Middle East and the US
Mahmood Elahi, Iris Street, Ottawa, Canada
Edward B. Luttwak, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, recently wrote an Op-Ed in Toronto's National Post: "It's best to ignore the Middle East." In the article, Mr. Luttwak asserts that backward societies should be left to themselves as they are not capable to adapt to Western ideas of democracy and rule of law. They cannot be reformed or changed by using military power or political engagement. As for oil supplies, Mr. Luttwak says that "while attention is obsessively focused on the Middle East, oil supplies are more immediately threatened these days by political thievery in Nigeria, illiterate oil populism in Venezuela and Russia's kleptocratic oil nationalism, all of which reduce both current production and installation of future capacity."His solution is to leave the Middle Eastern countries to themselves and let them try out their own future without the American support or intervention of any kind. Mr. Luttwak concludes "The operational mistake that Middle East experts keep making is the failure to recognize that backward societies may be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history -- the one thing that Middle East experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them." But the same can be said about Afghanistan after the Soviet forces left and Afghanistan lost its importance as a bastion of anti-Soviet warfare. The US policymakers seemed to have listened to the advice of Mr. Luttwak and left the Afghans to write their own history. But they didn't realize that the Afghans would invite al-Qaeda to help them write a new history as a terrorist sanctuary. Left to themselves, the Middle East might become another Afghanistan and it may be naive to believe that the fanatics will not write a new history by carrying out another attack on the mainland United States, using the Middle East as their base. As a country like Afghanistan has shown, even highly conservative societies can become a threat to most advanced societies if they become victims of such atavistic forces like al- Qaeda and Taliban. To avert such a threat, the best course would be political engagement with as little military involvement as possible.
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