Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

 You can blame the whole mess on the Ottoman Empire. It was one of those end-stage empires, too. Palestinians in the Levant had worked out numerous dodges around this extractive enormity. Lawrence of Arabia capitalized on the hatred felt by Arabs in general toward this Turkic "ultima ratio imperii."

Yet Islamic 1.0 had gone past its expiration date from an overripe apple to an "apple of Sodom."* The Brits did all they could to prop the Ottomans up against Russia. It had to fall like Hindu 1.0 did. Its successor-state is fascinating.

The crisis of these countries is a crisis of the system itself, the collapse of Islamic Civilization culminating in the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire that ruled over it in his later stages. The Near East is the wreckage of this civilization, and therefore presents problems far greater than the simple one of scarce natural resources. Rather it's a triple problem of resources, beliefs, that complicated thought-and-reflex pattern called outlook, and sentiments that possess some survival value.

This is a conflict zone in which the Western Powers and Russia are the latest players. It was like this when they found it. The recent clashes of the Great Game up to the Cold War and beyond could get shrugged off if the local folks could get organized - externally and internally - into some kind of viable modus vivendi.

During the Cold War the same sort of problem was being met across the Buffer Zone from Japan and Indonesia, across China and India, throughout Africa to Latin America, but nowhere else was it (and is) as acute as the Near East. This is due to it being the meeting place of three continents.

The Russo-American rivalry benefits nobody in the Near East. Next are the shortages (especially water) exacerbated on the nonmaterial or intangible level: irrational social organization and the irate, uncooperative, and spiteful personality patterns. After this come the perpetual political rivalries among the Arab countries themselves. And on top of this mess are the covetous Western Powers, especially the new world power the US.

Something extra should be mentioned: the Near-Eastern militaries. Wherever a modern state appears in an impoverished region, the possession of weapons is restricted to the small group that can afford them. This is made worse wherever the countervailing forces are tepid and martial virtues are admired. This second feature of Arab outlook predated Islam, and in many ways, Islam made it worse with glory. Review the Saracen conquests not just in the Near East but North Africa and SW Europe 100 years after Muhammad's death. Other factors curbed this military zeal such as Islamic spirituality and family (and tribal) ties. By the 20th century the steady diminishment of these factors, and finally the disintegration of Islamic Civilization in the wake of the disappearance of its Last Resort left militarism nearly in charge.

There has been plenty of evidence for this wherever Saracenic influence has spread, including North Africa, Spain, and Latin America, so that the miliary is the main political force from the Persian Gulf to Chile. Who remembers Franco? And the numerous revolutions in Latin America?

Along with the lethal firepower, imitations of Western parliamentary forms have been imposed on the Near East as in other parts of the Buffer Zone, but they fell short of the democratic and more important constitutional ideals because political parties were mostly blocs made up of personal followings with an arbitrary patriarchal superstructure. Mostly these are personal, never taking on the impersonal Western grafts of rule of law and constitutional practices. Zeus, the personification of the Mandate of Heaven who came south with the Medes and Persians to be reborn as Ahura Mazda, eviscerated any concept of "stinkin'" rules and the material benefits that help rules endure. This made it Real Hard for the Near East outlook to comprehend the conventions having to do with cooperation in opposition found in our two-party system (MORE PLEASE!), parliamentary procedure (the loyal opposition), and sports. Where the West was pluralistic, impersonal, and subject to rules, the whole range of human and universal  relationships was monolithic, impersonal, and extralegal. It was all a facade. Civil parliamentary government became or was replaced by military polo games, sometimes complete with rolling heads.

Enter Touchstone the Court Jester, but Nobody's Laughing. Who remembers SNL's feature "Danger Probe"?

From the Lie Circumstantial things went to the Lie Direct. That the poverty, chaos, and morale problems of the Near East were affairs of outlook instead of scarcity alone was proven by secular, socialist Israel. With outlooks antithetical to the prevailing Indo-Saracenic one, this Western-trained human capital almost outdid Ammurica's. It wasn't the loss of the land; it was the insult.

The wobbly balancing act the British tried to maintain in Palestine between their promises to the Zionists and their desire to placate the Arab upper class (whom they personally liked) was destroyed by Hitler's Faustian-willed Final Solution and near success. The Jews, their supporters, and allies did their level best to smuggle as many Jews that could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else for them to go, many were smuggled into Palestine. British attempts to stem this tide (in fulfillment of their League Mandate) led to guerilloid war between the Jews and the Brits, with the Arabs attacking the former intermittently. Allied victory made this even worse, and the surviving Jews made sometimes harrowing escapes from Nazism. In August 1945 President Truman asked the British for permission to settle 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine, but his repeated requests were refused. Many of the refugees' leaky, overcrowded ships were being intercepted and the passengers interred in concentration camps on Cyprus. Expectedly there were reprisals and counter-reprisals.

The average Zionist settlement was mostly agricultural, the immigrants placed in close-knit communities on semi-arid lands ostensibly purchased with World Zionist funds when they weren't being purloined by tricky real-estate maneuvers exploiting the fact that a lot of the land was never recorded as being owned in order to evade ruinous Ottoman taxes. These support organizations also gave the Zionists the political experience necessary to run a state which they were quite consciously creating under the Grotian-Westphalian model. Under constant danger of attack by Arab raiders, these Zionist villages developed a mindset similar to early American frontier settlements.

Britain simply wanted to get out of there and build its welfare state. The United States inherited the problem along with whatever is left of the British Empire - er - Commonwealth.

I admit I'm a sucker for rational "technicistic" meliorism (the word in quotes is from my ex-wife's OED where it has been given a negative spin because it's utopian). Israel continues to play this up even after passionate conflict has made Zionism go "funny in the head." Not precious-bodily-fluids anti-fluoridation funny, but pretty bad. It's called "enantiodromia." Don't consider this an excuse. I'm as much against this "funny-mentalism" as I am about the Christian enantiodromia running wild in the United States today. (Here it's Hofstadter's status anxiety which may not end until the Protestant dispensation does.)

Maybe I should include my own country in this "Neo-Magian Corridor."

Zeus has taken over everywhere.

*Real but poisonous. The sap can also damage your corneas enough to blind you.