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the me is yet another area where the legacy of euro-colonialism and neo-colonialism continues to play out--for example with iran, the biggest reason iranian politics are as they are today is the legacy of the shah's regime and the fact that the americans were ardent supporters of it. another has to do with the internal dynamics of the revolution itself, which is important but requires too much detail to go into...personally, i think folk underestimate iran in many many ways--i think it is a fundamental regional player (look at where it is in relation to the persian gulf and think about how much oil passes through the gulf) and i think that in the contemporary situation the americans are simply insane in trying to "deal with" iran through intimidation. iran really must be a significant part of a regional network that enables a coherent endgame for the iraq debacle from the american viewpoint--so the right has to suck it up, get over its pissiness from 1979 and deal. but they won't--so the best we can hope for is a crushing defeat of the right in the coming elections and that the bush people don't do anything stupid in the interim.
while these things fluctuate, ahmadinejad as been politically quite weak for much of his administration and has used the nimrods in the states to prop himself up. if the americans don't like him because he says inflammatory things, they'd do him more damage by negociation and integration than by their present tack.
the saudi situation is not reducible to class--mecca and medina, the old problem of whether these sites do or do not allow for openness to the non-islamic world--the internal repression exercised against political opposition in sa generate conditions not that distant from those generated by the shah and savak in iran---they have driven opposition into the mosques and one result is that the language of political opposition has been intertwined with that of islam---so fear of opposition has created and maintained this spectre of "fundamentalism"--so you reap what you sow. and the americans, as major supporters of the royal family, occupy the same stupid position they did in iran, structurally speaking. in geopolitical terms, all this could be quite different for the americans, but it wont change with conservatives in power.
obviously a central problem is the israel-palestine conflict. within that, the biggest recent one is the israeli/american response to hamas' electoral win in gaza, which set up the present seige of gaza, which has resulted in very considerable suffering and hardship for the population of gaza for the past 2 years. i think the consequences of this are everywhere, including in the state of the dollar and in the cost of oil. and this is, to my mind, why cowboy george has spent time his last two trips to the region talking abotu the need for a viable autonomous palestine--but of course he is undercut at every turn by gaza, by the occupation, by the israeli settlement program.
i dont see israel as in any danger from the other states in the region. it is a regional superpower. but i see the implications of american policy in israel as a fundamental problem. and it is a military problem, a colonial problem, a human rights problem--not particularly a religious problem.
we could talk about the self-defeating nature of mubarak's regime in egypt relative to internal dissent, where again fear of dissent and political repression drive oppositional politics into the mosques and so again you reap what you sow. we could talk about lebanon, which teeters again near civil war, and wonder whose interests are served by a shattered lebanon and from there wonder about why this is happening.
and the black hole of iraq.
too much stuff.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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