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The Middle East in Chaos

(Weekly Standard) Reuel Marc Gerecht - Modern Middle Eastern states, with the limited exceptions of Iran, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey, were created intentionally or by default by Europeans and Westernized native elites who dropped older imperial or tribal ideals for more empowering modern imports. Despite the best efforts of Western or Western-inspired modernizers, everywhere in the Middle East, for everyone, religion is the primary identity - cherished and nurtured by fundamentalists and the common faithful or constrained, submerged, and coopted by nationalists and secularists. Secular military dictatorship among Muslims has been a double-edged sword: It helped to build nationalist consciousness; but its injustices and brutality degraded the legitimacy of the state, collapsed traditional mores, and fueled the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. The promise of a new conquest society by self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, offers a tempting chance to get even for young men who've not hitherto enjoyed much fortune, in the Middle East or in the West. Add the Islamic State's anti-Americanism, and it's not surprising how well the organization has done. And then there are the nuclear negotiations, where the White House keeps giving ground to Iran's continuing progress toward a bomb. The Islamic Republic's pursuit of nuclear weapons is a strategic game-changer. All of the region's problems, especially those that hurt us, will worsen when the mullahs go nuclear. The writer is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2014-10-24 00:00:00
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