When I hear the "Oh no, the US is going to meddle in the Middle East again" reaction to the discussion about intervention in Syria, I think of something one of my professors said in a lecture during my first year of journalism school.
One of the reasons we're so obsessed with cancer and AIDS (this was 1989), he said, was that modern medicine had eradicated most of the other diseases that killed us. They were the last killers standing and so we ascribed them with special meaning and special status.
When you look at how many conflicts there were in, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia and the many US interventions, for better or worse, in those countries right up to the early 1990s, the metaphor seems to apply to geopolitics, too.
Not that we're at the The End of History. But it does feel like the clash-of-civilizations trope that feeds Middle Eastern fatalism is shortsighted. All we know for sure about Middle Eastern problems is that they have so far last a couple of decades more than serious conflicts in other regions. A couple of decades is not much in the span of human history, though it certainly is horrific when measured in a lifetime. The immediate cost of these problems is awful, but that does not mean they are different category of problem.
One of the reasons we're so obsessed with cancer and AIDS (this was 1989), he said, was that modern medicine had eradicated most of the other diseases that killed us. They were the last killers standing and so we ascribed them with special meaning and special status.
When you look at how many conflicts there were in, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia and the many US interventions, for better or worse, in those countries right up to the early 1990s, the metaphor seems to apply to geopolitics, too.
Not that we're at the The End of History. But it does feel like the clash-of-civilizations trope that feeds Middle Eastern fatalism is shortsighted. All we know for sure about Middle Eastern problems is that they have so far last a couple of decades more than serious conflicts in other regions. A couple of decades is not much in the span of human history, though it certainly is horrific when measured in a lifetime. The immediate cost of these problems is awful, but that does not mean they are different category of problem.
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