War will keep us together
by Tom Sullivan
The WaPo front page headline “Airstrikes bring together
Arab nations often at odds” started that old Captain and Tennile song playing in my head. (I know. Sorry.) It seems we’ve been thinking about it wrong all these years. Lasting war is the only hope for peace in the Middle East.
The four Persian Gulf nations whose warplanes flew in concert with U.S. jets over Syria this week have spent the past few years acting with far less harmony, riven by divergent approaches to address the growth of Islamist political movements in the Arab world.
The differences among the countries have grown so stark and acrimonious that earlier this year, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar, which has funded Islamists across the region to the consternation of the other three nations. In the months that followed, they have continued to wage a proxy war of sorts in Egypt and Libya, where the UAE recently conducted airstrikes against rebels backed by Qatar.
But then along comes ISIS (ISIL, the Islamic State, etc.). Theodore Karasik, the director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, says the group considered the threat “to be greater than what was happening among them.” The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the U.S. believes that this new and improved radical Islam is such an existential threat to the region that, “We need to confront it as a team.”
Now, combining their roguish ways with old-fashioned American firepower, this undisciplined band of miscreants and misfits must somehow work together to save the galaxy from ISIS — to a 1970s soundtrack.
Uh-huh.