How Do You Distinguish?

I stumbled across this piece by Terry Glavin in Canada’s National Post. He’s outraged that people in the West don’t recognize that revolution is taking place across the Middle East. After recounting accounts of demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, he declaims:

It is against this backdrop that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plaintive appeals for “de-escalation” in the region ring hollow. Trudeau deserves credit for refusing to be goaded into blaming Trump for the downing of Flight 752, which took the lives of 57 Canadians, although by his equivocations and banalities — “If there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families” — he’s come perilously close.

It’s the “escalation recently” that gives away Trudeau’s woeful unfamiliarity with the course of events across the Middle East over the past decade, a bloody “escalation” that did not begin with Trump. It is an “escalation” that has led to the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War and the bloodiest upheavals since the implosion of the Ottoman empire that followed the First World War.

It is perhaps understandable that some of the candidates in the ongoing contest for the Democratic ticket in the November presidential elections might suggest such an outlandish scenario, pitting Trump as the arch-villain of the latest drama. And certainly no Canadian politician risks losing stature by saying an uncharitable thing about the impetuous, mercurial and vulgar American president.

There is a revolution going on. It has been underway in fits and starts for years. It unites Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians and Iraqis. Its object is the sundering of a bloody Khomeinist despotism that runs from the IRGC’s Quds Force in Tehran through the Assad regime in Damascus to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq, which have now insinuated themselves into every branch of the Iraqi state.

It’s all very well for Trudeau and the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron to want to force Tehran to get back in line with Barack Obama’s nuclear-rapprochement arrangement, which Trump has renounced. But the genie will not be put back in her bottle so easily.

It was Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that freed up the Quds Force to enforce its ghastly Khomeinist hegemony throughout the region in the first place, and now, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani is warning that it’s European soldiers in the region, not just American soldiers, that may soon find themselves on the Quds Force target list. Counselling a return to the JCPOA status quo is not a call to de-escalation. Don’t believe it.

Now, I’m unsure of his take on the demonstrations in Iran. I’ve read accounts that say that there are far more demonstrators in support of the regime than against it, that the number of anti-regime demonstrators is actually quite small, and that there are as many basiji and police as there are demonstrators.

Beyond that I’m unsure of his interpretation. For most of the last millennium there has been a conflict going on in Islam between urban elites who have typically favored a more liberal interpretation of Islam and rural people and the urban poor who have favored a strict, literal, fundamentalist interpretation. Is what’s going on just the modern reflection of that conflict?

Additionally, while I wish those who seek freedom well, I don’t believe we should be championing their cause or riding in to support them. The Middle East is so fractious IMO our best posture with respect to it is from a distance.