Fear and Loathing in the Middle East

The Middle East has never been what any rational observer would call stable, and I do mean never (read the Bible because that goes pretty much back to the beginning).  Conventional foreign policy since the creation of the nation state of Israel has generally been to support monarchs, dictators and other autocracies that would rule with an iron fist and keep the supply of oil flowing.  This worked out okay for the most part, except for those occasions where we were forced to recognize the reality that most Arabs hate our guts, including the autocrats that we helped establish.  Empire building is such tricky business!
And so, you get what we had here last week... which is the way he wants it... well he gets it!
Sorry, I just lapsed into the warden from Cool Hand Luke, it happens sometimes.
So, now we have Benghazi, and a whole bunch of other places where chaos, fueled by anger and fear, breaks out.  Most of the talking heads on the idiot box have no idea how to process a situation with such deep historical roots, and such intractable animosities.  I find that Tom Friedman, NY Times columnist and author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (an absolute must read, if you even want to pretend to understand the Israeli-Palestinian slice of the general ME chaos), is a good source, and luckily, even my questionable local paper carries his editorial columns.
Yesterday's paper, which probably means the Wednesday edition of the Times, talks about the "Backlash to Backlash."  It is THE most hopeful thing that I have read concerning the situation in the Arab world at least since the hopeful days of the Arab Spring, which now seems like it happened years ago.  Friedman notes that moderate voices in the Arab/Islamic world are beginning to speak up, and in Benghazi particularly, take to the streets to challenge the extremists.  Friedman writes that a group of men stormed the headquarters of Ansar al Sharia, the group that claimed responsibility for killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens; their message?  Knock it off!
Not surprisingly, this counter-riot has not received the kind of attention that the earlier riots were given.  Partially because, in our rather shallow understanding of the Arab world, we do not realize that there are many people who do not particularly like Al Qaida.  There are, in fact, many Muslims who do not support the imposition of Sharia law.  There are, in fact, great levels of complexity and nuance involved in the situation in the Middle East, which is at least partly why it so regularly gives us the fear.
The twenty four hour news cycle, which could be absolutely well suited to providing the sort of in depth analysis needed to understand the fact that not all Muslims hate America and not all Arabs are ready to blow themselves up, spend most of their time chasing headlines and trying to keep up with the "latest news."  The Tom Friedmans of the world are left to inhabit the stodgy old world of print journalism and make the occasional appearance on those news programs that cling to the older and less exciting forms of journalism.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the mighty western empires are never going to master the Arab world, we've been trying since before Jesus was born, but we never achieved more than a temporary hold.  It seems to me that the only hope is for the people in that culture, who actually understand their own world, who actually understand their own people, who actually realize that, while the west may have done a little too much monkeying around with their lives, they can't blame everything on us for too long and not end up destroying themselves.  The Arab spring is going to need to grow up pretty fast, because there is enough fear and loathing to go around and some of those fearful people have nuclear weapons.  We may not be able to fix the middle east, but we can permanently turn large parts of it into glass and ashes.  That's not a threat, that is a terrifying fear that I have about what might happen if Islam doesn't get its house in order.
Christianity has gone through some violent, irrational phases in its history. I'm not claiming any sort of high ground here.  The difference was, during the crusades, the inquisition and the wars of religion that tore across Europe, none of our external enemies had their finger on a button that could fry millions of people to a cinder in a matter of seconds.  Sure we burned some witches and heretics, but we had to do it one at a time.
Netanyahu is a pretty serious man, with some pretty serious weaponry at his disposal, when he starts talking about red lines, you should really listen.  The fact that there are certain people who don't seem to listen to each other let alone their adversaries, gives me the fear, big fear.