The Middle East must fix itself

I’ve been listening to the audio tapes of Tony Benn reading out his diary entries from the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has helped me to finally establish an opinion on the matter. Whilst war is unquestionably an unpleasant thing which must be avoided at all costs, both Saddam Hussein’s party and the Taliban were odious tyrannical regimes that committed terrible atrocities that can never be forgotten (Iran is guilty of such crimes too). It is for this reason that I have previously been unsure about condemning the wars. But I now realise that any liberation must be achieved by the Middle East themselves. The average Muslim citizen of Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan is uneducated, poor, oppressed and still suspicious of the old colonial nations. Many honestly believe that whenever anything bad happens it is a conspiracy orchestrated by the British or Americans. For example the Iranian writer Iraj Pezeshkzad wrote a highly successful novel called My Uncle Napoleon which is about a man who blames anything bad that happens on a conspiracy by the British. The author meant it to be ironic, an affectionate poke at the eccentricities of some Iranians, yet when it was adapted into a television series he kept being approached in the street by people who thanked him for ‘speaking out’ about the British ‘oppression’. You cannot conduct military action in a region with this attitude, because no matter what your motive is they will believe that you are lying, aim to conquer them and add them to your empire. That explains why the resistance to the British and American invasions is so fierce. The anger, the hatred is stoked and fuelled by what they perceive as a direct threat from the West to the Middle East. Remove the threat, withdraw from the region and you will stop terrorism in its tracks. Al Qaeda uses any and all Western military presence for all its recruitment. Any progression needs to be carried out by middle easterns, for middle easterns. The West cannot intervene. The West has intervened in the past and is still reaping the consequences. The natural process of liberation may take hundreds of years but it is the only way to secure freedom and civilisation in the region. The most the West should do is stop them from getting hold of weapons of any description, which is a task which is not only achievable but does not involve any Western soldiers setting foot in any Muslim nations.