Blowback/Caliphate

(2014)

I have often wondered whether Western and Zionist intervention in the Middle East would eventually provoke the most extensive blowback of all, a territorially extensive Caliphate; so the recent flurry of ISIL-related news items & moving photographs of tearful Yezidis has renewed my interest in this matter.

The Caliphate was extraordinarily, impressively mobilized for war in its heyday, and a resurgence of such a Caliphate is the scenario which the divide-and-conquer tactics of the West are presumably supposed to stop. It is this interventionism, often in the name of universalism as was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which allows the ongoing plunder of the region's resources to continue uninterrupted as the State of Israel makes concurrent commercial, demographic, and territorial gains. 

The problem with this suppression campaign is not so much the amount of blood that it spills on the sand, from the standpoint of realpolitik, but the very real danger that the campaign will backfire so severely (“turning and turning on the widening gyre”) as to induce the revival of a Caliphate which is just as vigorously mobilized as ever its predecessors were, in addition to armed with nuclear-tipped MIRVs. 

Naturally the remarks above about realpolitik are to be distinguished from my own private views and reactions to the spilled blood in question. I make no apologies for looking at things as if I were a historian of contemporary events, anymore than a zoologist apologizes for accurate depictions of predation, parasitism, and what have you. Humanity is more like an ecosystem than any other known species on this Earth, and sentimentality regarding the geopolitical situation prevents clear apperception.

I close with this consideration, that a law of diminishing returns may attend continuation of the divide-and-conquest strategy. At the very least a reassessment of the likely consequences of continued interventionism is in order. For the very artificiality of the engineered national borders of the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans is the basis out of which a new layout of lines on the map may arise in the coming decades. The possibility of large-scale blowback is only too real, and it makes sense to stop throwing rocks at the hornet’s nest.

Could we have a better collective plan, please, than reenacting the Crusades?