Yes, its all happening in the Middle East, and looking at it from Jordan, it seems that it might blow up in our faces any minute. Things are already bad, how much worse can they get. The US has been after Iran and Syria, eversince I can remember (September 11); Are they now really going to go after both states when they are already in a quagmire in Iraq, or is this just pep talk. The Americans may have already tried to intervene in the region through their proxy ally, Israel, that was allowed to have its war in Lebanon but really got a bloody nose and failed to disarm Hizbollah. I think the general situation in the Middle East as far as the US and international politics is concerned is to keep the regional parties at each other's throats, but not to allow anyone become too strong. A boiling but contained Middle East is an ok situation as far as everyone (West) is concerned, so we really keep getting back to boiling point and the then de-escalating, its a normal part of our lives, or days of our lives I should say.

SD,

we all had our senses dulled. I've worked with Iraqis covering the "political process" in Iraq for over 2 years now, and we've come to a point where anything with less than 100 people killed doesn't even make a blip on our radar screens.

Ditto with all the speeches & programs & promises.

On the other hand, that "dulling" also prevents us from getting disappointed again & again & again.

So I guess it's a two-way street.

What I actually find much more draining is working on trying to change outside perceptions of the region (it's all about religious violence & "the Arab mind" & those progress-hating fanatics).

Of course, I'm lucky in that I don't have to do daily news.

And I do get to have "escape pills", like trips to Istanbul ...

--MSK

What I actually find much more draining is working on trying to change outside perceptions of the region (it's all about religious violence & "the Arab mind" & those progress-hating fanatics).

Yes - and what I find even more draining is doing that, and then coming into contact with the progress-hating fanatics whose existence I tried to deny. They may be a minority, but they are there, and they are dangerously vocal. Likewise the anti-western fanatics in their US logo baseball caps fuming about western imperialism as they chow down another Big McArabia (yep they have local-themed burgers here) and bucket of full-fat coke.

MA,
Surely a peaceful but fragmented ME would be even more in "Western" interests than a boiling one? Provided business interests are ever considered, that is. Capital hates instability.
I also don't see where the "West" really has to do very much to keep things fragmented and boiling. It's like the old joke about God and Satan:
Satan: Lord, I'm really bored, I have nothing to do.
God: What do you mean, Satan? Your task is to test My creation by tempting humans to sin.
Satan: I know, I know, but everytime I'm about to tempt someone to sin, he's already gone and done it!

AT - did you ever read a 'Peace to end all Peace' by David Fromkin? he's an 'antiquated Tory,' and a conservative British Jewish-Zionist historian, with all the loathing of Arabs that one can muster while reading Foreign Service documents about Winston Churchill getting involved in Gallipoli and bombing Kurds... but he too, says along with the modern Arabs that the maps and plans of the 'Great Powers' following WWI was to make states that were so unstable and weak that they would constantly require 'bolstering' and 'intervention' by the benevolent France and England... look how well that's going...

on that, can you expoits settle this issue for me: When the Ottoman empire was broken up, did the French and British draw arbitrary lines, or did they actually (as some have argued to me) look at identity/ethnicity issues when doing so?

Klaus,

For the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire, very grosso modo, most were drawn quite arbitrarily in a very short timeframe, some borders evolved from the lines of Ottoman provinces in the context of colonization (e.g. North Africa), Lebanon was initially carved out as a sectarian state (for Christians) but for viability reasons ended up including more, and later adjustments were undertaken by the independent states themselves (esp. Gulf related borders).

klaus - well, churchill used to brag that he created jordan on a slow sunday afternoon, although more along railway lines than ethnic lines.

there's a very good, very readable, book about this called sowing the wind by john keay, that i warmly recommend. it deals with the mashreq 1910-60, and how the arab states were set up, building mostly on colonial-era archive material. somehow it still manages to be very funny.

i guess it helps that its cast of characters is quite eccentric, to say the least -- lawrence of arabia was just the tip of the iceberg. as long as you were british or french and in charge, the roaring 20s mideast seems to have been the place to be: from keay's book, it seems every european who passed by and asked nicely could get his own arab republic to toy with. and safari helmets were still in fashion.

It is hard to keep people interested in the news when it always seems to be the same. The trick is you have to get a little edgier. You know, find an angle, spice it up, catch people's attention.

For example instead of a headline reading,

Bush Condemns Iranian Nuclear Program.

you might try something like,

Atomic Ayatollah Angers America!

As you can tell, I'm really looking forward to the new and improved Wall Street Journal.

dawud--
I own that book, though I read it a couple years ago. Really liked it. I was I'll have to re-read it, as I don't recall that point coming through very strongly, or at least not as strongly as the point that Britain didn't have the damnedest idea what it was doing, that different parts of the Imperial bureaucracy had completely different agendas (I particularly liked the Indian Empire backing House of Saud, mostly out of a recognition that they'd win anyway, while Egypt and the FO were backing the Hashemites), etc etc. As the author was clearly right of center and had Zionist sympathies, the utter cluelessness he depicts of the interwar Zionists vis a vis all matters Arab was particularly painful. The whole project comes off sounding more than a little daft, though that might be my own prejudices showing through. My one neo-con Bush-defending friend also read the book but seems to have come away with a completely different conclusion, as per the fact that he is still a neo-con Bush apologist.

alle--
I will definitely try to get hold of a copy of Sowing the Wind, it sounds great.

When I want history documentaries, you could do far worse than BBC4's "Between Iraq and a hard place"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by43joQLYj8

and there's also Robert Jenkin's "History of Oil"
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967&q=history+of+oil

oh yeah, satire... didn't that die with clasped arms with irony on 9/11?

The international situation is desperate, as usual.

Yes, will someone please write something about what's happening in Lebanon right now.

A few US presidential candidates outline their views on Israel. Future doesn't look all that bright. Richardson's experience shows.

Well, it should be said, that there is a body of American Jews whose first criteria when judging a Presidential candidate is "Is he good for Israel?" These voters are not all right-wing GOP?Likudniks either; quite the opposite. Admittedly, I think Jewish Democratic voters with this POV are, literally, a dying breed; my late grandmothers viewed things this way, my parents do to a lesser extent, but I don't know any liberal American Jews of my or subsequent generations who think quite as simplistically as this. Still, for a Democratic candidate to take a less than wholeheartedly pro-Israel stance is to piss off a sizeable chunk of lifelong Democratic voters.
To be fair to my grandparents, they all left E Europe due to the considerable levels of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism under the late Tsars, when in the States they faced a lot more discrimination and pressure to convert than an American of my generation can readily imagine, and the relatives whom they did not bring over were all killed during the War, either in the Holocaust or just plain civilian war casualties. So I think their attitude towards Israel is readily understandable, even if we may not like it.