{"id":2028,"date":"2006-07-24T13:18:18","date_gmt":"2006-07-24T17:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2006\/07\/middle_east_conflicts\/"},"modified":"2006-07-24T13:18:18","modified_gmt":"2006-07-24T17:18:18","slug":"middle_east_conflicts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2006\/07\/middle_east_conflicts\/","title":{"rendered":"Middle East Conflicts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems like just a few months ago that we were being told the regime change in Iraq would set the dominoes of peace and freedom falling across the Middle East.<br \/>\nThings have been falling over there, alright, but not quite what we were lead to expect.  Operation Flowering Freedom is going so swimmingly that CNN currently has a story entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2006\/WORLD\/meast\/07\/24\/damon\/\"> Iraq: The forgotten war<\/a>.&#8221;<br \/>\nNo doubt there are some who would like us to forget Iraq.  To some degree, I suspect some are using this &#8220;World War III&#8221; mantra to change the subject from their earlier prognostications on that mess.  Let&#8217;s wipe the slate clean and start with a fresh war.<br \/>\nThere are plenty of distractions.  Billmon identifies <a href=\"http:\/\/billmon.org\/archives\/002546.html\">the following feuds<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We&#8217;ve got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi&#8217;a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who&#8217;ve stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they&#8217;re both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi&#8217;a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi&#8217;a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi&#8217;a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi&#8217;a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi&#8217;a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi&#8217;a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria&#8217;s Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi&#8217;a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Slate has a chart of who&#8217;s friends or enemies with who.  Go <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2146230\/nav\/tap1\/\">here<\/a> and click on &#8220;The Middle East Buddy List.&#8221;<br \/>\nWhat you see is a picture that I&#8217;m afraid is too complicated for our one-dimensional, morally clear leadership to deal with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2006\/07\/middle_east_conflicts\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Middle East Conflicts\"><p>It seems like just a few months ago that we were being told the regime change in Iraq would set the dominoes of peace and freedom falling across the Middle East. Things have been falling over there, alright, but not quite what we were lead to expect. Operation Flowering Freedom is going so swimmingly that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}