Interventionist Regime Change & Medieval Feuds in the Arab Twilight

     

       Syria and Iraq, Algeria, Libya and Yemen have all succumbed to sectarian savagery. Egypt is fighting Hamas-supported jihadists, whose activities spill over from Sinai into attacks in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. Lebanon is torn apart by bitter Sunni-Shi’ite conflict. Even Jordan is combating Islamist factions, prompting the king to say there is a civil war within Islam between moderation and extremism. Among the few islands of stability to be found in this turbulent Arab ocean is, perhaps, Tunisia, where democratic elections have just ousted the ruling Islamist party in favor of the secular party.
 

    The military engagement in Libya (10,000 strike sorties killing & injuring tens of thousands) has created a failed state leaving behind an arena for warring factions, armed to the teeth with weapons provided directly by allies effectively transforming a peaceful, prosperous African country into a classic paragon of a phantom state.

     Indeed, the growing engagement in the Gulf States has resulted in increasingly challenging problems of conceptualizing and understanding the role and function of Russia, Washington & Brussels. Looking at the Syrian crisis and the resultant refugee influx into Europe, the aid industry follows the footsteps of the ‘military-industrial complex’. This complex creates havoc around the world and the aid industry behind it has become a colossal business, which is hard to reform let alone do away with. The reason behind this stems from the amount of money accruing to and diversity of interest involved, which nestle the aid trade, and the beneficiary nations that use the aid loot. This makes this effort impossible because of collective ignorance about the humanitarian drives of universal charity.

See lecture here