The Middle East: lets just ignore it

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This article from Prospect provides a refreshing perspective on what to do about the Middle East: nothing. According to the author, there are three major errors we make when dealing with the Middle East:
  1. That the current moment is a crisis of unprecedented proportions when everything is about to spiral out of control in an unprecedented manner (or conversely, when everything is on the verge of being solved forever), when in fact the current moment is a lot like many other past moments.
  2. Vastly over-estimating the conventional military capabilities of the states in the region: Egypt in the 60's, Iraq in the 90's, Iran now. Maintaining an insurgency within your country is a very different thing than launching attacks outside of it.
  3. Both advocates of military power and soft power over-estimating the malleability of societies in the Middle East. Militarists think that if we just bomb them or invade them a little more, their behavior will change to what we want. Wrong. But on the other side, advocates of diplomacy are mistaken if they believe that their one peace negotiation is going to change the structural and historical problems that plague the region.
(HT: Sullivan) I don't think I would advocate the extreme version of "hands off" that Luttwak advances in this article, and I think he's a little too dismissive of soft power. But certainly "hands off" would be infinitely better than what we have been doing. And I like Luttwak's idea that we all spend far too much time thinking about a region that is actually much less important than we think.

Comments

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10:55 PM, May 03, 2007
Zachary Drake said…
Um, Omar, I don't think the Prospect article on errors in dealing with the Middle East has anything to do with marijuana. I'm going to leave your comment up as an example of the sort of thing that crops up in blog comment sections, but I think you're doing drive by spam and it is not particularly welcome.
12:21 AM, May 04, 2007
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