Dear Mark,
kmarkw64 wrote:
> I'm beginning to wonder what happens if the Arab nations all fall
> into civil war instead of becoming part of the Clash of
> Civilizations war. Is this a valid possibility? What causes
> nations to fall into civil war instead of going to war with other
> countries in a generational crisis era? If my questions are naive,
> or have already been addressed elsewhere, please forgive me.
In order for a country to have a major crisis civil war, it has to be
in a generational Crisis era, and there has to be an internal fault
line across which the civil war will be fought.
Generally speaking, there are two major fault lines in the countries
of the Mideast: Arab vs Jew, and Sunni vs Shia. There are also
various ethnic fault lines, but those are the major ones that span the
Mideast.
Lebanon, Syria and Iran had major crisis civil wars in the 1970s-80s,
but today those countries are all in generational Awakening eras, so
they won't be having another civil war. They'll try to resist being
drawn into regional wars, but they may have no choice.
Egypt is in a generational Crisis era, but there's apparently no fault
line across which a civil war will be fought. For that reason, I
expect Egypt's crisis war to be an external war.
Several years ago, I would have thought that the Palestinians would
end up at war with the Israelis, and that's probably still true.
However, the split between Hamas and Fatah has shown that a component
of the war will be a civil war among the Palestinians themselves.
The real hotbeds of the Sunni/Shia split are in Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Bahrain, and other Arabian Peninsula countries. That will also be a
factor in Pakistan.
Unfortunately, having a civil war does not prevent a country from
having an external war as well. In fact, one way for a government to
try to defuse a potential civil war is to try to unify the country by
declaring war against someone else. Declaring war on Israel, for
example, might be a tool to attempt to prevent a civil war in more
than one country.
John