Who started all this trouble in the Middle East anyway?

If you have ever seen the great movie, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, you know the primary source of our problems in the Middle East today. Essentially, the Ottoman Turks conquered all of what we know as the Middle East and subjected it for about 400 years. When World War I started, the Ottomans sided with Germany. The British sent T. E. Lawrence, an Arabic scholar, to organize the local Arab tribes in a revolt against the occupying Ottomans. In return, the Arabs were promised freedom and self rule. After the Arabs and Lawrence of Arabia routed the Ottomans, they went to Damascus to form a new free government. The British and French however, had already decided to divide up the Ottomans' former territory (the Sykes-Pecot Agreement) and prevented the Arabs from proceeding. All the Middle Eastern countries we know today - Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon -  were created in 1922 as a way for the French and British to divide the spoils. The British also created Afghanistan in 1823 and Pakistan in 1947. Thank you very much.

Apparently, when Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Pecot drew up their map they were more interested in geography than sociology. Iraq, for instance, was cobbled together to include Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis, three groups not inclined to share a tent, much less a country. The Kurds are a separate ethnic group, yet the British and French gave them no country of their own, instead dividing them up into Iraq, Turkey and Iran, where they have caused constant trouble for those three governments ever since. The Shi'ites and Sunnis have fought for 700 years, so there was no reason to expect they would stop arguing as a favor to the British who forced them to share a common border. The British had all kinds of problems in Iraq as a result, successive governments with successive coups. The only time in its short history that Iraq existed in relative peace was under Saddam Hussein. He figured correctly that fearing him would keep them from fighting each other. When we went into Iraq and successfully removed Saddam, well, you know the rest.

Afghanistan? The brilliant British cartographer who laid out that map must have suffered from geographical dyslexia with its 20 some odd nationalities, languages, rivalries and only 12% arable land, most of which is used to grow poppies for export as heroin to the US and Europe. Actually, the best chance Afghanistan ever had to succeed economically was when the country extended south to the Indian Ocean. But again, in their infinite wisdom, when the British gave India its freedom they had to resolve the long-standing conflict between Indian Hindus and Muslims, so they created Pakistan as a Muslim homeland. Only problem was, they created it out of southern Afghanistan, eliminating its only route to the sea and insuring that Afghanistan, Pakistan and India would never share so much as a cup of sugar.

The proverbial last straw in this successful effort to alienate forever Arabs everywhere goes to the United Nations. Not satisfied with betraying the Arabs and just about every other ethnic group in the Middle East after World War I, The UN "graciously" agreed to give the Jewish people a homeland after World War II and created the State of Israel. Of course, Israel was created out of the existing Palestinian Arab homeland.

So there you have it folks, the mess we call "The Middle East," brought to you by two of our closest allies. With friends like that we don't need enemies, but unfortunately, we have those too.

Why should we care about Libya?

I've never visited Libya, though it is not my fault. First of all you might ask why I would even go there. Well, if you are interested in ancient history as I am, there are numerous World Heritage sites there. I am also interested in World War II, and Libya is where Rommel (The Desert Fox) and Montgomery fought several key battles of the war (Tobruk, Benghazi). I am also interested in the Middle East generally and have visited most countries in the region, so Libya was definitely on my bucket list.

I was scheduled to fly from Cairo to Tripoli but the flight - and the tour - were cancelled as I sat in the airport hotel waiting for my ride to the terminal. I called the US embassy because the rumor was that Ghaddafi's son was denied a US visa so he retaliated by barring Americans traveling to Libya. Something as eccentric as that was not outside the realm of possibility for those who knew Ghaddafi. The duty officer called me back after talking to the US embassy in Tripoli to say there was no problem they were aware of. In fact, there were 30,000 Americans in Libya at that moment who had come to see the solar eclipse days earlier. So it turns out, Ghaddafi had nothing to do with my cancelled trip. It was the Libyan tour operator who decided to keep our money (I was traveling with six other people) and use it for something other than our trip. That's an example of how Quixotic doing business in Libya can be.

So why care about what's happening in Libya now? Ordinary citizens are revolting all over the Middle East, encouraged by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Every country in that region is ruled by autocrats trying to reign in their citizens who are fed up with the corruption, fear, unemployment and general stagnation resulting from autocracies in an age of free enterprise and democracy. The most violent revolt has been in Libya, where the mercurial Ghaddafi has no problem killing thousands of his own people to maintain power. In Tunisia and Egypt, their armies refused to fire on fellow citizens. That's not the case in Libya, where Ghaddafi maintains his fiefdom with billions in oil revenues, paying soldiers loyal only to the paycheck he provides. The bottom line is this -- if Ghaddafi succeeds in putting down this rebellion without the US or any other industrialized nation helping the rebels, it sends precisely the wrong message to people and governments in the neighboring autocracies -- if your people revolt and you do nothing, they will succeed. If you massacre your people, we and the rest of the world will do nothing and you will succeed.

If we do nothing in the face of these massacres, the rebels, having lost hope, will turn to fundamentalist groups for help in ridding them of their discredited leader. These groups, supported by Iran and other countries friendly to terrorists, will gladly supply weapons and bombs to get rid of Ghaddafi and other Arab autocrats. They will then turn Libya and other countries into little Irans, where we will have no influence and a heightened risk of terror within our own borders. The people of Libya know this is the risk. They would much prefer to be free of tyrannical regimes and prosper in western style capitalistic societies. But even a fundamentalist regime to them is preferable to their current regime and worth the risk.

So, fellow Americans, if you liked the Middle East under Ghaddafi-like dictators, you will love the Middle East filled with terrorist states bent on our destruction.

Is Spam getting a bad name?

When I first tried to eat Spam as a youngster I hated it. My parents didn't like it either, and I knew that before I tried it, hence the reason I hated it. As an adult, I began to appreciate Spam as kind of a delicacy, a low class tinned meat made from mystery meats but with a storied past. I still don't like it though. Well, there are now two different kinds of Spam, the brand name food product and the lower case internet kind.

I am really tired of internet spam. It's like being forced to eat Spam every day for every meal. Now, just since yesterday afternoon, I have emails from unintelligible sources telling me they were referred by a friend,  the ubiquitous business proposals from foreign governments, requests from companies I do business with telling me they need me to re-enter my financial information, survey opportunities with big rewards, money making schemes that are just a click away and the usual prurient offers to make your body into something it isn't. It's kind of like buying a can of Spam expecting a medium rare T-bone steak inside. The difference is that you can eat Spam and imagine it's a steak without getting sick, but if you click on promising spam emails, what it does to your computer WILL make you sick.