Issues in the Middle East

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Many Americans when they begin to hear the countries of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc. thrown around the image in their mind is just a blurry mess in between Europe and China. So don’t feel bad if that is where you are.

I think this is a tremendously important issue for us today because it is the most pressing global military threat right now. Many of you might remember back in January when the U.S. sent a drone strike to kill Iranian General Soleimani.

Middle Eastern Cold War

To understand what is going on in Iran, and why the U.S. is concerned or involved, we have to take a step back in history to get some context. And as we do, we can see that there is another cold war that has been going since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

I don’t expect to resolve this confusion in one post, but I hope that I can pique your interest and get you to look a little bit deeper at the things that are happening in the middle east. First, watch this quick overview of this Middle Eastern Cold War. It is very visually engaging and puts everything in a good framework. It was from 2017, so it does not discuss the most recent developments.

The tension in the region is great as the video made clear. Much of the tension is between the Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, and the Shia-majority Iran. However, this conflict has spilled over into every area of the middle east, and it is not as clean-cut as this makes it out.

As you heard, in the video, the United States has been involved in this region in both Saudi Arabia and Iran for decades with close ties to the capitalist friendly Saudis and pulling strings to remove extreme Muslim elements in Iran.

Afghanistan

It actually never mentions Afghanistan or Pakistan, Iran’s neighbors to the east. Afghanistan was the final proxy war of the U.S. / Soviet Cold War and the instability left in the region in the 1990s led to a civil war in which militant Islamists gained power with support not from Iran, but from Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 when they refused to turn over Osama Bin-Laden, who was actually from Saudi Arabia but had been organizing terrorist groups and activities against U.S. held sites in the middle east and Northern Africa since the early 1990s. Obviously, Osama Bin-Laden is best known for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Oddly enough, Iran actually supported the U.S. in the months following 9/11 by rounding up and identifying Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents. But the U.S. turned around in 2003 and invaded Iraq, removing Saddam Hussein and the buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Imperialism vs Iran

There is nothing simple about this conflict. It feels like the more the west or Russia gets involved in this region the more unstable it becomes. Perhaps that is the point, but with massive oil reserves in Iran and 90% of the world’s heroin coming from Afghanistan, its easy to see that this conflict is not going away soon.

The video below is a little bit longer. Feel free to skim through parts of it, but pay particular attention to Patrick Bet-David’s chart near the end of the video. He was raised in Iran and emigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. He is an entrepreneur and tries to toe the line between calling for capitalist reform in Iran and calling for an end to U.S. meddling in the region.

What do you think? Did this help to clear up some of the confusion about the main players in the Middle East? What do you see as the main obstacles to peace in the Middle East? Do you think that U.S. politicians really want peace in the Middle East?

P. S. – If you liked Patrick Bet-David’s perspective as much as I did, you might want to check out the follow-up video he made after the U.S. drone strike against General Soleimani.