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Introduction: The Mideast After the Gulf War
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19918 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1992 |
1,907 Words |
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Certain places are important, far beyond the warrants of their population or economic activity or natural features. The Mideast is one such place. In fact, it may be the single most important geographic area in the world.
The Mideast is the locus of some of the world's longest-lived, most bloody and bitter, and apparently most intractable conflicts. As Herodotus remarks at the beginning of his history of the Persian wars, a goal of our investigation might be to discover the causes of the sides fighting each other, and to find out who was first responsible for initiating the hostilities. But, in the Mideast, as Herodotus knew, memories are very long, stretching back hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years into the probably mythological past. Each party has a seemingly endless litany of accusations and grievances against opponents and enemies, and a compelling story as to why his side is the oppressed and the other is the oppressor. There are numerous and continuing reasons that have exacerbated the conflicts.
The immediate background and occasion for our examination of this subject is the Gulf War of 1991. The complex of events and situations leading up to the gulf War, and the results of the positions taken before, during, and after the war by various participants and non-participants in it, have changed things. The questions now are: What kind of changes and how much? Can we reply to Herodotus that it is now possible in the Mideast to dispense with, or at least ignore and go beyond, all the discussion about who is victim and who is victimizer, and move on to work toward a possible peaceful future? What, if any, are the prospects for a lasting peace, or at least a new era of lessened hostilities and increasing rapprochement between the former enemies?
A primary reality is that the Mideast contains the originating sites and holiest places of three of the world's most important, powerful, and widespread religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These three are the world's religions of history: they understand their schemes of salvation--or their sagas of human interaction with the divine--to take place in time, influencing or being influenced by the movements of human history. They are also the religions of "the book." Each has created a culture (or, more accurately, a collection of related cultures), which spread more or less world wide, with accompanying political and other institutions. The holy sites of these three religions, with their attendant histories, cultures, and politics, frequently coincide and interfere with one another: Jerusalem is the holy city for Judaism and Christianity, and a
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