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One Year Anniversary

© lawhawk

I start this week's article with a bit of history. This is the one year anniversary of my first article to Suite 101. It's been a busy year for me with my studies at school having to take priority to everything else but I hope that I do appropriate justice to this important area of the world. Looking back on my previous articles, I've come to note a few things. First, the more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. Last year at this time I was discussing the problems of figuring out what the Palestinian Authority should do about the Hebron situation and offered some alternatives to what was going on throughout the region.

This past week, we see that the same problems have not gone away, and in fact we find that the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government relations have ebbed to a tremendous degree and most observers of the region would probably agree that there is a worse situation now than a year ago. While the Israeli-Palestinian situation continues stagger along at a slow crawl, there are other, more ominous events ongoing in the region.

Iraq has been increasingly been tempted to strike back at both the Turkish and Iranian forces that have entered Iraqi territory ostensibly to control Kurdish groups that seek to destabilize both Iranian and Turkish provinces adjacent to the Iraqi border. The U.S. recently sent the USS Nimitz battle group into the region and made veiled threats to the Iranians that they should be careful in their actions vis-a-vis to the Iraqis.

Iranians are quite upset at their being singled out by the U.S. for their actions along the Iraqi border since the Turkish government is essentially doing the same thing along Iraq's northern border. In all likelihood, the U.S. is treating the Iranians differently since Turkey is a member of NATO and is therefore a major player in U.S. policy along Europe's southern border. It can't be underestimated how important Turkey is to U.S. policy in the region as both a stabilizing factor and as a way to keep Syrian and Iraqi interests at bay. However, Turkey is seen by some in the region as having gone to bed with the U.S. and co-opting Islamic ideals.

The second observation is that the only way that the region's nations will find peace is if they finally get past the rhetoric and nonsense that their propagandists spread about their foes. Peace in the region may be attainable if the region's leaders set aside their differences and put preconceptions of the other side at the door. However the more likely scenario is that the status quo will continue ad infinitum until someone or something comes along to change things.

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