1921 or 2006?

Friends, you may or may not know that I have been reading a book in the attempt to edify myself on the situation in the Middle East. Being a history major, I have chosen to start more or less at the beginning of the modern middle east, which has its roots in the aftermath of World War I.

The book I am reading, which I highly recommend, is David Fromkin's magisterial A Peace to End All Peace. Though I am not yet through with the book, I am getting there, and in light our recent misadventures in Iraq and the most recent Israeli-Lebanese conflict, I must relate to you an editorial from the Times of London that Fromkin quotes on page 470 of his book. The similarity of Britain's position as described by the Times to our current situation is frighteningly, sickeningly, eerily familiar.

Allow me to set the scene. It is 1921, and Britain has been left "in control" of the middle east after WWI, by fact of having roughly 1 million troops in the area. However, due to unrest at home caused by a deteriorating economy and political realities that demand demobilization, the government is scaling back its manpower in the area, leaving the door open for uprisings against British rule. The government, however, persists in keeping troops in quantities too low to establish control yet in great enough numbers to require heavy amounts of expenditure and draw funds away from much needed domestic programs. As Fromkin puts it:

"The principal danger, as The Times pictured it, lay in British overcommitment. The principal challenge to the country, in its view, was at home and was economic. Britain needed to invest her money in renewing herself economically and socially, and was threatened in her very existence by a governmental disposition to squander money instead on Middle Eastern adventures. In an editorial published on 18 July 1921 The Times denounced the government for this, saying that 'while they have spent nearly 150,000,000 pounds since the [1919] Armistice upon semi-nomads in Mesopotamia [Iraq] they can find only 200,000 a year for the regeneration of our slums, and have had to forbid all expenditure under the Education Act of 1918.'"

Allow this to sink in, if you will. This is the same issue we are facing today - 85 years later - and promises to be the issue that controls the destiny of this country and the western world, for the political and religious tensions that have plagued the area for centuries have been augmented by the geopolitical realities of a dwindling oil supply, which is concentrated in this very area.

All of this is to say that I'm trying to take a historical perspective on our current imbroglio in the Middle East, and I'm thoroughly discouraged by the lack of a prominent media voice that understands the complexities of the situation. I don't expect he government to care, really, about such things, but those commenting on its actions should. And they should be doing a much better job of it than they are. It's a pity to have to look to 1921 to find such a voice, and a discouragement to think that this has all been done 85 years before.