UKking

The Middle East is a region rising up its importance in the modern globalized world due to the amount of resources it has.

Most of the problems there are rooted in their long history of poverty and extremely divided class structure. You're either very rich, or very poor in the majority of those nations, and that's where a lot of the conflict comes from.

When it comes to who will become the leading hegemonic power in the region, all eyes have to be directed to Iran. If you look at how the country is posturing itself as the leader of the region through diplomatic intimidation and saber-rattling. Due to Iran's natural resources it has gained two very powerful allied in China and Russia, which helps give the Iranian government credibility.

On a tangent, Iran President Amadinejad...or however it's spelled, has no real politic power, and it is somewhat ridiculous to use his speeches and confrontational rhetoric as justification for any sort of military actions there.

loquitur

There are lots of reasons for the political problems in most of the countries of the Middle East, and I don't think you can isolate poverty as the main one. There were huge disparities for centuries but the dysfunction wasn't there until pretty recently. Personally, I think it's modern communication coupled with a rigid culture that makes people aware of the world outside but unable to participate in it. It's frustrating.

Willravel

Poverty, imho, is just another symptom of the various problems.

You're absolutely right about Ahmadinejad, though. He's a figurehead.

Miss Mango

Despite their victim hood overtures, Israel would hold up. They have nuclear deterrents, an advanced military, and can summon up diplomatic and political assistance other than the US, if they felt like it. Even if the US dropped the middle east like a rock, neighboring nations know that the US would honor our alliance eventually, making any plans for invasion or destruction a no-go. Israel can handle anything short of that. Effectively, all the wipe Israel off the map talk is just bellyaching talk, and not a realistic threat. Even if Iran had nukes.

One of the things about the Middle Eastern cultures thats very different from the West, is that you dont mean business until you start yelling. If you act calm, not animated enough, not enough posturing, etc, people wont take your word for it that youre angry or whatever. Thats basically why they yell a lot. And thats part of whats happening with the over-inflammatory speech.
At least, thats how Ive come to understand it....


True. For as much noise as he makes, its much more useful to watch the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, or Chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Akbar Rafsanjani. Despite the organization of Iranian government, they have popular seniority, and pretty much have the final say in anything.
But then, even those guys have said some ridiculous shit too...

Ya know whats interesting, of all the places in the world that could be constant hotbeds of political turmoil, why the middle east? What started it all, why there? Its because of the geography. You have to go through there to cross between Asia, Africa, and Europe. You couldnt bypass it. It was always a trade hub, with a lot of very different cultures coming through and meeting and sometimes clashing. That was their source of riches back the in day, before oil. But also turmoil. By necessity, it was always moved through by conquering cultures, over and over.

Thats mostly what got the ball rolling, comparative with other regions...
At least thats what Ive come to understand.

girldetective

Greed.

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dlish

Miss Mango...

and you have come to understand this through...

a) originating from the middle east
b) living in the middle east
c) watching movies?

/sarcasm alert - Hotshots and True Lies along with Delta Force 1, 2 and 3 are my fav movies of all time

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An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

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Willravel

Aww, comon Dlish! You have a unique perspective on this!

Martian

You mean to say movies lie?!

No, it just can't be true.

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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame

dlish

you know, i just came home and intended on laying by the pool, bask in the summer sun and have a nice afternoon, but ive decided that this thread needs me more than i need a tan.

sure, i could make the odd comment and not really get involved in this converstion as i have before. previously i tended not to get too inolved in the PF due to many reasons. there have been many a times that ive wanted to write but held back. sometimes i regreted this decision, other times i havent.

this time ill be contributing more than just my usual sarcasm and sneers.

although i agree with some of what UKing has said concerning the ME as an up and coming power, id disagree on the point of iran.

in my opinion, iran can only become so powerful. it has limitations as a powerful nation chiefly due to the fact that iranians are not arabs. they dont speak arabic, they are not of arabic lineage, they may share some customs and traditions, but generally they are considered as much as an arab as say turkey or armenia. it will remain and always be persian.

because of this limitation, it will lack support from other fellow ME nations apart from maybe iraq.

limitation number 2 is the fact that it is a shiite muslim majority country and will never see eye to eye on theology with sunni arab countries as well as other sunni muslim countries the world over. this is a very important aspect of the relationship between sunnis and shiites. theology plays a big part.

The arabs of the ME are primarily sunnis, and the shiite population makes up about 10-15% of the worlds muslim population. the only two shiite majority countries are iran and iraq. the only loose cannon being iran. even though there is a large shiite majority in iraq, i see a conflict in iraqi loyalty between either their arab cousins or their theological brothers in iran.

with saudi being the birthplace of islam some 1400 years ago, and the fact that its leaders are ardent supporters of the US administration, id have to disagree and say that saudi will remain the power-player in the ME without a doubt.

it matter not how much crap ahmadinejad spews out, at the end of the day the way i see it, is if saudi were militaril attacked , i would bet my house on it that all of the arab nations as well as the african, asian and european muslim countries will be in uproar over the attack. primarily because of its sanctity as the birthplace of islam. any attack on saudi is looked upon as an attack on islam. regarless of the current despot in its leadership.

compare this with an attack on iran, the backing of most arab and muslim nations would be subdued due to those 2 reasons. 1) race 2) theology.

for this reason i dont see iran being a powerbroker in much of the middle east. its power may encompass iran iraq and some parts of southern lebanon, but thats about all its going to get.

with iran warming up to russia and china, i think the eastern states would think twice before even contemplating supporting iran outright over the US. political aceptance and correctness go hand in hand.

on the issues of the problems that the ME faces in terms of poverty, class, terrorism, conflict, its not as straightforward as saying that poverty is te problem. here for example in the UAE, people have lots of money. more money than any of us would probably have in our lifetime. but it doesnt mean than dueto the lack of poverty that the UAE will be free from the problems of the UAE. money brings other problems like an open society thus opening up the counry to western ideas and thoughts.

the topic of problems of the ME are huge, and volumes of books cannot do it justice, and have been countless discussions and arguments over this here in the politics board. but id haveto say that ww1 and the british meddling in arab and muslimaffairs to unbalance the delicate equilibrium in the ME was a major catalyst. britain, remains to this day scorned by most arabs for this. i still see this as a thorn in their side and i dont see the arabs as forgiving as the british hope they would be.

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An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
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roachboy

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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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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host

Excellent post, dlish, but I warn you. It is all but impossible, in my experience, to reach anyone who already "knows what they know".

Summer reading:

Inventing Iraq – Yet Again?
http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/?articleid=2556

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied