Fareed Zakaria is one of my favorite commentators. He has illuminated the situation in Syria in a way that I haven’t heard before. It is a video, so I can’t cut and paste his quotes into this post, but I can give it a brief summary. His first point is that after WWI, the European powers divided up the Middle East and they installed three minority powers in three of the countries. That is, they installed leaders of a minority group in charge of each of the countries. Maybe this was to make the new rulers dependent on outside help from Europe? Maybe as a way to protect the minorities from slaughter by the majorities? At any rate, all three of those countries have had the rest of the country rise up in revolution against their minority governments. First was Lebanon. The country went into civil war in the ‘70s against the minority Christians put in place after WWI. It took fifteen years. Reagan smartly stayed out of Lebanon’s civil war. Second was Iraq. Bush foolishly kicked off that civil war by invading in the ‘00s and the Sunni Muslims were ousted. It has been going on for 10 years. Now the third is Syria. The minority Alawite Muslims are being thrown out of power. They have no choice but to fight to the death, because if and when they lose they will be massacred, and most will likely flee. Obama is smartly staying out of Syria. It will last at least 10 years. It seems humanitarian to try to help the “good Muslim rebels” overthrow the savage dictator, Assad. But, as Fareed pointed out, even the massive presence of U. S. troops in Iraq didn’t prevent the slaughters of their civil war, which is still ongoing to some extent...
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 03:04:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015