January 05, 2014

There Is No "Power Vacuum" In The Middle East

Vacuum is the absence of matter.

But according to the New York Times the only "matter" that counts is the U.S. military. Thus this hallucinating thesis that a Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants:

[F]or all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.

Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in both Iraq and Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda, as the two countries’ conflicts amplify each other and foster ever-deeper radicalism.

Hmm - there has been no bloodshed in the Lebanese civil war? There was no Iraq Iran war? All was peaceful while the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq?

That "vacuum" thesis is nuts. The "power vacuum" idea is even more stupid when one looks at the list of powerful forces within the "vacuum" space that are mentioned in the piece:

For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority. Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political figure and American ally. In Syria, the tempo of violence has increased, with hundreds of civilians killed by bombs dropped indiscriminately on houses and markets. Linking all this mayhem is an increasingly naked appeal to the atavistic loyalties of clan and sect.

So the "power vacuum", the absence of "power matter", is, according to the NYT writers, filled with al-Qaeda, the Iraqi army, terrorists in Lebanon, and various forces fighting in Syria all somehow involved in a Saudi Iranian proxy war. That is quite a "vacuum".

Behind propagandizing the idea of such a "vacuum" which is none is of course the intend to get the U.S. further involved so that the non-existing vacuum is filled with the only "power matter" that somehow is supposed to count.

Where did those NYT writers get this stupid idea? One might guess that such nonsense can only leap from some neoconned minds. And indeed, a different NYT report points to such a source:

Two Republican critics of the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw all American troops, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said that “many of us predicted that the vacuum would be filled by America’s enemies and would emerge as a threat to U.S. national security interests.”

What "vacuum" and what "national security interests" might that be?

It was the U.S. attack on Iraq that set off the sectarian war in Iraq and beyond. It was the removal of Saddam Hussein that changed the balance between Saudi Sunnism and Iranian Shiaism which then motivated the Saudis to unleash the Jihadist forces. It was not a "power vacuum" that created the strife that continues today and will continue in the future. It was the insertion of U.S. forces into the Middle East that led to overpressure and the current explosions.

To pretend that such military insertions and presence is needed to fill Middle Eastern space only points to the lack of matter in the writers' sculls.

Posted by b on January 5, 2014 at 13:49 UTC | Permalink

Comments