The time has come for serious introspection in America. The Nation is locked in a race between self-discovery and self-destruction. It is losing that race. It needs to recognize that the present equation does not equate. It is off-balance. America needs to reformulate a new equation. More wars based on the old equation will not do. Unfettered release of the human psyche as we now see in the current political scene will not do. And as for that critical evangelical Christian voting block; they need to understand that the Nation will be saved not by their belief in Jesus as their Savior, but by living his example.
The rise of Islamic terrorism is exposing an American formulaic weakness. An analysis of US involvement in the Middle East can give us a clue as to the underlying elements. Following is this analysis by way of a chronological briefing on post-World War II US interventionist influence in that part of the world.
- First we have Truman’s Israel decision followed by the 1948 UN decision to grant Israel statehood. It is difficult to pass judgement on this. Secretary of State General George Marshall strongly opposed it for two reasons; oil and Arab hostility. Had the ’48 decision gone the other way, would Muslim attitude in the area towards the West be different today? That is the question. There is no evidence of the genesis of al-Qaida stemming from Israel statehood. Nor of ISIS/Daesh. It is more of an Iranian problem. It is, however, a fact that Muslims believe all of their land is Holy and once they occupy land, it can never be returned.
- Then a significant event with ongoing repercussions. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers in August of 1953 deposed Mossadegh, the elected governor of Iran and installed Mohammad Reza Shah who then brutalized the people with his SAVAK police forces. Mossadegh was about to bring Scandinavian Social Democracy to the country, also to nationalize the British oil interests.
The brutality of SAVAK empowered a revolution, (January 1978 – February 1979) deposing of the Shah, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and reversion to a Shia fundamentalism. This is the Iran we are dealing with today.
- As an aside to Middle Eastern failures we have Kennedy’s failed Cuba invasion along with his and Johnson’s Vietnam disaster. Over 58,000 American soldiers; more than 200,000 South Vietnamese and more than one million North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters died, also thousands of civilians.
- During Reagan’s 8 years in power the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid through the Pakistani ISI to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. That empowered the Pakistani ISI, making it stronger than the Pakistani government itself. The Wahhabi Saudi’s assisted by building Wahhabi madrasas in Pakistan. These madrasas (As the Americans and Europeans are now finding in their own countries) became factories cranking out jihadi’s who became the backbone of the Taliban. It was the Afghanistan Taliban who gave bin Laden sanctuary and al-Qaida a home.
- Reagan also armed Saddam Hussein to fight Iran in an eight year war and gave him satellite imagery to improve his use of WMD’s and employ poison sarin gas, a lethal nerve agent. It has been estimated one million Iranians died in that war.
- It gets worse. Evangelical Christian G.W. Bush defeats Al Gore in the contested 2000 election. (Without that evangelical Christian community he would have lost the election) Then 9/11. Then Bush & and his Vice President Dick Cheney embark on the disastrous Iraq adventure. After the invasion, Bush has the newly appointed American Ambassador to Iraq, Paul Bremer disenfranchise all the military and other government Sunnis (The elite) in the country with his de-Baathification law based on a foolish analogy to post war Germany. Some Baathists are sent to Abu Ghraib Prison (many brutally tortured) which becomes the genesis and finishing school of the ISIS/Daesh of today. It gave the opening for ISIS/al-Qaida in Iraq, where none had before existed.
- Then it continues to get worse with the Bush/Condoleezza Rice Arab Spring. As a first try she chose Gaza, (She and the President reasoned that America could solve all the problems in the Middle East simply by bringing American style Democracy to the region. Much to the regret of the Israelis today, their government complied. This has spawned Hamas, the violent Islamic resistance movement of Palestinian Sunni–Islamic fundamentalists.
- For Barack Obama, the next US President, American style Democracy seemed to make sense. He encouraged an “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Syria and Libya. Today we are witness to that failure.
- Only Egypt was able to recover. As Syria began to turn into chaos,
Obama followed through with the myth of a Free Syrian Army ready and able to take down Assad. The “army” faded away as a total failure.
(Note on Syria)
A word on the current Syrian situation can give us some insights on Middle East complexity. The thought of a transitional unified post Bashar al-Assad government in Syria is fanciful. Psychotic power hungry Sunni individuals like deceased rebel leader Zahran Alloush would set out to crush every last Alawite. Sunnis consider Alawites illegitimate, oppressive, anti-Islamic, secular, wine drinking, women unveiled “Infidels”. Faction by faction area by area city by city radical power hungry clannist Islamists like him would then turn on each other. Religiously; Al-Assad’s Alawites are Shia/Mystic with a touch of Christianity – contacts with Byzantines and Crusaders early on added later Roman Christian elements. They even have their own Triune God story. They were given control of the country by the French after World War I. Then over the years they solidified that control through key government posts, the military, and the access to the limited natural resources. The Sunnis remained agrarian. Over the years they grew to the 24 plus million today. As the semi dry land of their forefathers became unable to support them, many Sunnis gravitated to the cities. Alawites today at 4.3 million are only a fraction of the total population. Sunnis were all lumped together by the Obama Administration as “opposition fighters.” He called them the “Free Syrian Army.” In other words, there are only two sides in the conflict.
(Note on exponential population growth)
Although this discussion centers on the failures of US intervention in the Middle East, there is a second part of the problem that must be understood. The US takes no responsibility. That responsibility rests squarely with Islam. Exponential population growth in these countries is based on the borrowed Hebraic Torah mandate to multiply. Families with six to eight children are common.(Alan Kurdi the drowned Syrian child’s grandparents sired 6 who sired 24) See exponential population growth As population in the Middle East continues to expand and oil revenues throughout the region decline (Paris meeting global warming restraints) at some point there will be social turmoil far beyond what we now see. Islamic terrorism will be on the rise. Millions of Muslims will be forced to flee. Tens of millions will seek asylum in the West. They will be blocked off at the borders from entering. The million Muslims Angela Merkel took in will be history.
Now to return to the continuing US disfunction:
In 2016 Republicans in the US congress attempted to kill the Iran Nuclear Agreement. It should be noted that many of them were members of Fundamentalist Apocalypse believing Christian Churches who hold firmly to the conviction that the end of times is soon to begin in Jerusalem. They were joined by an assortment of members of the American Jewish community.
For my comments on this Christian opposition and warnings to the Jewish community, see:
https://countercurrents.org/anderson120815.htm
Nuclear physicists, military officials, non-proliferation experts, and more than 100 countries across the globe all voiced their support for the Agreement as the best solution available to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
There was no concern by the opponents of the Agreement over the fact that if the Iranians continued with their program, the Sunni Saudis would bring nuclear weapons in from their Sunni Salafi/Wahhabi neighbor Pakistan. Then we would have had Middle Eastern nuclear escalation; Sunni vs Shia.
The only option would have been an American/Israeli invasion of Iraq. That was what Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel wanted.
The death toll would have surpassed that in Syria.
For details on the deal see:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/iran-deal
It continues and continues to get worse. FOX and friends backed by pseudo brilliant neo con minds such as those of John McCain and John Bolton now keep repeating that if we had only left 10,000 troops in Iraq, the whole ISIS problem would have been solved.
FACT: We would then have had to deal with the inept anti-Sunni former anti-Baathist dissident Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki – and as he proved to be king of Shia crony corruption ‑ INCLUDING IN THE MILITARY. Clearly he did not want us there as was shown by his refusal to release our troops from Iraqi law.
America’s problem is not ISIS. It is the public’s inability to understand the Middle East.‑.and the limitations of its military power there. The Wahhabi-Salafi-Takfiri cult; what’s that? Egyptians; Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri; who are they? Why should I even care? Let our democratically elected leaders (Note above) take care of it.
And these Americans say; why bother with the detail? Just send over our troops to clean the place up. Then bring our heroes home.
No mention of course that since 2001, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs, of at least 2.5 million members of the American armed forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, among returnees, between 11 and 20 percent are estimated in any given year to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. (PTSD)
As all of this is taking place, most Americans are happy just listening to Fox and Friends or Wolf Blitzer; and for some even Rush Limbaugh. Some find their understanding each week in their church or synagogue or Mosque. Some are in search for a “savior” the likes of Donald Trump.
Or they are content with reading op-eds in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or The New York Times. My proto use of religious words such as “Hebraic” and “Judaic” recently in my comments to op-eds in one of them have several times prevented approval of the comment. A few years back I had the same problem running ads for my books with Google.
America has another problem. Money now buys “free speech.” Wasn’t it Joseph Goebbels who said that if you keep repeating a lie, eventually people will believe it? Most of the American media understands this all too well and is intent on making revenues based on the public’s extreme bias and shallow thought. The political operatives do too.
To understand the challenge facing the American nation, using the analogy of an equation can be helpful. On the one side there is a force; powered by dangerous psychotic internals buried in the Homo sapiens brain and there regardless of race, religion, class. It is a powerful force. It is driving not just Americans but humanity itself. It can be described with the common words: psychotic, neurotic, self-hatred, self-interest: competitive, aggressive, selfish, deceptive, mean spirited, ego centric, violent, jealous, possessive, power hungry, narcissistic.
On the other side of the equation we have the vision of an idealistic world; a cooperative peaceful state of selflessness innocence. Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14) tells his followers: You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. From the time of its founding, America was to be that city on the hill. Unfortunately that is not the way it all turned out. Today, it has become a city of the psychotic, the neurotic; a city of self-hatred, self-interest, a city of many competitive, aggressive, selfish, deceptive, mean spirited, ego centric, violent, jealous, possessive, power hungry, narcissistic individuals.
Many religious Americans as they examine themselves; rather than face these inner forces, have chosen to take the easy road and simply assume that they are irreparable sinners. But not to worry, by belief in Jesus as their Savior they have found salvation. The outcome is a nation far from that ideal of the Jesus’ city on the hill.
The time has come for serious introspection in America. The Nation is locked in a race between self-discovery and self-destruction. It is losing that race. It needs to recognize that the present equation does not equate. It is off-balance. America needs to reformulate a new equation. More wars based on the old equation will not do. Unfettered release of the human psyche as we now see in the current political scene will not do. And as for that critical evangelical Christian voting block; they need to understand that the Nation will be saved not by their belief in Jesus as their Savior, but by living his example.
David Anderson brings together a wide range of interests in his writings, namely; theology, history, evolutionary anthropology, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics.
He has written three books. A fourth is near completion. It is about a necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift for human survival.
See: http://www.inquiryabraham.com/new-book.html
David is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Hawaii (Harvard Asia Pacific) Advanced Management Program. Over his career he was an international risk manager and senior executive at several of America’s premier multinational institutions. During that period he became increasingly aware of the underlying cultural, institutional and religious causes of past and present civilizational dysfunction and conflict.