Broaden Your Perspectives on the State of the Middle East
Scott Anderson’s NY Times Sunday Magazine feature, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” is an excellent piece of reporting and one all of us could learn from. Telling the story of how we arrived where we are today in regards to conditions in the Middle East, through the eyes and experiences of real individuals, Anderson brings multiple perspectives to the narrative of why the Middle East appears the way it does from our Western viewpoint, including the rise of ISIS. (For another primer that covers the evolution of modern Islam I also highly recommend “Storm From the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West” by Milton Viorst.) If you’re looking for a neat and tidy explanation of it all, this isn’t it. We short-change ourselves when we turn away from the deep complexity and responsibility of where the Middle East is today. Consider just the unique perspectives Anderson illuminates:
- A western educated Kurdish doctor/pesh merga fighter continuing to fight for a free and independent Kurdistan
- A Syrian college student stuck in the middle of real war within his own country and a proxy war quietly being fought between the US and Russia
- An Iraqi women’s rights activist targeted for death within her own country and stuck in political limbo in another
- A Libyan air force cadet caught between loyalties to a government and loyalties to his clan
- A young Iraqi man stuck in an economy destroyed by a war and searching for meaning and any chance of prosperity
Combing social media and news outlets today we can add to these perspectives that conflict with the prevailing narratives US media holds today:
- Syrian accounts of love and praise for their President, placing blame for the war at the feet of the US
- A Syrian refugee who fled his homeland because of an oppressive government
- A strong-man Turkish president using the Syrian war as a front to attack Kurdistan and fight what they see as Kurdish terrorism in Turkey
- Tens of thousands of Turks protesting in the streets, both for and in opposition to the government.
How do we balance all of these conflicting view points? Are the Kurds freedom fighters or terrorists, or both? First, stop looking for the right and wrong perspectives. They don’t exist. Perspectives are contextual and therefore subjective and individualistic, and true depending on where you stand. Anderson gracefully refuses to engage in any such binary narrative, an us vs. them story line, or a black and white framing of a confusing present that can’t be explained away in a campaign slogan or a by-line.
As Westerners, its easy for us to intellectualize and lay blame for what happens “over there” and excoriate the boogey-man that is ISIS. What’s been missing is the acknowledgement that we as Western nations played a role in creating the very conditions in the Middle East that led to the rise of fundamentalist terrorism and ISIS itself. In a month where Donald Trump stated that President Obama is the founder of ISIS, I would point Mr. Trump’s gaze, and our own, further back in history to identify where US foreign policy and action did contribute to the rise of terrorist organizations ranging from the Taliban to Al Qaeda to ISIS, as well as supporting or combating totalitarian regimes across the region (sometimes both as in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). Whether its the fabrication of post-WWI Middle Eastern borders, the proxy battles of the Cold War, or the US’ more modern policy of regime change, today’s turmoil in the Middle East and its effects on western nations did not arise in a regional vacuum.
As long as we view that world as separate from us, we will never move past the frames of hate and violence that underpin the narrative by which both the West and the Middle East engage with each other. Violence only begets violence; which side will be the first to risk showing up with compassion, empathy and understanding of the opposition? In his article Anderson comes as close as any I’ve seen to really putting the reader in another person’s shoes, without spin or proselytizing a political viewpoint. Anderson simply paints a picture and pulls through to today the threads of the recent past not to show a neat and tidy narrative, but to show its complexity, confusion and violent reality. In reading about this reality, can you, as the reader, connect that world to your own? Can you be as acutely aware of how different that world is, as a typical Iraqi, Syrian or Libyan is of the differences in the day to day of the Western world?
Anderson nails it when he says, “I find it impossible to predict what might happen next, let alone sum up what it all means…I am reminded of something Majd Ibrahim told me: ‘ISIS isn’t just an organization, it’s an idea.’ It is also a kind of tribe, of course, and if this incarnation is destroyed, the conditions that created ISIS will remain in the form of a generation of disaffected and futureless young men…” If in the West we’re not willing to acknowledge our own responsibility in creating these conditions, and shape a different future, we’re destined to stay on this wheel of politics and violence and will remain the object of hatred for many of those futureless young.
