crusading days of the past. It is arguably true that the end to crusading by the west allowed the enlightenment to occur, and gave purchase to a social evolution in which secular governments could in fact be built and established.
Once WWI became global, and the Central powers were defeated, the powers of the modern world were able to fully embrace the new ideas. Democratic socialism in Europe, Communism in Russia and China, and Democratic Capitalism in America and other places. But, the loss of the war also meant growing resentments for the conquered.
In Germany, the dictatorial Nazi party and its charismatic leader rose up in merely 2 decades.
In the Middle East, the Ottoman imperial territories, however, once dissolved into smaller nations, new fiefdoms and left to return to ideological chaos between disparate factions, the results took longer to realize.
These territories were treated in practice, if not formally, as little more than colonial territories rich with newly needed resources such as oil. Tentative alliances were sought throughout WWII with the emerging states in the region by both Axis and Allied powers.
While European refugees from the advancing WWII fallout spread around the globe, many European Jews, who for generations had little considered their cultural or hereditary roots in the Middle East, fled the genocide of the Nazis back to their biblical home land, fostering a new era of conflict in the long standing religious and cultural differences between Judaism and Islam. This conflict, in its own right, has been difficult to accurately understand, as it predates an accepted recorded history and finds its roots in more etherial scriptures. The only dissed able fact of it seems to be that Isreal does at present exist, and is in fact in varying states of conflict with its Islamic neighbors. (This article will not speculate on moral justifications for or against this conflict. I personally support the right of Israel to exist).
As WWII closed with the defeat of the Axis Powers, again the Allies set the world stage for a post war era, and they did so with a relatively dismissive view of the resource rich Middle East, instead carving up the globe with more recent or modern interests in mind. The once mighty and united Ottomans, now almost forgotten when framed by the advent industrial history, were seen as less industrial or even "3rd world" interests to be only negotiated with for resources they held, but had seemingly little use for, as the modern Western world held the technologies that required these resources.
Lacking the cohesive leadership of the empire, and feeling dismissed in the new era, the states of the former empire each in their own interests, and driven by internal strife between resident, Sunnis, Shiites, Jews, and Christians, as well as constant border disputes, made individual, though often temporary alliances with outside forces.
Most of these alliances were in effect to avoid further colonizing by other powers, such as that attempted by Soviet Russia in the 1980's. During this seeming scurrying for patron nations to assist in establishing solid and secure borders through the region, or broker tenuous peace between factions, the tactics of assimetrical tribal warfare begin to flourish in the far off deserts and isolated mountains.
New leaders, born in the same resentment as the Nazis before them, yearning for the glorious days of imperial success, form religious and political armies similar to those of fading memory by the west. they find a poor, marginally preindustrial population with deep roots in their religion and desert cultural identity on which to prey.
These groups, Al 'Queda and most recently ISIS/ISIL, promise the return of Caliphate, the return of past glories in the name of prophets and if the creator. It is the complete devolution of enlightenment ideals, and the return to the battle cries of nearly a millennium ago.
To effectively set an expectation that the nations of this region join the modern era requires first that the "new world" acknowledge that by action, inaction or negligence, the concurrent development of the Middle East and its politics has been stifled for the past 100 years as a result of a the regions now ancestral participation as a Central Power of World War I.
The question now remains, one of historical significance. If the contributing factors to WWII could have been recognized, could the war, the rise of its leaders and the death it caused have been avoided?
Now, its implications realized: can it be avoided again?
If not, and the result of the century long build up is to be another global war, is it best to prepare, pre-empt or await it?
This article does not excuse the deplorable and despicable actions of ISIS-ISIL, or any other terrorist entity, nor does it imply blame for their deceit, destruction or hate. It merely posits a series of limited observations about the historical context of current affairs.
At its best, this is speculative observation based conjecture or a pseudo-intellectual rant.
You decide.
