Not a day goes by without reading a news account or editorial piece in which the author is outraged and shocked by the brutality of ISIS, the mass murdering jihadists who seek to establish a radical Muslim caliphate throughout the Middle East. Both the outrage and shock are understandable, coming from people who are relatively safe and secure. But it is time we all stand back a bit and put these religious zealots and their behavior in historical perspective. It might just help temper our actions as we move forward.
Consider for a moment the Catholic Crusades that lasted for well over two centuries at the beginning of the last millennium, wherein millions of Muslims and Jews and heretics were mass murdered throughout Europe and the Middle East, all in the name of Jesus. That was the height of Catholic glory, and their power ran rampant for the following 500 years, controlling despots, engaging in genocide, conquering lands all over the globe, raking in gold, their power entirely unchecked. That is, until 1517 when Martin Luther got the Catholic ball rolling downhill with his 95 complaints about the church. 130 years later, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 diminished the power of the church forever more, putting control instead in the hands of monarchs and dictators all throughout Europe. Nation states in the west have been largely in control of their affairs ever since, and the role of religion has been relegated to charity and all of the various marginalized positions we've come to think of when we consider the church. This diminished power of the church led to the Enlightenment, as people were free to consider science, philosophy and politics. Farsighted, liberal thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau devised the underpinning ideas of democracy, the very principles of a government wherein the power lies in the hands of its citizens, thereby protecting them from tyrannical despots. There have been exceptions to this rule, of course, but the point here is that the power of the church, and subsequently governments with absolute power, were checked.
Fast forward three centuries. ISIS and its radical Muslim brethren are really no different from the Catholic church of 1000 years ago, raping, pillaging, killing and controlling millions in the name of their religious dogma. The western world has been free during that time to move on, to where today the Catholic church was placed firmly in the margin where it should be, its Pope engaged in nothing much more than applauding behind the scenes as a democratically elected U.S. President normalizes relations with a long time adversary.
We must ask ourselves how this knowledge of western progress can affect our actions today in the Middle East. There are several ways. First, it can force us to consider what happens to a people when they are so long abused as have been those in the Middle East: Shortly after the Crusades came the European imperialists, exploiting Middle Eastern culture for financial gain, arrogantly redrawing political borders without thought of tribal affiliations. That lasted through the 19th century, nearly up to the beginning of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. began policies of keeping dictators in power to ensure loyalty and open markets all along the southern border of the Soviet Union. Then came big oil. Don't forget oil. To get as much of it as possible, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980's during the Iraq-Iran war, building up his army to keep a balance of power and ensure that the oil flowed steadily out of the Gulf of Jormuz. Following that, the U.S. decided to bring Saddam down to size and suckered him into invading Kuwait with promises that we would do nothing while he rightfully got back the gold Kuwait had stolen from him. Then, for the following decade, we kept troops in Mecca, the holiest of Muslim cities. That brought about an understandably extreme response on Sept. 11, 2001, which allowed a corrupt regime in the U.S. a chance to grab even more oil by invading Iraq. And there we are today, with ISIS running rampant throughout the region, a land in chaos reminiscent of the middle ages. And why? Because they are stuck right where the west put them, and if we don't understand that, we can never hope to help facilitate their advancement. Obviously, we hope to see diminished religious power, a rise in democracy, but we cannot force that upon them. It has to come from within. The sad truth is, democracy is a lot like what the Supremes said about love, you can't hurry it.
As with nearly everything Barack Obama has done since he took the Presidency, he is proceeding prudently in the Middle East. His reluctance to put "boots on the ground" is wise. The people of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan must put a check on these religious zealots themselves, albeit with financial support and military training from the west, but they've got to develop and move forward on their own power. That's the way the western world moved on from the middle ages. No one did it for them, and it didn't happen overnight. We've just got to remember as we go that the elitist, calloused, thoughtless behavior of the European imperialists, the U.S. and the USSR, must never again occur. If the Middle East progresses at the pace of the West, perhaps our great grandchildren will see the establishment of stable democracies throughout the region. If we follow President Obama's course, supporting dialogue and opening borders, there's a chance it might happen sooner. We've just got to be wary of the chicken hawks in Washington who would characterize the President's prudence and thoughtful caution as weakness. We've taken a big step forward, let's not turn back now.
Haldon Richardson is a teacher and a writer at beyondthelineshaldonrichardson.sportsblog.com. Please like him on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/... on Google + at: https://plus.google.com/... and on twitter at: https://twitter.com/... and on the Daily Kos at http://www.dailykos.com/...