Looking Forward in the Middle East

The great Negro League and later integrated major league baseball player, Satchel Paige, once gave a bit of advice: don’t look back—something might be gaining on you. As we survey the situation in the Middle East,, roughly from the Dardanelles on the western border of Turkey to the Radcliffe Line that divides India from Pakistan, nearly every country is either at war, engaged in a civil war, or fallen into chaos. We are involved, directly or indirectly, in at least five of those conflicts.

In the interests of honoring Mr. Paige’s advice and to avoid futile rehasing of what we should or shouldn’t have done, let’s focus on what we’re doing and what we should do. We can’t undo past bad decisions. We only live with their consequences. That doesn’t mean we should keep making the same bad decisions over and over again.

What are our interests in the Middle East? I can think of seven:

• Oil
• Israel
• Non-oil trade
• Humanitarian
• Our military assets in the region
• Terrorism exported from the region.
• The dangers posed by a nuclear-armed Iran

not necessarily in that order. I think that we can reasonably say that all of those interests are threatened right now and that what we’re doing now isn’t doing much to move things in a more positive direction.

We could always take the recent advice of former UN Ambassador John Bolton and immediately bomb Iran into submission. Not only would doing that place all of the interests listed above in jeopardy, it ignores something basic. The only way you can control the outcome on the ground is to be on the ground and barring some catastrophe I just don’t see that happening.

Also, that would advance the interests of Saudi Arabia which either directly or indirectly is the sponsor of a lot of the Islamist radicalism that’s causing so many headaches in so many places.

I personally don’t have much more interest in Israel than I do in Tajikistan, a country with roughly the same population and somewhat less interest than in Switzerland, ditto. There’s a humanitarian interest but that’s about it. That means my views are so divergent from those of so many Americans I’m just in no position to offer advice on what we should or should not be willing to do to secure that interest.

Our non-oil trade with the Middle East is actually pretty minor. Other than arms, of course. We sell a lot of arms to the countries of the Middle East or, said another way, we would be contributing to the problems there if Russia, France, Germany, the UK, and China weren’t eager to expand their markets there. We’re not the primary supplier of arms to Syria so I guess that’s something.

Should we decamp completely from Afghanistan? IMO U. S. aid to the country will evaporate shortly after we leave and when that aid ends what little civil order exists now in Afghanistan will collapse completely. Do we care? If we don’t care what happens in Afghanistan why have we been there for the last six years? For the last 14?

I also think that our attempts at securing humanitarian interests in the region are doing more harm than good. Shouldn’t the basic rule of a responsibility to protect be primum non nocere, first do no harm?

I don’t claim to have any answers but I can certainly see the problems. Increasingly, I feel like the doctor who’s the narrator in the novel The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s all madness.

I simply can’t figure out what the White House or Congressional Republicans are trying to accomplish or see that the means they want to employ as suitable to those interests. We seem to be doing things to do things.