Creating the Modern Middle East
You really can't understand the Middle East without knowing its history.
The history of the Middle East is long and complicated because it spans thousands of years that includes the births of: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, much that is currently relevant is fairly recent and involves oil and also religion, well, always religion.
The modern Middle East and the geopolitics of the region starts with a map of the Ottoman Empire at its peak, an Islamic empire that spread by the sword starting in the 7th century. The numerous battles between Islam and Christianity are well documented but a few major battles are defining moments in history. The Ottoman Empire lasted over 600 years, from about 1300 to the end of World War I.
The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
As the Ottoman empire reached its peak, you could have called yourself an Ottoman if you lived in Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Pretty much massive swaths of Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were under Ottoman rule for over 600 years….
So as we head into the 1600s and throughout the 1700s, there’s no question that the Ottoman Empire is clearly in decline.
The Ottomans were ferocious warriors and dedicated to Islamizing the world. They militarily conquered a lot of land, Christian lands, and the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) to Islam in 1453 marked the end of the Christian Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire that had lasted a thousand years, from 330 AD to 1453. It was a major blow to the Christian world. As is typical of every empire, they grow beyond the ability of the military and administrators to control large and diverse populations, especially when the population hates their conquerors. Empires go bust for a lot of reasons but mostly because they simply exhaust and bankrupt themselves.
Ferocious warrior that they were, the Ottomans could be defeated and were defeated at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, a HUGE Christian victory, which halted Islam’s conquest of Christian Europe. The Christian-Muslim battle at the Gates of Vienna is hugely significant and a history worth knowing, here.
The Ottoman Empire had been expanding into Europe ever since Constantinople fell to the Turks, and even before that. Wherever the Muslim armies went, they plundered cities, took slaves, turned churches into mosques, and converted many thousands of Christian captives to Islam at the point of a sword.
The Sultan’s armies overran Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. They turned Protestant Hungary into a compliant vassal and made war repeatedly on Austria and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Ottomans had designs on Vienna, since the fall of the city would open the way into the heart of Austria and the rich principalities of southern Germany.
However, successful Christian challenges to Islamic rule had been formidable and ongoing since the Battle of Tours (732) which halted Islamic expansion into France and the sea Battle of Lepanto in 1571 that curtailed Islamic power in the Mediterranean. The Christians under Islamic rule began to revolt, and the Balkans and Greece extricated themselves from Ottoman rule over time. The Russian Orthodox Christians fought many battles against the surge of Islamization into Eastern Europe and Russia. Still, it was a formidable Empire that controlled vast swaths of real estate in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, even considering the ebb and flow of its holdings and power.
By the time WW I rolled around, the Ottoman Empire was already in deep decline. The Ottomans became paper tigers and were no longer feared which of course made them ripe for further demolition. During WW I, the Ottomans sided with Germany believing that such an alliance would help reconstitute its dying empire. Well, the Germans lost WW I and the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist as it became a dead carcass that vultures were feeding on.
The demise of the Ottoman Empire was a catastrophic event for the Muslim world as it was also an Islamic Caliphate that controlled all lands legally, civically and religiously. Unlike the Christian world that embraced the separation of church and state, there has never been such separations of powers in the Muslim world. What we may find to be peculiar, Muslims find normal. The Caliphate is the state and church.
The end of WW I was especially nasty as two major Empires bit the dust, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire. When empires die, there are new wars and even negotiations for land and resources. After WW I everybody wanted pieces of the Ottoman Empire and Austro Hungary Empire with the goal, of course, of creating new fledgling empires from the bones of dead empires.
Oil was coming into geopolitical play in the early 1900's, especially with the advent of modern mechanized warfare, and specifically in nations with existing military empires. Churchill had converted the British navy from coal to oil and while Britain had substantial supplies of coal it had no oil at the time.
Everybody wanted oil because it was neccessary to fuel modern mechanized militaries.
May 26, 1908: Mideast Oil Discovered — There Will Be Blood
1908: A British company strikes oil in Persia (now Iran). It's the first big petroleum find in the Middle East, and it sets off a wave of exploration, extraction and exploitation that will change the region's -- and the world's -- history....
Why all the fuss? The automobile was in its infancy, and few people could foresee its future. How did an investor expect to get rich off an oil strike? Well -- and we really do mean well -- you could run an electric-power plant with oil, you could run factory machinery on oil and, perhaps most importantly, the world's powerful navies were converting their ships from coal to oil. Almost anything that had run on coal -- especially coal that heated water to create steam -- could run on oil.
Exactly 100 years ago today, the smell of sulfur hovered in the air at Masjid-i-Suleiman. That was a good sign for an experienced oil hand like Reynolds. At 4 in the morning, the drill reached 1,180 feet below the desert and struck oil. A huge gusher shot 75 feet into the air.
It was soon learned that the entire Middle East was, in fact, one gargantuan oil pond. Oil had been around for a while and a Russian engineer created the first modern oil well in Asia in 1848 (history of oil here).
By 1914 and after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 that birthed America’s fiat monetary empire and its wars, the world got WW I, a very ugly fiasco that killed 35,000,000 folks. WW I was supposedly triggered when a Serbian nationalist shot and killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 6/28/14 in Sarajevo but Europe had been ablaze with war aspirations to challenge existing empires which at the time were the British, Russian, Austro-Hungary and Ottoman Empires. Germany is a nation that always lusted for empire and while dreams of empire seemed to evade the Germans, that didn’t stop a rising and industrialized German economy from pursuing war to achieve its goal. Moreover, a lot of European factions had been itching for a war to bust up the existing world order because the potential spoils of war were irresistible - real estate to control and resources to plunder. The Ottomans and Germany were allied against British interests.
To the victors go the spoils and while they feuded for years over their respective slices of the geographic victory pie, eventually much of the Middle East was put under the control of the English, French and Italians. The French took control of what is now Algeria, parts of Syria and Lebanon, the Italians took control of what is now Libya and the English staked their claims on Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel while forging so-called protectorate relationships with other tribal chieftains in the area. Most of the Middle East was a nation-less landmass at the time. There are many observers who believe that WW I was started to secure oil resources in the Middle East and the Sykes–Picot Agreement validates this assumption because it was a secret agreement between Britain and France to plant their imperial flags in the Middle East and stakeout their oil interests as well as control of land and peoples they believed they should dominate, rule and exploit.
The defining characteristic of empire is war and war is always about plunder.
Rich and well educated British aristocracy had a passion for hanging out in conquered territories because they had a vested interest in serving the interests of imperialism and empire - a hobby of the landed gentry and idle rich. Gertrude Bell was one such British aristocrat and she spent many years in the Middle East but particularly in what is now modern Iraq.
Gertrude Bell literally drew the borders of Iraq with a red pen in a geographic location where no nation had existed since ancient times. As was the custom of the British, they installed a British lackey on a newly created throne who was to serve the British Empire.
The Muslim people are basically accustomed to living as semi-sovereign tribal entities and never really had any concept of the modern nation state or its authority. Under Ottoman rule, the tribes more or less lived happily under an Islamic Caliphate which is a defining characteristic of Islamic history and theology. However, the Ottomans had a huge and far flung empire and sending in the military to quell local revolts here and there was fairly common. The last Caliphate was the Ottoman Caliphate. For a Muslim, it is unacceptable to live under infidel rule.
Accordingly, the Middle East underwent a series of revolts against infidel rule and throughout the process nations were created that had never really existed as modern and functioning nation states. However, many European nations also had a presence and/or a form of control of a Middle East territory for a very long time that predates WW I.
Algeria became a sovereign nation in 1962 after being under various types of French control since 1830, a period known as French Algeria. Algeria was also a component of various Arab and Ottoman empires.
Libya declared its independence and became a sovereign nation in 1951, after a long history of being under Roman rule, Arab rule, Ottoman rule and Italian Rule.
Syria gained independence in 1946 and is another nation that was born mid-20th century after unstable periods of British and French rule that had followed Christian rule, Islamic rule, Ottoman rule and a French Mandate.
Tunisia became a nation in 1956 after a long history of Phoenician, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and French rule.
Saudi Arabia was officially created in 1932 when the House of Saud militarily squashed all opposition to its absolute rule. The House of Saud was heavily supported and funded by the British to destabilize the Ottoman Empire prior to WW I. The Arabs never liked being ruled by the Turks even though Ottoman rule of the Arabian Peninsula was relatively benign and non-intrusive. The absolute worst legacy of the House of Saud is that it allied itself with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of "Wahhabism". Whhabism is an exceptionally violent, virulent and non-tolerant strain of Sunni Islam. Some Sunni Muslims reject Wahabbism but many, especially in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan thoroughly embrace Wahabbism as the only valid form of Islam. PBS did a nice chronology of the House of Saud, here.
The House of Saud created a Wahhabist terror group known as the Ikhwan. Ikhwan translates to 'Muslim Brothers' and while the Ikhwan greatly assisted the House of Saud in securing power in a civil war, the House of Saud feared these warriors and ended up attempting to crush the organization. However, the Ikhwan lives on in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, another radical group of Wahhabist Islamists who permeate Sunni nations to various degrees.
All terror attacks against westerners are attributable to Wahhabist Sunni Islam. Unfortunately, the US has been in bed with these dudes at least since the days of Jimmy Carter who funded and armed the rise of the Afghan Mujuhadeen, now the Taliban. It's no surprise that 15 of the 19 911 jihadists hailed from Saudi Arabia with the others being from Egypt, the UAE and Lebanon.
Lebanon is a most unusual Middle East nation because of its historic multi-cultural diversity and the fact that Beirut was once considered the Paris of the Middle East, a beautiful and bustling city that exemplified tolerance, cultural diversity and prosperity. If there ever was a Middle East nation that was a success story, it was Lebanon. Lebanon gained independence in 1943 by accident as it became a pawn of Nazi Germany who at the time was occupying France. The German backed French Vichy government cut a deal for Lebanese independence by getting Lebanon to agree to allow the movement of German war materials and supplies through Lebanon. A lot of WW II was fought in North Africa and the Middle East where the British and the Germans locked horns in various battles. The US also fought the Germans in Africa.
Lebanon survived WW II and flourished, despite a mix of Maronite Christians, Eastern Orthodox Christians and various Muslim sects that included the Druze, Shiites and Sunnis. Somehow, these folks hobbled together a peace and a government that was tolerant and prosperous, although low level civil wars were in progress and brewing. What Lebanon could not survive, however, was Yasser Arafat invading Lebanon and setting up terrorist training camps to attack Israel. This forced the Israelis to enter the Lebanon civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 with 15 years of sheer hell, misery, destruction and death.
Arafat has previously invaded Jordan in a failed attempt to overthrow King Hussein; he barely escaped with his life and only survived because Arafat dressed as a Muslim woman to escape from Jordan. Arafat then set up camp in chaotic Lebanon.
Unfortunately, Israel just didn’t clean out Arafat and Company and force them to pack up and go elsewhere. Israel proceeded to involve itself in the Lebanese civil war and sided with the Lebanese Christians, thinking they would be more amenable to their cause of a peace treaty and recognition. Of course, the violence only escalated as the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Druses, the Christians, Arafat and Company, Israel and, along the way, Syria jumped into the mess. Things got even uglier when someone convinced President Reagan to send our Marines to that war zone; their barracks were bombed and 241 US military personnel (220 Marines, 18 Sailors and 3 Soldiers) were killed in a vehicle bomb terror attack that blew up their barracks.
Eventually, Arafat was evicted from Lebanon by the Lebanese government and the Israelis packed up and went home. Before it was over, Lebanon was a wasteland, a situation that may have happened anyway. But with the help of Arafat, Syria and later Israel, the destruction of Lebanon was most certainly expedited and along with it an exploding civilian death toll. Also, Shiite Iran did fund Hezbollah a Shiite group known for its terror activities.
Iraq/Mesopotamia/Badhdad has fascinating history. In it's prime around the 6th century BC, Baghdad was one of the great learning centers of the world as well as an extraordinary civilization but it was conquered by Arab Muslims and declined rapidly. The area ended up under various rulers including the Abbasid Empire and the Ottoman Empire while also being invaded by the Mongols. Nothing much happened until the bust up of the Ottoman Empire and that's when all hell started breaking loose after the British aristocrat Gertrude Bell literally drew modern Iraq from a map with a pencil.
Woodrow Wilson's creation, the League of Nations, the predecessor organization to the United Nations, established what was called the British Mandate which put the area under British control. The Brits then created an Iraqi monarchy and installed a Hashimite on the newly created throne in 1916. The Hashimites were actually a tribe from the Arabian Peninsula and the tribal chieftains in the freshly created Iraq opposed being ruled by the foreign Hashimite tribe. Immediately, there were big problems involving the Kurds, who were revolting, unhappy Assyrians and various tribal ethnic groups. Not only were there uprisings, the British sent in troops to quell civil unrest.
By 1932, the British agreed to Iraq independence. Well, sort of. There was an Anglo-Iraq War in 1941 when the British believed that their oil interests were in jeopardy after a coup. The British tried again to restore a Hashimite to the throne of Iraq which lasted until 1958 when another coup by the Iraqi Army succeeded in dethroning the monarchy. Iraq was then ruled by the military until 1968 when another coup flipped power to the Socialist Ba'ath Party. By 1979 there was another coup and Saddam Hussein seized control after murdering his political opponents.
Here’s another critical point about Iraq. The nation is rought 70 Shiite Islam with the rest being mostly Sunni Islam and Kurds. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, gassed the Kurds, killed thousand of innocents and it’s alleged that former and now deceased Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave Hussein the poison gas to kill the Kurds.
There are photos of Rumsfelt with Hussein.
But it gets worse and more insane. After 911, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld led the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that toppled Hussein’s government and eventually resulted in his execution. Hussein was NOT involved in Islamist terrorist against the US or anybody. For starters he wasn’t even a devout Sunni Muslim; Hussein reportedly loved watching the Godfather movies while drinking US whiskey…LOL, very unIslamic. Having experienced a previous hellish US invasion over Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Hussein flatout refused to allow Islamist terrorists on Iraqi soil.
But here’s the real nightmare: Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who had viciously persecuted its majority Shia population for years. So after he was toppled and executed, the US held one of it fake purple finger elections to prop up a fake democracy. Muslims have no use whatsoever for democracy…it’s just something that they don’t understand because they view democracy as a western infidel creation.
Nevertheless, the monumentally stupid US used its fake democracy to deliver democratic power to its Shia majority knowing that the mother of all Shia nations, Iran, was just across Iraq’s eastern border. The US has been lusting to Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran for decades but for no justifiable reason. Therefore, the utter irrationality of fusing Iran and Shiite Iraq together was just insane and one of America’s dumbest foreign policy interventions ever.
Iran is a nation with a glorious Persian history of incredible accomplishments. Iranians are not Arabs but an Indo-European people and consider themselves Persians. In fact, the Iranians have a long history of hostility toward the Arabs starting with the Arab Muslim conquest of the Persians. Iraq and Iran have a lot in common as both Baghdad and the Persians had great civilizations that got squashed by the Arab Muslim invasions. In fact, Shiite Islam developed as a revolt against Arab Sunni Islam and retains a lot of the civilizing characteristics of its historic Persian culture. It should also be noted that neither Iran nor Iranians nor Shiite Muslims have been involved in any acts of global Islamist terror from 911 to blowing up 2 US African Embassies to the bombing of the USS Cole to the Madrid bombings, London bombings, Bali bombings, Mumbai bombings and much more. Those honors go to Sunni Muslims who are typically Wahhabists. Not all Sunni Muslims are Wahhabists, in fact, most are not.
Iran was a functioning democracy that was advancing into modernity until the CIA engineered a coup in 1953, tossed their popular elected leader out of power and installed the hated Shah, a US puppet. Well, the rest really is history. The Ayatollah Khomeini who was languishing in exile in France roused the Iranians to revolt against the Shah, a Shah they never wanted or even liked. The Iranian people had no earthly idea that they were replacing one US/CIA backed psychopathic murderer with an equally dangerous and intolerant theocrat. The Iranian Revolution that ushered in the era of absolute ayatollah power has been devastating for Iranians.
There NEVER would have been an Iranian Revolution had the US and CIA not intervened and pretty much destroyed the country. Here’s one of many photos of Iranian college students BEFORE the Iranian Revolution and BEFORE they were forced into wearing Islamic clothing.
Still, neither Iranian or Iran fingerprints are on any acts of Islamist terror. Moreover, Iran does not have nuclear weapons nor has it committed any acts of aggression against America, the American people or American interests. Yet, it should be noted that US sanctions against Iran have hurt the country badly and hostility toward America from the Iranian government and Iranian people is real.
US sanctions everywhere are brutal, ruthless and crimes against humanity because they result in horrific human suffering. Anybody who endorses sanction is a psychopath and a clear and present danger to humanity.
Egypt had always been a sovereign nation since ancient times (the great Egyptian civilization) even thought it was under Ottoman rule, invaded by many including Napoleon who invaded Egypt in 1798 but failed to conquer it. While Egypt was always a prize of foreign conquerors, it became an even bigger prize when the French raised money and started building the Suez Canal. While the project was plagued with horrific problem including the brutal use of slave labor and financial problems, it still advanced and opened in 1869. The Suez Canal continued to have problems for years after its opening but it dramatically affected global trade because until it opened, trade routes from the far east had to sail the treacherous Cape of Good Hope (tip of South Africa).
The Suez Canal wasn’t alone in experiencing financial difficulties. Egypt was desperate for cash and ended up selling its shares in the Suez Canal venture to the British in 1875 with money from the Rothchilds banking house. It was a scandal of sorts because the share purchases were not approved by Parliament. In any event, the Suez Canal became a entity under the protection of Britain because Britain has supplied war money and materials for ongoing wars in the Sudan and other parts of Africa. After WW I broke out, the Turks attacked the Suez Canal and by 1951 the Egyptian Nationalist Nasser simply repudiated the treaty with the British, the 1936 British/Egyptian Treaty, and demanded the removal of British troops. Effectively, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal which is a hugely significant toll plaza for world trade.
Then there's the perennial nightmare known as Israel with a complicated history.
With Charity Toward None, A History of Israel, I don't stand with Israel or Hamas or the Palestinians or Arabs. They've all committed unspeakable acts of savagery.
The Middle East remains a complex crazy quilt of frustrated people, autocratic rulers, poverty, rigid religiousity, massive insecurity, conspiracy theories on steroids and yet it continues to be the playground of western interventionists.
Then, there is the US-Saudi relationship that dates back to 1945 and Roosevelt who personally met with the Saudi king on board the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal.
The Saudi-US relationship was always about oil.
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Since the 1930s From the Foreign Policy Research Institute but the link has been purged.
There is practically no civil society in Saudi Arabia. The country is run by the al-Saud royal family in partnership with a highly conservative religious establishment espousing a fundamentalist theology known as Wahhabism. The alliance goes back to the mid-eighteenth century.
Both the House of al-Saud and the Wahhabi religious leadership are against freedom of religion, democracy, a free press, and the public mixing of unmarried men and women. Wahhabi clerics are also against movie houses; public dancing; drinking, women’s sports centers; girls exercising in schools, and women driving....
Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy, William Knox, told Congress in March 1944 that the war had made the U.S. government extremely anxious about oil. He pronounced what was to become America’s postwar oil policy, namely “to provide for acquisition of oil resources outside the limits of the United States for the safety and security of the country.” That was the rationale for our becoming more and more involved with Saudi Arabia.
In 1944, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company that Chevron had set up became Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco. Chevron brought in three other partners, the big majors of the United States: Mobil, Exxon, and Texaco. Aramco was not just an oil company. In the early years, the king kept turning to it for loans, because they weren’t earning any money from oil until much later. Aramco became something like a proxy for the U.S. government in Saudi Arabia....
In 1948, a pot of gold was discovered. Aramco discovered the Ghawar oil field, the mother lode of the world’s fields.....
In 1950, to try and solve the problem of how to get the Saudi oil to American and Western markets, the U.S. company Bechtel, based in California, built a 1,000-mile pipeline directly from the Saudi oil fields across Jordan and the Golan Heights to Sidon in Lebanon in order to take the oil directly to the Mediterranean by pipeline....
In 1973, Saudi government led the Arab boycott of oil supplies to the U.S. (Netherlands was also singled out). This led to a quadrupling of the oil price, from about $3 to $12 per barrel. Saudi Arabia was suddenly very much on Washington’s radar screen, and very rich. Saudi oil earnings went from $8.5 billion in 1973 to $35 billion in 1974. With that money, they began building and buying from the U.S. tanks, airplanes, and infrastructure. The U.S.-Saudi military relationship took off. American companies basically built the whole military infrastructure of Saudi Arabia as it is today. Over the next twenty years, the Saudis spent some $85-86 billion on American arms....
In 1973, however, because of the war between Israel and the Arab states, the Saudis began to take over Aramco. They insisted on taking a 25 percent interest in it, paid for in oil—they didn’t try to nationalize without compensation. By 1980 they owned 100 percent of Aramco. But they treated their American partners well. They gave the U.S. partners—Chevron, Mobil Exxon, and Texaco—priority in selling them oil, and they offered special discount rates, to please both Washington and the companies. So the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the oil companies continued to be strong and close.
And that's precisely how the US came to ignore the dangerous scourge of Wahhabism and a Wahhabist interpretation of Salafist Islam. Oil and oil profits simply trumped everything.
There can be no question that the West and Islam have had a tortured relationship throughout their respective histories and for reasons that are directly attributable to Muslim conquests of Christians lands or Christian conquests of Muslims lands and all all for purposes involving religious supremacy and/or control of land and resources via military conquests. Oil did in fact significantly buoy Arab-Muslim power. After all, the Middle East had the oil to feed our insatiable appetites for the black gold that fuels our economies and lifestyles. They also used that wealth create autocratic royal families that do indeed fund radical Islam, jihads and terrorism.
Perhaps one of the worst tragedies of Middle East oil wealth is that it was never really used create productive free market economies which by extension tends to result in more prosperity, more tolerance, more equality and a more peaceful co-existence of ethnically and religiously diverse people. Instead, the greedy Middle East rulers hoard wealth and use Israel to feed a hatred that shifts anger away from themselves and to Israel. After all, Israel is a modern economy that enjoys a modern standard of living in a massive geographical landmass of 453 million folks, here, that is swimming in poverty and deprivation.
Poverty rates in the Middle East are as much as four times higher than previously assumed
• About 250 million people out of 400 million across 10 Arab countries, or two-thirds of the total population, were classified as poor or vulnerable
• “Mass pauperization” in the Middle East makes the region the most unequal in the world
• A poor family in the Middle East today will remain poor for several generations
• With governments in the Middle East unable to deliver basic services and opportunities, young people are turning to religious, sectarian, and ethnic organizations like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to fill the void
This is a nasty situation with profound geopolitical consequences.
As the Middle East is currently exploding over yet another Israeli-Arab war which this time was triggered by Hamas slaughtering 1,400 Israelis, the cycle of death and destruction continues. The Arab deathtoll from Israeli vengeance is over 8,000 and climbing.
Finally, it should be noted that nations that prosper are not only tolerant but steeped in rights that start with secure property rights. Capital is the lifeblood of economic prosperity because it motivates corporations and industries to invest big bucks in factories and plants. Nobody will invest capital in areas with chronic political instability, wars, intolerance, religious hatred and a generally inhospitable climate for business and people. Take Elon Musk and Tesla, two names easily recognized. Tesla has plants in the US, Europe and China. Musk is never going to invest billions into opening a plant in Gaza or much if not all of the Middle East; that would be an insane business decision.
The Middle East has made itself inhospitable to commerce and trade. Whether it’s their religion or culture or politics, the situation is bad and yes, the US tends to play a role in keeping the Middle East unstable and volatile. US foreign policy is never the good guy.