It's easy to fall into the trap of compartmentalization when trying to keep up with the Middle East. Things are happening in Lebanon, some more things in Iraq, and then there are those pesky Iranians. It's easy to think of them as isolated when, in fact, they are all of one piece. As things keep escalating it becomes clearer as actions in one country ricochet around the Middle East.

A war without borders in the making

A day after killing four United Nations workers, Israel's cabinet has simultaneously called up reservists and announced that there will be no "major offensive" inside Lebanon. This in light of Hezbollah's tough resistance and continued ability to fire rockets at Israel more than two weeks after the latter declared its military objective of finishing off Hezbollah.

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We already have a war without borders and the US is the common denominator. I've started reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. I could go on and on about this book but I will wait until I finish it and post a book recommendation. It doesn't take long in reading Fisk to understand that the US and Britain are pretty much responsible for the Middle East Clusterfuck. Here are a couple of paragraphs from page 27 of The Great War for Civilisation:

The Taliban had finally vanquished twelve of the fifteen venal Afghan mujahedin militias in all but the far north-eastern corner of the country and imposed their own stark legitimacy on its people. It was a purist, Sunni Wahhabi faith whose interpretation of sharia law recalled the most draconian of early Christian prelates. Head-chopping, hand-chopping and a totally misogynist perspective were easy to associate with the Taliban's hostility towards all forms of enjoyment. The Spinghar Hotel used to boast an old American television set that had now been hidden in a garden shed for fear of destruction. Television sets, like videotapes and thieves, tended to end up hanging from trees. "What do you expect?" the gardener asked me near the ruins of the old royal winter palace in Jalalabad. "The Taliban came from the refugee camps. They are giving us only what they had." And it dawned on me then that the new laws of Afghanistan-so anachronistic and brutal to us, and to educated Afghans-were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before. The Taliban gunmen had grown up as refugees in these diseased camps in Pakistan. Their first sixteen years of life were passed in blind poverty, deprived of all education and entertainment, imposing their own deadly punishments, their mothers and sisters kept in subservience as the men decided how to fight their foreign oppressors on the other side of the border, their only diversion a detailed and obsessive reading of the Koran--the one and true path in a world in which no other could be contemplated. The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale. Hence there was to be no education. No television. Women must stay at home, just as they stayed in their tents in Peshawar. Thus it was to be at the airport when I eventually left; another immigration officer now, perhaps only fifteen, was wearing make-up on his face--he, like many Algerians who fought in Afghanistan, was convinced the Prophet wore kohl around his eyes in Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. He refused to stamp my passport because I had no exit visa--even though exit visas did not exist in Jalalabad. But I had broken a greater rule. I wasn't wearing a beard. The boy pointed at my chin and shook his head in admonition, a child-schoolmaster who knew wickedness when he saw it and directed me towards the old plane on the runway with contempt.

The CIA worked to suck the Soviets into Afghanistan and then supplied the mujahadin with weapons and training. When the Soviets were gone we just abandoned Afghanistan. A recent right-wing opinion piece dates the Iranian war against the US from 1979 and the Iranian revolution but the CIA toppled Iranian democracy in 1953 and installed the Shah who operated a deadly dictatorship. It's all blowback.