As The World Becomes Complex

Millions of Americans are familiar with the television soap opera "As the World Turns," which ran for nearly half a century.
Set in the fictional town of Oakdale, this long-running soap focuses on the complex relationships and difficulties of its inhabitants.
Watching the news on television, I notice the stories being reported have just as many twists and turns in relationships between nations and in international developments. You could call it “As the world becomes complex” and mean every word of it as it becomes more complicated and complex. Politicians, negotiators and leaders are faced with challenges like never before. Civilians find themselves often caught in the crossfire -- be it verbal or real.
The Middle East is a good example: The ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, the US-led Gulf incursions, the Turkish-Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) crisis, the Russian and Bashar al-Assad armies fighting against rebels and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Stretching the map a little, we remember the Afghan-Soviet conflict and are aware of the Afghan-Taliban fighting that continues today, and on it goes…
The most heartbreaking is the Syrian war and the growing humanitarian crisis. “The situation in Aleppo is a humanitarian catastrophe," High Negotiations Committee spokesman Salem Al-Meslet said in a statement on Friday. He added, "The international community must take urgent, concrete steps to address it."
Even as heads of states and other leaders were being encouraged to pledge monetary help to the neighboring nations that have received hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, the number of new refugees began to increase significantly in the no-man's land between the Turkish border and Bab-al-Salam as tens of thousands began to flee the northern city of Aleppo as it came under attack.
Often you hear foreign visitors say the Middle East is a "culture of violence" or a "culture of conflict." It is true that there have been many battles, wars and strife across this region over the centuries. We must not forget that these kinds of problems existed even before Islam. Some believe it has to do with the religion, Islam. This could be a myth. But certainly the nature of man and desire for power and inability to forget and forgive also play an important role.
Fred Halliday, in his book “100 Myths about the Middle East,” writes: “The incidence of wars in the post-1945 period has nothing to do with the earlier incidence of wars, or with a ‘culture of conflict' inherited from pre-modern times.“
He adds, “States, warriors and propagandists make much of such continuity, be it the Israelis invoking the warrior-king David, Saddam Hussein the Battle of Qadissiya or the Turks their conquering sultans; but this is symbolic usage, not historical explanation.”
As we hear comments from many of the American presidential candidates, United Nations delegates, scholars and writers, one wonders if anything has been learned about the Middle East and the culture from the mistakes made in the past. In many ways, it does not appear so. Since about a decade or so, the number of books about Turkey and the Middle East has increased considerably. Ironically, no other region has been as misunderstood. Many clichés and mistakenly held beliefs are conveyed.
One of my favorite writers, Ibn Khaldun, provides much insight about North African nomadic society, particularly in his work "Muqaddimah." Sadly, such accounts and those later by travelers and explorers such as T.E. Lawrence and St. John Philby and others who wrote about the Ottomans and the Arabs have left the average reader who has not traveled to these places with the impression that on the Arabian Peninsula or across the Middle East the land is one of conflict and all desert and tribal. From my travels in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Qatar, the UAE and Lebanon, I realized that these nations are not entirely desert. You can see steppe, semi-arid land, brush-land or thorn-land. Also not all the inhabitants are nomadic. Many seek a normal and peaceful life. You will see many settlements and modern city dwellers.
One thing is for certain: It is not a myth that the world is becoming more complex and that hundreds of thousands of Syrians are victims of war and need aid and assistance.
“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” -Talmud

CHARLOTTE MCPHERSON [Cihan/Today's Zaman]