What I know about the Middle East

Hmmm... Seems like a rather imposing question. It is a little hard for me to know where to start. I have not really been to the Middle East, though I have been close. I have traveled to Morocco, Crete, and Pakistan. In Pakistan I went to Peshawar and to the border with Afghanistan -- one of the first Americans to climb the highest peak in the Hindu Kush, which is on the Pakistani / Afghani border and we hiked for days through villages in Chitral that are probably quite similar to Afghanistan, that is, if Afghanistan is the "Middle East..." I have made a bit of a study of the "Middle East" and I have several close friends from there...

Ok, what do I know? Well, I guess that the first thing is that the region is diverse. There are three main ethnic groups, Arabs, Turks, and Persians. Countries in the Middle East are, for the most part, a "new" idea -- resulting from the break up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and the establishment by the British and French of mandates -- these countries were created by the victors of WWI, basically, to establish a "balance of power" which is another way of saying to allow the continued domination of the region by Europe, and soon, that would also mean by American oil companies.

There have been three major political/philosophical systems in the Middle East that vie with each other: 1) traditional elites (now seen, for example, in the Gulf States, and put in place by the Europeans and kept in power in part by America, usually Sunni and not at all democratic); 2) socialists/nationalists (Nassar of Egypt is exemplary, but the Bathists of Syria and Iraq can be seen as versions of this, because they had the crazy idea that the people of the country/region should control their own assets they were seen as unacceptable by Americans and thus undermined, often by Islamists); 3) Islamists (Iran after the revolution, Hezbolah, Osama bin Laden, etc. -- now seen as bad guys but in the day of socialist/nationalist ascendency they were the "enemy of our enemy: our friend.")

Well, what else? One could talk about how these different groups/ideologies compete with each other... One could talk about Israel and it impact on not only Palestinians but on the whole of the Middle East. There is the role that the "American Satan" has, and continues, to play. Maybe the last thing that, for the moment, I will say that I know about the Middle East is that there have been over 1,000,000 deaths in Iraq as a direct result of the American invasion. I think that is the kind of number that justifies the word "holocaust." Your tax dollars at work.