Luttwak: "Middle East Less Relevant Than Ever"

Edward Luttwak, author of "The Grand Strategy of Roman Empire", has an intriguing and counter-intuitive piece in this month’s Prospect on why the Middle East is “less relevant than ever” and the rest of the world should learn to ignore it. Here are some excerpted paragraphs:

Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies.

In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025. [...]Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.

He then goes on to describe Iran as a modern day Mussolini’s Italy (I tend to agree with him somewhat), which is to say all the trappings of power, except, as the old saying, “never fired, and only dropped once." What he fails to comprehend is the power of an ideology wrapped in deception as a spiritual and religious dogma. He makes some interesting deductions:

Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name.

Whilst, Luttwak enumerates Litany of Islam’s history bloody borders, yet still manages to contradict himself by doing exactly what he accuses the West of doing, namely ignoring the Cradel of Civilization's (Iran, Iraq) 7000-years history of Empires and religious wars in the region:

With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.

Luttwalk is not only unmindful of the long history of the Middle East, but also completely in denial about certain genocidal maniac and his ilk who want to repeat this history and are quite vocal and perilously honest about it since Khomeini took power in 1979 and embeded his 'Islamic manifest destiny' (Khomeini's Doctrine) into the Constitution of the country itself. This includes even our best Arab allies in the region who wouldn't mind to establish an Islamic Empire again.

Take a look at the map of the Islamic Caliphate below:
source

Lutwwak, apologists, and those navigating in the circles of denial in foggy bottom, tend to forget that Iran, India and all other "Arab" states - including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity under the Palestinian Authority - were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, killing, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews, Zoroastrian exodus to India, and destroying their language (Phoenicians in Lebanon didn't speak Arabic)(Iran is the only country that was able to sustain its own language thanks to our brave poet, Ferdowsi) ancient and flourishing civilizations. (Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Phraonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000-year history.)

It is precisely this history that Khamanei and Ben Ladanite want to repeat if we allow them to have their "own history". Islamic Republic's ambitions are not just repressive and incendiary; they are nuclear (their nuclear programs started 20 some years ago secretly and we just found out about it 4 years ago) and global (See the Islamic Republic's Constitution and Read Khomeini's book, "The Islamic Government" and not just for Iran) and to this end they have formulated and continue to implement all of their foreign policies since 1979.

H/t to Vigilant Freedom