Escalation

Well, I may have been premature in my posting yesterday. Today, the Yahoo headline is “Explosion Destroys Dome in Shiite Shrine.” It sounds like someone decided to turn up the heat a little and see what happens. I see it as a recipe for disaster. When you start messing with someone’s holy sites, you typically whack the hornet’s next. We’ll see if this religion of tolerance will remain so in the face of wanton destruction.

The question I have is who wins in a situation like this? It is not like the mutual deterrence between the USSR and the United States during the cold war. We both had nukes and we could both wipe the other, as well as everyone else off the face of the Earth. Blowing up buildings just makes people mad and who are they going to attack? The most likely target is the rival Sunnis. I can see their holy sites being reduced to rubble in a spiraling conflict where they will be holding revivals in tents. It will be hard to hear the prayers from the minarets when they are lying on the ground. If they are not careful, it will look like Afghanistan after the Soviets were done. Buildings that are little more than roofless hovels will be where the upper class live and the rest will be resting with the flocks of sheep to stay warm at night. Doesn’t sound very appealing to me.

Now Americans are actually expecting this. After all, the Middle East has always been presented as an area of barbarism. We have this picture of a people who herd camels, live in tents, don’t bathe and hate everyone who does not follow the teachings of Mohammed. They have not done a good job of changing their image and the riots over the cartoons, the bombing their own people and their treatment of women have done little to persuade those outside the region that they are little better that cavemen.

Unfortunately, it is only a small portion of the population that is creating all of this havoc. What they seem to forget is that market forces will eventually drive this into the direction the money is flowing. Bombs scare people and create short term blips but the flow of currency is what people eventually follow and it is hard to have any kind of economy other than a sustenance level if you do not have running water and electricity. For most of America, that is how they appear to live anyway.

Icool

Cobb