When Anarchy Matters

There is much discussion now concerning the extent to which various “nations” in the Middle East have functional governments. The latest to be questioned is Tunisia, but Libya, Afghanistan,  Iraq all seem to be candidates for the term anarchic states.  Anarchy exists when the people in a region do not demand the rule of law. This would characterize virtually the entire Arab world, a region in which Israel has been the only nation with a democratically elected government. And why Israel?? Well, what is Israel but a European nation state that has been transplanted into the Middle East? So, a little slice of Europe has been set down in a region of nomadic, vaguely 13^th century peoples, all of whom are ruled by tyrants.  I have often believed that we would have been better off, far better, had we donated Florida to the Jewish people after WW II to found the democratic state of Israel there. Think of the global troubles the world would have avoided. Think of how many people would be alive today had we done that.

With innocents convinced routinely if not daily to strap dynamite around their middle, walk into a crowded marketplace and detonate themselves, this satisfies my definition of anarchy.  Anarchy exists when you cannot count on going outside without running the risk of being shot, or blown up by someone with whom you have no quarrel. It would be like getting into your car, entering the street without the assurance that people will agree to stay on their side of the road.

Now, throughout the Middle East, it has been the case that such rules exist only by virtue of the tyrants who rule the region with an iron fist—police states modeled on the monarchies that used to exist centuries ago. The Emperor Babur would probably feel comfortable wandering around Afghanistan and most of the Middle East today. And, now, with the Arab Spring unleashed on the world, most of the tyrants have been swept away (Iran and Syria excepted of course) leaving behind the detritus of their tyrannies, but lacking all of the social controls. We have vaguely crazed peoples, heavily armed with nary a thought about rules of law.  How else to explain the manic reaction to a stupid video that purports to insult the Islamic prophet?

Really . . . some idiot produces  an insulting and terminally stupid video and the entire Islamic world goes berserk, shooting and killing innocents randomly, including a few people who had befriended and assisted the crazed mobs to regain some semblance of freedom.  That is how you defend your prophet? How pathetic is that?

The problem here is that it has become difficult if not impossible to define rational solutions to this problem which, at its core, is simple anarchy.  It occurs to me that the people in this instance are practically demanding the return of their tyrants, because they refuse to join the civilized world. How would one introduce the concept of a representative democracy to people who seem to think it is ok to convince innocent children to blow themselves up in order to kill other innocents for no reason beyond promoting the concept of anarchy?

So, perhaps our own leaders will need to either label the entire region of Muslim anarchic states as wards of the United Nations, or we will need to recruit new tyrannicals to come in to rule these places in between.   Failing that, perhaps we can convince the Republican Party to take over and invite Mitt Romney to become the leader of these lost tribes. He could surely do no worse than he has been dong as a candidate for President here. And republicans do seem to love their guns. Seems a potentially nice fit.