A reader made the following observation yesterday: “The Epicurean solution (to the turmoil in the Middle East) would be: DON’T INTERVENE. Epicurus was against involvement in politics, especially geopolitics, and for good reason – life is too short to make yourself miserable solving other people’s problems. The reader was talking about Britain, but I entirely agree with him when it comes to America and the West in general.
One way of looking at the turmoil in the Middle East is to look at The Thirty Years War in 17th Century Europe. This was a vicious, deadly war of religion, like the current one with highly complex political overtones. Eventually it stopped when everyone was exhausted. That was a civil war and so is this, and conventional wisdom says that outsiders should not intervene in a civil war. It is not clear that our intervention would result in fewer people being killed.
It is in the interest of the other Arab countries to get together and crush ISIS, a brutal and uncivilised bunch. But the fact is that their populations are ambivalent; fighting fellow Moslems devoted to the Prophet makes them uneasy. But Shouldn’t they be shouldering the burden and taking responsibility for their own futures?
What can we do? Are we too late to address the complaints Al Queda made about the West and America in particular?
– Crusader troops in the Middle East (we can fix that; just withdraw)
– The export to Moslem countries of unacceptable movies, porn and images of scantily dressed ladies, sexy pop music and other similar creations in dubious taste, according to Al Queda (probably impossible to stop for reasons of freedom of speech).
– the issue of Israel and the Palestinians (it is already too late to do anything sensible about this. The Israelis have most of what they want and Congress will never agree to any change while Congressmen have to raise their own campaign funds).
When one contemplates the difficulties of dealing with totally unreasonable people, whether Jewish or Arab, in the Middle East, you have to conclude that the ideal option for action is to put the region out of bounds to all Western citizens (to at least save their lives) and let the region ferment at its own pace. But not even this is practical. And then you have to reckon with the US military industrial complex and the flag-waving American nationalists, who sincerely believe in American exceptionalism (despite torture, Iraq and Afghanistan, rendition etc). You realise that there is, regrettably, little hope of consensus even in America, and little we can do that doesn’t make matters even worse.
This has to be the most intractible issue. I am sorry that President Obama has been drawn into the dreadful business with bombs and drones and trainers. This was the objective behind the ISIS beheadings in the first place, and he fell for it. I am so very sorry about the slaughter of innocent women and children; no one can easily contemplate that. But what we badly need is concentration on our own national interests to avoid another Iraq catastrophe. Where are you, Machiavelli, when we most want you?
Given that, were He alive today, Epicurus would not have been in favour of western intervention; but (I know its a different topic), would he have been in favour of granting asylum to everyone who came to Britain from countries like Iraq and Syria? I know it’s good to be compassionate, but my fear is that we would become like Sweden, where there are ethnic ghettos of asylum seekers who cannot integrate into society, and so resort to violence and claiming welfare- their presence fueling the rise of far right hate groups.
There is no indication that Epicurus ever made any comments from which you can draw any conclusions. But it is probably the case that all humans are uneasy with strangers with whom they have nothing in common. It calls for great effort, on the one hand to be welcoming, and on the other to adapt to local mores. We are as a species, in general, not very good at either.