"Deep Thinker" Thomas L. Friedman Gets to the Heart of the Middle East Divide
Shias verus Sunnis? Jihadis versus democracy? Nuh uh. According to the NYT's peripatetic pundit, there's another, more crucial division in play--"and it's not what you think," he says:
It is not the elected Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki versus the Sunni extremists. Al-Maliki is a tyrant who’s governed Iraq as a Shiite chauvinist, just as much as Sunni militants promote Sunni chauvinism. Both are losers. No — the real of war of ideas, the only one worth taking sides in, is the one between the religious extremists (Sunni and Shiite) and the committed environmentalists. Both are actually trying to erase the borders of the Middle East but for very different reasons.
Both the extremists and the environmentalists believe their visions will triumph only if you imagine that the borders of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon don’t exist and you govern the region as a single political system or ecosystem. If the extremists win — and right now they are winning — this region will become a human and ecological disaster zone. If the environmentalists win, it will be because enough people realize that if they don’t learn to share this space, either they will destroy each other or Mother Nature will soon destroy them all.
While in Kurdistan, I hung out with some of the environmentalists. What an eye-opener!
Their view is that the Middle East may be divided into separate states, but it can be managed today to the benefit of the most people only if one thinks of it as a single hydraulic and biological ecosystem that is increasingly threatened by natural and man-made disasters...
The committed environmentalists need to be committed to a nut house if they think the jihad isn't going to mow 'em down. That said, however, their "ideas" about global "oneness" are every bit as totalitarian as the jihadis'.
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