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The Middle East Essay

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The middle east is a land stained with the blood of innocence and plagued with instability. Most history books will claim that the instability has been growing since the late 1970’s and some state its stemmed from bad blood between tribes that has been cultivating for thousands of years. But could the foundations on which the house of history stands be built upon grains of sand? Have western nations played a larger part in the rapid growth of conflict in the middle east? “Christianity and western civilisation, what countless crimes have been committed in thy name?” - Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Many of the current conflicts are the cause of territorial dispute which can be directly linked to the resolution of WW1. “Everything changed with the …show more content…

This incited a mass body count between both Palestinians and the people of the newly formed Israel. Through the unthoughtful declaration of invasion and redistribution of land it's undeniable that western states have played a role in causing much of the distrust and civil unrest we see in the middle east today.

Fast forwarding from the Sykes-Picot to the period after the Second World War. The West had imposed not only fake borders on the region, but also brought various leaders, such as King King Faisal in Iraq, Farouk in Egypt, and the Shah of Iran. As Tarek Fatah (Pakistani born writer currently living in Canada) noted, the CIA coup in Iran added gasoline to an already out of control fire that is extreme Islamism and brought about a new breed of terrorism. The West single handedly created the Saudi state while the Brits also supported its nascent rulers. One author states “support for these family regimes has been a part of US policy for decades.” The West also played a part in establishing all the Gulf Monarchies. As Owen Jones notes in The Guardian “the west’s relationship with Middle Eastern dictatorships that have played a pernicious role in the rise of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism. And no wonder: the west is militarily, economically and diplomatically allied with these often brutal regimes, and our media all too often reflects the foreign policy objectives of our government's.” Every regime in the Middle East is a creature

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