Will we go to war once more in the Middle East?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            St. James asked centuries ago, “From whence come wars and fighting among you?” (James 4:1)  His answer, to paraphrase him simply, is that we war with others, both nationally and individually because of our covetousness and lusts.  When it comes to nations especially and to individuals on a limited basis one might do well to remember that St. Paul viewed covetousness as idolatry.  I am not a pacifist in the sense that I believe all wars are wrong.  But I fear that Americans and especially Conservatives tend to support war far more easily than did the early church fathers or the most blameless of the men and women whom we have come to recognize as living some of the most stellar of Christian lives throughout history.  We want to believe our national leaders when they say war is necessary.  We live in a strange time when more and more we doubt the integrity of our leaders, yet feel we must give them the benefit of the doubt when they announce that some foreign leader in our target site has crossed the line and used weapons of mass destruction against their opponents.  What will our tax dollars and inflationary fiat money and all the cash we can borrow from China and our Persian Gulf “allies” serve to accomplish in the next war?  I present the following understanding of the Middle East as a theory.  Perhaps others can prove my suspicions to be foolish.  I would even like to think so.  But I present what makes sense to me.  When nations rush to war ignore the given reasons for going to war and seek out what seems like the crass reason one would go to war if all the good reasons did not explain the rush to war.

            The Middle East is a rather complex area and our foreign policy in the Middle East is also complicated.  Reasons for wars are generally like icebergs in the ocean.  There are the announced reasons given to rally men and women around the flag and to convince parents and young people that the deaths of a few good warriors in a war is for a good cause and one should be proud of their child either for dying in battle or for killing in battle.  Parents aren’t typically proud of their children getting killed by someone in peacetime, nor are they proud when their child kills someone in peacetime.  But let the government wave the flag and suddenly it is a patriotic duty for your children to either kill someone or die when someone else kills him.  I suppose that there are few more irrational things done so often as to rally around the flag when someone says “let’s go to war.”  It is an insane dreamer that imagines that one day a government will call its citizenry to war and the people will say (I shan’t say it, but you can put in your own feelings if you think just once it would be nice for a government to issue a call to war and the people to respond with a response of peace.  Deep down we are sinners and we have these secret wishes to kill people with whom we disagree, so when the government says we must go to war, we almost always will for we have no will but to be led to slaughter on our own way to slaughter.

            There are probably two central focuses on American and also European foreign policy in the Middle East.  Like the iceberg, one focal point is well known, but the other is something we hardly ever speak of.  The first focal point of American foreign policy is that we are allies of Israel.  Whether it is because our Christian culture has its roots in Judaism, or Evangelical eschatology, or because the Jewish vote is important in close elections, support of Israel is pretty much a given in American Middle East policy.  But I really don’t believe that is what chiefly drives our foreign policy in the Middle East.

            It is the hidden alliance we have in the Middle East that perhaps more often drives our foreign policy than the Israel lobby.  There have been two struggles for Middle Eastern control in recent decades.  There has been the Muslim v. Jewish struggle with Middle Eastern Christians caught in the middle, but there has also been a struggle within Islam between the Sunni majority and the Shiite minority.  Worldwide the Shiite portion of Islam is a footnote in the population of Islam, but within the Middle East it is a majority of the people in some regions of the Middle East.  While there have been times when the two sects of Islam lived peacefully with one another, there have also been troubled times when great struggles between the two sects of Islam have fought for control of the region.  The overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Islamic clerics resulted in the establishment of a powerful Shiite regime in the Middle East.  This resulted in Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran.  Iraq’s leadership was Sunni, but the majority of Iraqi citizens under Saddam’s rule were Shiite.  Saddam Hussein feared that Iranian influence would endanger his grip in the Shiite regions of eastern Iraq, in which Iraq had the largest portion of its oilfields.  Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran resulted in heavy casualties for both nations but no ultimate winner.  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States under the first George Bush refused to topple Saddam Hussein.  We did not do so, visibly because that was not our mandate by the United Nations.  But invisibly, I suspect the reason was that we feared a Shiite dominated Iraq would tilt the balance of power from Sunni run governments to Shiite dominated governments.  That would be extremely significant.

            Why would it be so significant for Americans if the Shiites gained an upper hand in the Middle Eastern Islamic world instead of the Sunni governments in the Middle East?  That leads us to the second alliance America has in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia is ruled by the House of Saud.  The Saud family is Wahhabi, which is a fundamentalist sect within Sunni Islam.  The alliance between the nations of Western Europe and North America and Saudi Arabia has had its rough moments but has been a fixture of Middle Eastern policy since the end of World War II.  When President Richard Nixon took the American dollar off the gold standard, it was the Saudi led OPEC oil cartel that solidified the dollar by agreeing to sell OPEC’s oil only in US dollars.  When oil prices rose too high for Western nations to support the OPEC oil cartel, Saudi Arabia could be counted on to bring oil to the market to disrupt the goal of hardliners that wanted to see Middle Eastern oil used more to develop Middle Eastern infrastructure and industry.  Hardline Islamists saw the House of Saud as little more than a vassal of Western powers.  American foreign policy is more easily traceable to making decisions based on what is good for the House of Saud than what is good for Israel.  The American leadership of NATO and Western Europe depends on its ability to keep oil flowing from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East to Europe.

            One can follow America’s wars and will see that in each instance care was taken not to injure Saudi interests, even as Saudi actions generally were helpful to Western Europe and the United States.  Following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, America tended to be friendlier with Saddam Hussein.  But Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait led to concern within the House of Saud.  It was one thing for Hussein to offer resistance to a powerful Iran, but quite another to vie for Sunni leadership with Saudi Arabia.  The invasion of Kuwait resulted in chastisement but not destruction of Saddam Hussein.  It all makes sense if Western Europe, the United States, and the House of Saud agreed that a chastened pliable Saddam would be more in their interests than a Shiite dominated Iraq.  After 9-11 Saddam’s rule began to be viewed as no longer tenable.  There were concerns that Hussein had supported some of the factions resisting Israel.  But the final breaking point came when it was determined that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.  It has been noted that Saddam’s greater concern in seeming to claim at times that he had weapons of mass destruction was its uneasy border with Iran.  He wanted to appear more powerful than he actually was because of Iran.  But probably the real WMD that shook American willingness to support Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s determination to sell oil directly in exchange for the Euro.  If OPEC’s selling of oil in American dollars was threatened, then the fear of the American dollar going into free-fall would likely have horrendous ramifications on the American dollar and the American economy.  Saddam Hussein's decision not to sell oil in dollars was a "weapon of monetary destruction."  It was determined that Saudi Arabia’s chief competitor for power within the Sunni portion of the Middle East was no longer supportable.  But there was a cost to toppling Saddam Hussein.  Iraq would undoubtedly come to be governed by its Shiite majority, and would tilt towards Iran in critical situations.  Almost immediately even as the United States fought a war helping Shiites to free themselves in Iraq, American foreign policy began to target Iran as the next enemy with which we would have to deal.  Iran’s only real ally in the Arab Middle East is Syria.  Syria is led by the Assad family which has offered Syria religious freedom and political oppression.  The Assad family is neither Sunni nor Shiite, but Alawi.  The Alawi movement has some roots in Shiite Islam but has been viewed heretical by both the Shia and Sunni movements.  Nevertheless the Assad family cultivated support in all the people groups under their rule by allowing freedom for most all the groups in Syria to worship.  But politically a minority heretical movement would not fare well if Syria were in the hands of its Sunni majority.  So the Assad family was extremely recessive politically even though it was quite benevolent to all worship groups when judged by Middle Eastern standards.

            So what is the reason for the rattling of sabers in the Middle East?  Is it because Assad is a bad guy?  Is it because the Sunni rebels, largely supportive of Al-Qaeda are such good guys?  Or is it because the key to American foreign policy is to support and maintain support of the House of Saud?  This is so because in times of crisis, the House of Saud can be counted on to help the Western world, and has been willing to do so for sixty years.  The House of Saud, perhaps more than any other Middle Eastern nation feels threatened by the growth of Shiite power in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia is a majority Sunni nation, but it fears Shiite power because one part of Saudi Arabia has a Shiite majority.  That portion in Saudi Arabia with a Shiite majority is the Eastern regions of Saudi Arabia where Saudi Arabia’s most productive oilfields exist.  That is why the struggle between the Shiites and the Sunni threatens the one crucial nation that seems to explain everything we do in the Middle East even if the House of Saud is never mentioned as the reason for what we are doing in the Middle East.

            Israel is a spiritual and cultural connection to the Western world.  If our political leaders wish to motivate us to warfare we will hear of how Israel is affected.  But if you wish to understand our foreign policy in the Middle East view the Middle East as an iceberg with Israel the small pointed nation sitting above the waterline and the House of Saud as the large mass beneath the water level.  There is one ally always seen and always spoken of, and another hardly ever seen and hardly ever discussed.  It is the latter one for which we will likely go to war with our flags waving and hundreds of ministers urging us to support Israel.