Unintended Consequences

2004 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3616712.stm

"Nepal's prime minister has appealed for calm following violent protests in the capital against the killing of 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq.

 Correspondents say it is the first time in living memory that the Muslim minority has been targeted in Nepal"

When assessing outcomes of political events, what is often left unsaid are the potential unintended consequences of such events. These may occur immediately, or in the medium to long-term (with long-term potentially being years or even decades later). Said events may be government policies, or the acts of individuals and/or groups of people.

A single event, or series of events can unfold in various ways. In purely "tribal" terms (or perhaps Asabiyya as used by Ibn Khaldun), individuals or groups within a particular nation, ethnicity or religious sect may be spurred on to commit violent acts against another in response to the "other" having perpetrated a crime of their own. It is obviously grossly irrational to assume that individual acts carried out by small groups of people are actually representative of some sort of philosophical essence inherent in anyone and everyone of the same identity (of whatever fashion), yet we are what we are and history bears this out in bloodshed and massacres over the ages.

One suspects that "unintended consequences" is not really on any one government's mind, especially given the current standards of international politics and diplomacy, which is mostly amoral and self-serving in the extreme, particularly focused on immediate to short-term gains, with little thought as to what happens next.

Israel comes to mind. The first generation of Israelis were admirable in their ruthlessness and bloody-mindedness in achieving their stated goals, with land theft, murder and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.Without wishing to gloss over history's darker corners, the revolting anti-semitism extant in Europe had little equivalent in the Middle East and wider Islamic world, until the modern state of Israel emerges in 1948, which claimed (and continues to claim) to act and speak on behalf of world Jewry. No leap of intellect is required to understand how many within the Arab and wider Islamic world would then start to associate the state of Israel's crimes with Jews and Judaism in general. Ever since then, as a direct result, vulgar anti-semitism is rife and commonplace throughout the Muslim world, often drawing on gross caricatures created in Europe all too recently, giving them a life beyond 1945.

I suspect that violence directed against French Jews, usually by male youths of North African origin, can be partially traced to the general atmosphere of anti-semitism engendered by the events described above. This is not in any way making the slightest justification of violence towards innocents of whatever group, but merely an illustration of a point. Conversely, when Arab or Mizrahi Jews in Arab-majority countries were forced to leave, either as a direct result of discriminatory government
policies or due to growing general intolerance, many of them went straight to Israel and it is no accident that many Mizrahi Jews vote for the most extreme racist parties in Israel even today.

I also think of Assad's deliberate destruction of an entire country. What is relevant here is that a significant percentage (possibly a majority) of the Alawite sect continue to support him despite everything. Even if Assad were able to win, Alawites would still have to live with a Sunni majority, except who are now filled with burning hatred towards them. I pray that sectarian strife does not come to pass when Assad falls (and despite everything, it is a testament to the Syrian revolution that actual massacres of Alawites have been very few), but the possibility is there for widespread attacks,
massacres leading to ethnic cleansing of Alawites and Shi'ites. Again, this should never happen, but if it does would you be surprised?

I suspect that governments take into account multiple scenarios occurring after, say, military intervention or imperial occupation (be it Iraq post-2003 or earlier British and French empires), but they will only look up to a certain point in time (I suspect only in years). I wish that they would consider effects over not just decades, but even centuries. Even supposedly innocuous changes can have grave implications over time. I can only weep when I think of how European powers swept away the old order(s) in Middle Eastern countries only to replace them with shaky new ones lacking legitimacy, swept aside all to easily by the curse that is the "national army".

I know that I am conflating multiple categories and types of event/response into one essay rather than dissecting them out (if I wasn't lazy), but no-one ever seems to focus or even talk about this! I will end with a quote by Robert Fisk (although in recent years he seems to have lost his wits entirely...)

"After WWI the British and French created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and the Middle East.

 I've spent my entire professional career watching the people within those borders burn"