Cities in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories are on fire. And the United States of America stroked the match that set the blaze.
If you’re following the news, you know that all of these countries have protestors flooding the streets calling for the ouster of their respective governments.
And I maintain that this region-wide crisis is, at least in in part, our fault.
Most political science and Mideast experts would agree with me at some level on this point – but not for the reason I am going to lay out for you.
You see, the problem in the Mideast is not the USA’s backing of Israel.
It's not our continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan or our drone bombings of Pakistan.
It's not even because of the fact that we are a licentious, covetous, gluttonous people who pollute the young of every other nation on the planet with our our egomaniacal pop-culture bile.
While each of these is certainly a contributing factor, they all can be overlooked -- even embraced - if not for the billions of dollars we spend every year on foreign aid in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. (FYI - this list does not include the billion-dollar-a-week plan that goes with our standing armies in Iraq and Afghanistan).
To be clear about the numbers, The United States sends $3.1 billion per year to Israel and another $5 billion per year to the countries listed above (again, not including our “investment” in Iraq and Afghanistan).
That’s $8billion per year (or just about 8 x the annual budget for the International Red Cross).
What do we get for our money?
Well… in many cases we get brutal, totalitarian governments that only masquerade as democracies (Mubarak {Egypt}, Ben Ali {Tunesia}, Abdullah Salah {Yemen}, Khaled Mashaal {Palestinian Hamas} Qaddafi {Libya} and more.
We’ve spent decades (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama) sending bags of blood money to scumbags just because they will, at times, play nice with us.
Moral and ethical problems aside – the bigger issue, the issue that we see exploding in the streets right now, is the brand issue.
Let's face it - We're Mel Gibson. Fans of Lethal Weapon, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ love us. Our ex-girlfriend, on the other hand...
What I'm saying is this: You can’t be a country that says it stands for freedom while, at the same time, funding torturous regimes. You can’t go to war to oust one repressive dictator while you spend billions to support other repressive dictators.
Now all of these countries – and their leaders that America has spent billions on propping up - are crumbling under the anger of people who are marching for reforms.
These people are taking their respective governments into their own hands – tossing their proverbial tea overboard.
And they are not just rejecting their own leaders but they’re also rejecting the people who helped keep those leaders in power – namely us.
In other words, these Middle Eastern countries want what America was supposed to represent (government for the people by the people) but they reject what America has stood for to them (the sugar-daddy for totalitarian regimes).
Can you blame these people if, after the dust settles, they insert aggressively anti-American governments?
The question now is this: Is it possible to repair our brand?
And the answer – as is so often the case for this question - is simple: We must first repair our truth.
