The Middle East’s fractured lands - Complex and chaotic, not impossible

IT’S safe to suggest that this weekend, somewhere not too far away, some golf club sage tried, at a lively dinner party, to hide their insecurity on one subject or another by suggesting they didn’t read the papers because they know that “the Israelis and the Palestinians are still fighting and I don’t need to find out about this week’s atrocity”. 

Indeed they are, and, tragically, likely to continue to do so for some time yet. More atrocities can be expected.

However, had our cornered diner the inclination — or the interest needed to sustain democracy — he might discover that much of the Middle East seems either a battlefield or a refuge, a source of funding for terrorists.

The region seems a forlorn, needlessly impoverished, fly-blown place, dominated by monarchies richer than Croesus because of our addiction to oil.

Parts seem so very rich that normal rules we depend on to order our world do not, apparently, apply.

Awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar confirms this.

That country’s mistreatment of migrant workers building World Cup infrastructure is appalling, even by our hypocritical standards in Europe.

We are complicit. Much of the region seems a series of fractured, irreconcilable tribes afflicted by a litany dictators indifferent to human rights. Lybia’s deposed and lynched Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar in Syria, and others, give the West an occasion to appreciate the relative stability underpinned by its secure, more or less unthreatened lives.

The region has to cope too with the various shades of Islam, from the moderate to the insane and belligerent. The match-to-the-fire zealots make our bloody sectarian history seem a game of charades.

The West’s, particularly Europe’s, dangerously stupid tolerance of Saudi Arabia’s promotion of radical Islam — the Wahhabi branch of Sunnism — challenges our idea of religious tolerance and will eventually challenge European security. It is time to be far firmer on this issue.

Our golfer might find too that as the forces united to defeat the Islamic State fantasy close in on that Satanic cult entrenched in Mosul, that the strongest card IS has is the inability of those who oppose them to join in common purpose.

IS hopes that even if defeated militarily its opponents will eventually fracture, allowing them to resume their reign of terror.

The region faces a complex, deadly set of problems many of them exacerbated by ill-judged interventions by Western powers, shaped by a culture of imperialism.

It is also one of the primary sources of the migrant crisis doing so very much to change Europe, energise the Trump affront and feed the strand of xenophobia that lurked in Britain’s campaign to quit the European Union which, like it or not, made this country’s mushroom farmers, forced to close by sterling’s fall, early victims of Brexit.

The problems cursing the Middle East are not new but neither are they so impossibly dark that they cannot be resolved.

Today, inside, we publish the first instalment of a week-long series that will, hopefully, help us all reach a better understanding of the challenges facing the region and the ordinary individuals and families trapped in its chaos.