Category Archives: May You Live In Interesting Times

Dr. Strangelove Rides Again

Each anniversary of the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (and later another on Nagasaki) in August, 1945, news media display images of the aftermath. The blasted landscapes, devoid of humans, have always sobered us. Other images of burn victims and sufferers from radiation sickness increase our horror.

This year, those images haunt us even more, as a small dictatorship revives the fear of nuclear annihilation. Ironically, North Korea lies not far from those unfortunate Japanese cities, the only ones to suffer from nuclear weapons.

It seems absurd. Those of us who remember fears of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War may also remember the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a black comedy starring Peter Sellers, dealing with those fears.

We also remember the joy that erupted when the Cold War, we thought, ended. The United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty and actually began dismantling some of their nuclear arsenals.

Whatever faults the two superpowers committed during the Cold War were redeemed by one fact: Though both had nuclear weapons, neither used them.

Was it the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)? Perhaps, but through it all, people of differing political persuasions and forms of government worked and hoped for the abolishment of this Dr. Strangelove kind of weapon.

Now, like a sudden resurrection of our Cold War nightmare, we fear the madness of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. Unfortunately, our current president appears to enjoy some of Kim’s tactics, the two trading insults like leaders of adolescent street gangs.

In the background, almost on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the United Nations Security Council passed a bill calling for sanctions against North Korea. The fact that the fifteen members of the council voted unanimously for the measure indicates the seriousness of North Korea’s threat.

We can only hope for the success of this slow but less deadly way to rid the world of Kim’s weapons.

One Immigrant’s Confusing Experience

Luma Simms is a Christian Iraqi who settled in California with her refugee family in 1978. According to her story in Plough Quarterly (Winter, 2017), she has pleasant memories of her early years in Iraq with grandparents and family members.

Other memories are not so pleasant. The family suffered discrimination because they were different—they were Christians, a minority.

However, her first memories as a school child in California were not pleasant either. She could not speak English, and local foods, like peanut butter, were strange. As before, her school mates saw her as different and sometimes taunted her with names—“Luma Puma Montezuma.”

She learned to read English and devoured books like Charlotte’s Web. Then the Iranian hostage crisis caused her family to try to hide the fact that they were from the Middle East. “Just say you’re from Greece if anyone asks,” her parents told their children.

Of those times, Luma says, “The internal turmoil of those years has never left me. It has shaped me and informed how I view human identity and immigration.”

She contemplates the devastation in her birth country by two Iraqi wars, invasions led by her adopted country, the United States. She calls on the U.S. to aid in healing and rebuilding the country.

But the U.S. must not, Luma says, attempt to build another people and society, as in Iraq, in the image of itself. “Bringing freedom to a people starts with respecting them as a people in their own right.”

Luma ends her article by describing how she, a daughter of God, has synthesized the two worlds she knows. “I am a daughter whom he brought from the East. It was in the West that he recreated me . . . and gathered me into his kingdom, where all his people become one.”

In the News This Week: Liu Xiaobo Died; Donald Trump, Jr, Sought Scandal

Liu Xiaobo, Chinese human rights advocate, won the Nobel Prize for peace in 2010. The Chinese government refused to let him receive it, eventually sentencing him to prison.

Dying of cancer, he was not allowed by Chinese leaders to leave the country for treatment. Finally, they sent him, in his last few days, to a hospital in northeast China, where he died.

The United States has been, through much of its history, a lodestone for those living under oppressive governments, and who, like Liu, call for changes and suffer for their efforts.

While Liu was in the last stages of his illness, however, the United States was losing the world’s respect. The Trump government was increasingly seen as isolated and dysfunctional, more interested in strengthening relations with strongmen like Russian leader Putin than in serving as a beacon for democracy.

Emails of Donald Trump, Jr., surfaced, in which he said he would love to meet with representatives of Russian interests to obtain incriminating emails on Hilary Clinton. The offer appeared to be a ruse to discuss Russia’s desire for relief from economic sanctions against Russia. Some of the sanctions relate to holding accountable those responsible for the murder of a Russian lawyer involved in uncovering fraud by Russian officials.

The Economist (July 15, 2017) wrote: “It would be nice to think that political campaigns ought not to work with foreign governments who imprison and beat up their domestic political opponents. Nice, but probably unrealistic.”

Another comment elsewhere in the magazine offered a gleam of hope: “The scandal is becoming a clash between the worst aspects of American democracy and the best. The worst is its bilious myopic hyper-partisanship; the best the unrivalled ability of American institutions, including journalists whom Mr. Trump reviles, to hold the powerful to account. Legally and politically, the ending is unclear. Morally, the verdict is already in.”

Not Your Grandmother’s Cold War

“I Led Three Lives,” a TV show in the 1950’s, was based on the story of an actual person, Herbert Philbrick. He lived as an American businessman, a Communist spy, and an American counterspy for the FBI. In those old days of the Cold War, the different sides used espionage and radio broadcasts.

Today, hacking and cyber warfare have overtaken the earlier methods.

Some worry that politics surrounding the testimony of former FBI director James Comey will blind Americans to Comey’s warnings about the serious Russian intrusion into our elections.

“The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle,” Comey said. “They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government.”

Whatever Donald Trump and his election team did or did not do, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates the interference of a hostile power in our election process. European democracies have also been attacked. These attempts should be taken seriously by all political parties.

It seems like an age since the end of the old Cold War in the early 1990’s. Today’s young people weren’t around, and the over thirty crowd have forgotten the euphoria in Europe and the United States when Eastern Europeans danced in the streets and reclaimed their countries from the Soviets.

Americans were going to have a peace dividend and beat their swords into plowshares. Russians were going to have free elections and a free press and join the rapidly escalating democratization of the world.

Instead we seem to have fallen, like Alice, through a rabbit hole into a crazy place of fake news, hacked political systems, and the rise of strong men with dictatorial powers, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Our governments, national and local, are tasked with developing technical methods to neutralize cyber attacks. Citizens, however, have the duty of reading widely and responsibly. Fake news disappears without followers.

 

Are Free Elections All We Need for Democracy? What Is Illiberal Democracy?

On April 16, Turkish voters gave Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, greatly increased powers. Observers believe Erdogan, already attacking dissent and the free press, will act to further erode civil rights in his country, even becoming something of a modern day sultan.

Turkey is a democracy, a Muslim majority nation located where the Middle East meets Europe. It is a member of NATO and thus allied militarily with the United States and other western nations.

The election in Turkey is the latest in a series of democracies moving to limit civil liberties, including Russia and Hungary.

Two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” (Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 1997). At the time, U.S. embassies in the Middle East, where I was serving, championed free elections as an answer to many of the problems there.

Zakaria sounded a warning about the consequences of free elections without other safeguards. “It has been difficult to recognize this problem,” Zakaria wrote, “because for almost a century in the West, democracy has meant liberal democracy—a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.”

Free elections alone, Zakaria pointed out, may produce dominance of one ethnic group, or the election of leaders from a single family corrupted by crime, or the suppression of free speech and religion.

Along with free elections, Zakaria said, we must include other measures such as a constitution granting protection to all, regardless of ethnic identity, religious preference, or other identifiers. A judiciary unconstrained by the need to be reelected every few years in partisan contests is also necessary.

Is the recent election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency a move toward illiberal democracy and the protection of favored groups? Or is it a correction, instead, toward a government that includes those left out of a changing economy and culture? Both?

Trump was the first Western leader to congratulate Erdogan. Most other western democracies were more restrained. Russia, however, also congratulated the Turkish leader.

Third Horseman of the Apocalypse

In the Christian Old Testament, seeking food for self and animals is often a part of the stories. Herdsmen like Abraham moved to find better pastures for their flocks. A famine in Israel sent Jacob and his large family fleeing into Egypt. Lack of rain in the time of the prophets led Elijah to a miraculous encounter with a poor widow.

Obviously, areas with less predictable rain, as in much of the Middle East and parts of Africa, are more likely to suffer famine than countries in temperate climates. Sometimes, however, famine is not caused by weather but by conflict.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who follow each other in the book of Revelation in the Christian New Testament, are sometimes depicted as conquest, war, famine, and death. The third horseman, famine, is not the result of weather but of conquest and war. It is human caused.

This kind of famine is afflicting millions of people in the countries of South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. In Sudan, they flee power struggles, often over oil revenues or ethnic rivalries. In Nigeria, people flee terrorism. Somalia’s looming famine is partly a problem with lack of rain but is increased by struggles with the terrorist group, al-Shabab.

Yemen, a country in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, suffers fallout from rivalry between Saudi Arabia and its arch enemy Iran. The two countries are supporting rival factions that are tearing the country apart. Terrorist groups also have made inroads, as they often do in areas of conflict.

Some relief is possible if food shipments can be unloaded in one of the ports. According to reports, Saudi Arabia has so far been unwilling to allow shipments to the people they are fighting.

The United States has supported Saudi Arabia in this struggle. If we are truly a compassionate nation, we will exert as much pressure as possible on Saudi Arabia not to use starvation as a weapon of war. Else, we will be collaborators in the resulting deaths.

Syria: No One Wants to Own It

A previous post “The Graveyard of Empires” pointed to the number of empires throughout history that bogged down after entry into the Middle East. But the Middle East continues to thrust itself onto the world’s stage, like some black pestilence.

Today, it’s the horrendous deaths in Syria apparently caused by a gas attack on civilians. Most nations are condemning the attacks, and especially Bashar al Assad’s rule there, abetted by Russia.

Perhaps things will change, but as of now, no one appears to know what to do to prevent future attacks. No one wants to own the problem.

Recent interventions to “fix” international problems have often made them worse. Unlike World War II, a powerful alliance working together seems nonexistent. Militarily, an immediate fix might tumble Assad, but where’s the will for another Marshall Plan? That effort, after World War II, used billions in aid, not for war, but to build the economies and governments of post war Europe.

The saying is: “If you break it, you fix it.” And no one wants to risk the cost of fixing Syria.

Laughing at Ourselves

One of the great strengths of a democracy is the freedom of its citizens to laugh at themselves.

Humor helps us cope in tough times. American comedians have recently noted the boost given to their profession by the current political upheavals.

Dictators may feel threatened by humor directed at them, but satire and political cartoons have been around since at least the 1700’s in both Great Britain and America. Television and the internet have increased the possibilities for humor. Humor releases tension and sometimes causes us to notice absurdities we didn’t see before.

Even presidents understand the need for humor to lighten the mood. President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’”

Ronald Reagan is reported to have said, “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency—even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”

From George W. Bush: “These stories about my intellectual capacity really get under my skin. You know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ‘Intelligence Briefing.’”

Barack Obama: “There are few things in life harder to find and more important to keep than love. Well, love and a birth certificate.”

The White House correspondents’ dinner, begun in 1920, became an occasion for ribbing between the President and the reporters who covered him for the press. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge was the first president to attend. Since then, every president has attended at least one dinner during his time in office.

President Donald Trump refused to attend the first one of his tenure. Too bad he can’t recognize the value of humor, the cleansing humbleness of laughing at oneself.

They Don’t Want to Visit Us Anymore

The Week magazine, March 17, 2017, quoted The Guardian, a British newspaper, about the drop in British visitors to the United States: “Interest in travel to the U.S. has plummeted since President Trump’s inauguration. . . .”

According to the same article, the Global Business Travel Association “estimates the U.S. travel industry has lost $186 million in revenue so far because of Trump’s presidency.”

Citizens of the United Kingdom don’t require visas for temporary visits. If Britons are visiting the U.S. less frequently, think about those who must first go through the hassle of applying at a U.S. embassy or consulate for a visa to visit the country.

My work overseas for the U.S. State Department included processing visas for temporary visits. I dealt with endless lines of visa applicants. Perhaps my successors are less busy.

American tourism depends in part on global travelers paying money for hotels, meals, and recreational activities. Businesses depend on merchants from other countries buying our products. Universities depend on foreign students kicking in hefty fees to attend our schools. Without them, American students would pay even higher tuition costs.

Foreign citizens do not vote in our elections, but they can certainly vote, or refuse to vote, with their money.

Data Scrubbing Fears

Some librarians, civic groups, historians, and others have begun downloading federal websites for safekeeping, just in case the data on these sites disappears (The Seattle Times, March 12, 2017.)

They are alarmed by certain actions of the Trump administration regarding federal data. They include: removal of animal cruelty data from the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; suspension of a regulation protecting whistle blowers at the Department of Energy; more difficulty in accessing the log of visitors to the White House.

Do their fears echo George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four, in which all information is controlled by a Soviet style government?

Alex Howard is an official of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks transparency in government. He was quoted in the article as saying that downloading by private citizens is done “because of the antipathy this president has shown toward government statistics and scientific knowledge.”

Government watchers are awaiting Trump’s appointment to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This little-known agency guides federal policy on various aspects of information policy.

Data watchers wonder if this appointment will change or limit our access to government findings and information.

How to Stage a Coup in a Democracy

First, if a majority of people did not vote for you, proclaim that the election was tainted. Add that millions of those who voted against you were not Americans but illegal immigrants. Against all evidence, continue to make this claim

Second, if some media reporting is critical of you, angrily denounce these critics as the opposition, or even that the free press is the enemy of the American people.

Third, if reports are leaked that a foreign power may have interfered in the election that put you in office, deflect attention from these reports. Loudly state, showing no evidence, that the past president ordered illegal wire taps. Order your administration to continue to push your accusation, throwing as much sand as possible into a clear investigation of possible foreign meddling.

Fourth, turn citizens’ healthy skepticism of government into hatred. Proclaim often that government is the enemy. Appoint amateurs into positions of leadership, declare a hiring freeze, and starve the government of funds, assuring lack of expertise when crises arise.

Coups do not necessarily require troops marching in the streets. Small groups can so manipulate emotions by sound byte slogans and angry rhetoric that the electorate begins to believe them. It they succeed, they will prove the old adage that a lie repeated often enough will be believed.

Suffering Uncluttered

This day, scenes of suffering will float across our computer screens: perhaps atrocities in Syria, or a kidnapping in Nigeria, or a terrorist attack somewhere in the world, or an earthquake in southeast Asia, or the homeless caught in freezing weather in one of our cities. We are bombarded with scenes of suffering, both in our home towns and in other hometowns all over the globe.

The Morse Code, leading to telegraphic communication, was invented in 1839. In the early 1860’s, Matthew Brady was able to take photographs of people and places in America’s Civil War.

The concerns of the average American until the first decades of the twentieth century were mostly local, those of his or her community or, for some, a missionary speaker in a local church.

Today, we are bombarded with multiple needs. How do we cope when human suffering meets us every hour?

Some of us become callused. The suffering bounces off with no more effect than a baseball score in the minor leagues. Others of us live in guilt, overwhelmed.

A better way is to choose a few areas of need and concentrate on them. We give either time or money or both to a few causes that we have investigated and that speak to us. We do not give to every need that lodges in our email or feel guilty when we can’t. Instead, we practice disciplined giving as a part of our lives.

In the same way, we set aside certain times of the day for news. We don’t click on news stories every time a teaser headline rolls across our screen as we leave our email or finish a check of the weather.

We’re finite individuals. Best to channel our sympathy and not become either frozen or unmoved.

No More Protected Space

In North America, we have for centuries lived in protected space because of the physical distance between us and the rest of the world. That protection began to break down with telegraphic communication and newer means of transport. After two world wars, air travel and television became part of our lives.

Today, mobile phones are as well-known in Africa as they are in Europe. The videos of an ISIS leader in the Middle East can be watched by a young woman in Idaho.

We can no longer seal off our societies from others, those we deemed in the past as strange and threatening. Today, they come to us, if not physically then electronically, but our ability to speak to each other has far outstripped our ability to speak wisely to each other.

Sometimes old values are strengthened by new insights. In the past, the new ideas of the Renaissance and the Reformation led to wars, but they needn’t have. The ideas ultimately strengthened older institutions when those institutions began to address their failings.

We grow or die, and new challenges can renew us if we use them to spur the changes we need.

Thoughts After Reading THE TERROR YEARS by Lawrence Wright

The Terror Years; From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State by Lawrence Wright is a thought-provoking book. Its somber analyses ring true. Especially disturbing is his chapter on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Each side believes retaliation is justified. Carrying out what one believes is justified, however, sparks an endless cycle of killing and violence. Each year the conflict sucks more and more nations into its rapidly spinning whirlpool.

Only if you are elderly, do you have any memory of a time when Israelis and Palestinians were not in conflict. Each group—Israeli and Palestinian—has reasons for hating the other. Each side has reasons for wanting to murder and maim the other. Each could cite the saying: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Consider, however, dialog from one version of the play Fiddler on the Roof:
FIRST MAN: We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
TEVYE: Very good. And that way, the whole world will be blind and toothless.

Much of terrorism today is the result of resentments long buried but never extinguished, only waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps the only solution is the teaching taught by one who lived in the Middle East over two-thousand years ago. Somebody must sacrifice righteous vengeance and begin a virtuous circle of forgiveness.

Post-truth Age?

“Post-truth” is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016.

Post-truth means circumstances where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The growth of a post-truth environment is heightened by the speed with which digital media can ramp up emotions with misleading information.

More than a few conservative and liberal media sites stretch the truth or bury it. The Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat, wrote about his city’s Bipartisan Report, which Westneat named a “click bait” site for liberals.

In response, the site founder said he was only following the successful formula used by Fox News. “What Fox does is accurate to a point. It’s based on facts and reporting, but, at the same time it’s giving people only the parts they want to hear. .. it’s not lying, but it’s leaving out critical information.”

The choice is ours. Plenty of news outlets lean conservative or liberal (usually within their acknowledged opinion pieces) without reporting dodgy news stories. We have a choice between reputable news sites or entertainment that stokes our prejudices.

Yogurt and the American Dream

You may not have heard of Hamdi Ulukaya, but you may know about, or even consume, Chobani yogurt. The company is based in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, bought a defunct yogurt factory in Twin Falls and turned it into a successful business. He now employs about 2,000 people, according to an article in The Seattle Times (November 6, 2016).

His story reminds us of other migrants before him: refugees from the religious wars that devastated Europe in the 1600’s, the Jews, the Irish, the displaced persons of Europe following World War II, Indochinese from Asian conflicts, and now victims of Middle Eastern wars. The list is long of the different ethnic, religious, and other groups who have found refuge in the United States.

As the Chobani business grew, Ulukaya needed more workers. Close to Twin Falls is a refugee resettlement center. Ulukaya hired about 300 refugees for above minimum wage jobs at his factory.

Sounds like the ultimate rags-to-riches story of the American dream.

Unfortunately, Ulakaya has received death threats on social media from some who claim Ulakaya wishes to “drown the United States in Muslims.” According to the Times article, “the far-right website WND published a story, ‘American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims.’”

The mayor of Twin Falls and his wife have received death threats for supporting Ulukaya’s work, which benefits their region with the money spent by the employees, as well as the taxes they pay.

Past history of other refugees has included hatred of new immigrants, including Irish and Jews. Today, however, we contend with the rumor hate mill of social media, spewing out invectives with no verification required.

How do we discourage these unfair attacks? Something to think about as a new administration takes office in Washington.

The Canadian Century?

Perhaps the twenty-first century will be called Pax Canada as the twentieth was known as Pax Americana and the nineteenth as Pax Britannica.

In a section called “Liberty Moves North,” the British magazine The Economist (October 29, 2016) suggested Canada might be a replacement for the United States as a leader for hope and justice in the world.

Maybe Canada will take up what some consider the fallen American (U.S.) guardianship of a rules-based order. The United States was the great influencer in the last half of the twentieth century. The country gained economic power and a measure of wealth for many of its citizens as a result.

Bucking the populist trend toward protectionism, Canada has just signed a trade agreement with Europe.

If Canada grows in influence as the United States did in the twentieth, perhaps Canada will allow the United States the same kind of protection that the U.S. afforded Great Britain and Europe in the past century.

American Leadership Is Not a Given

Polarized Americans agree on one thing: Never again do they want a political campaign like the one they’ve just suffered.

The campaign has done more than traumatize American citizens. It has damaged the effectiveness of the United States’ ability to operate in the rest of the world.

In a quote in The New York Times, one Lebanese reporter, Hisham Melhem, illustrated the feeling: “. . . there were always pockets of people who had studied in the U.S. who still looked up to the United States . . . Now many of them have given up on the United States as a beacon of progress and enlightenment.”

One member of India’s ruling party asked, “These are the two best candidates they have to run the biggest economy and the oldest democracy in the world?”

Whether Americans seek military alliances to fight terrorism before it reaches the United States, customers to buy their products, or other underpinnings of American influence in the world, the United States requires the good will of others. Plenty of countries wait in the wings to take America’s place as a world leader.

Muslim Democracy

Of all the countries convulsed by the Arab Spring, beginning in 2010, only the small North African nation of Tunisia remains a serious contender for a democratic form of government.

One of the leaders of the democracy movement in Tunisia offered his thoughts on Muslims and democracy. (Rached Ghannouchi, “From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016.)

Ghannouchi helped found the Ehnnahda Pary as an Islamist party years ago when Tunisia was still ruled by a dictator. He suffered imprisonment and torture for his activities,

He believes past Tunisian dictatorships forced secularism on Tunisians. Since the people now are free to practice Islam if they wish, Ghannouchi writes, he no longer sees a need for his party to protect Islam as a core political activity.

The new constitution, he says, “enshrines democracy and protects political and religious freedoms.” Muslims now are free to worship as they please.

But how free are religious minorities to practice their religion?

Most Tunisians practice Sunni Islam, but Christians, Jews, and other faiths are represented in the population. Some operate schools for their youth.

When I lived in Tunisia in the early 2000’s, before the Arab Spring, I attended a mostly expatriate gathering of Christians. On my way to the church, I passed a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue. Local Christians also gather in Tunisia, as do Bahais.

Tunisia’s constitution declares Islam to be the country’s religion. The Tunisian president must be Muslim. Yet, the constitution also stipulates that the country is a civil state. It guarantees freedom of belief, conscience, and exercise of religious practices.

No doubt the average Tunisian accepts the concept of a state religion with some tolerance for other beliefs. The line between complete religious freedom and the pull of a majority religion is never easy for any nation.

For more information, the following link will take you to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2015. Find your way to the report on Tunisia and other countries of interest to you.

Graveyard of Empires

What’s the best bad way to cope with the Middle East? The next U.S. president had better be prepared.

The Middle East is called “the graveyard of empires.” The small region where Africa, Asia, and Europe connect has bedeviled conquerors for millennia.

An instructor in one of my classes when I worked for the U.S. State Department told us about a cliff or large rock in the country of Lebanon. The rock is inscribed with graffiti of various conquering groups passing that way over centuries, each presence erased by the next. The list might include Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, French, and British.

One of the last of the conquerors, Britain, wanted a friendly Middle East because of the Suez Canal and the desire for safe passage to India, one of their dominions. Untold numbers of British soldiers died in various wars in the region until Britain retreated from most of its possessions.

For one thing, different ethnic and religious communities live side by side throughout the region. Choosing allies from one group makes enemies of other groups.

Example: many of the Kurds, U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State, are enemies of the Turks, our NATO ally.

Another example: Iraq used to be governed by a dictator, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, even though the majority of Iraqis are Shia Muslim. Now, after our war against Saddam, the Shia are the dominant force in the Iraqi government and have problems with the Sunni, who lost power. Some of the Sunni supported the Islamic State, which the Iraqi government is fighting.

The United States became interested in the Middle East when oil became important to our economy and massive supplies were found there. Now we are learning why this area is called a graveyard.