Sunnis and Shias Square Up in the Desert

The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings is an endearing image coined to explain chaos theory. A butterfly flutters its wings in a forest in the Philippines and that infinitesmal movement ramifies in billions of tiny increments to find expression in a storm over Ireland.

Those charged with predicting future events and managing systems in domains as varied as weather forecasting and running the Tokyo subway now routinely factor in a small random chaos (or fuzzy logic) component into their calculations. It improves accuracy no end.
You’d hardly describe the deployment of Saudi and Egyptian fighters in Yemen in such delicate terms. Far from it. But trust me, their rumbling and thundering will ramify across the world in just the same way, only moreso.
These are sensational times. As I write this, here in Ireland, there’s the aftermath of the astonishing Graham Dwyer trial, for the murder of Elaine O’Hara. Just a little bit further afield, there is the analysis of the Germanwings plane crash, which was precipitated by an act of apparently wanton murderousness by the suicidal co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. As with Graham Dwyer, we are left aghast at the pits to which human beings can decend.
And then there is the unfolding of the Greek crisis, which could yet take Europe just about anywhere. Amid all of this, who has time to bother with stirrings and storms in the desert? Factions divided along tribal and religious lines have been at war in the Yemen for many years. So far away, so primitive: we don’t bother much with it. At our peril...
Those lines and loyalties cling to big, dangerous and opposing forces. The Shia Houthis look to and are supported by Iran. The rest are Sunni Muslims who look to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and beyond. Recently the Houthis have been in the ascendant and the Saudis don’t like this. Their air force has started bombing. Their army is mobilised; likewise the Egyptians. Even the Pakistanis are rattling their sabres. They border Iran and they have nukes. This could get very messy indeed.
The Saudis and their allies fret about a possible Shia crescent stretching from Yemen up through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. They also fear the implications of IS, even though they themselves seed-funded the fundamentalist scholars who developed the IS and al-Qaida model.
Strangely, it seems that little has changed in a century – except, of course, the availability of weapons of far greater destructive capability. In an intelligence memo written in January 1916 TE Lawrence (of Arabia) described the Arab Revolt of the day as:
“beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the break up of the Islamic ‘bloc’ and the defeat and disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states... (that) would (be) set up to succeed the Turks would be... harmless to ourselves... The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion.” (The emphases are his).
He was right about the “state of mosaic” – though this outcome was stage managed as far as possible by the British and French. But he was wrong about the states being harmless to British or to wider western interests.
You know why. Oil!
It’s just another cruel twist of fate that oil began to flow after the tribal desert dwellers came to rule what the then world powers regarded as vast, empty, arid spaces. Had it been flowing before World War I, for example, everything would have been different. Instead, the men in tents became rich; and then they became very, very, rich altogether. As well as building cities and ports and highways, they could afford to make the desert bloom, indeed to create artificial oases where butterflies might flutter their wings.
But they could also afford armies and police to protect their wealth and enforce their laws. Some were – and are – more tyrannical than others. Many Saudis like going to Bahrain because husbands and wives can shop together.
The spending goes far beyond mere extravagance. There’s an artificial ski slope in Dubai. But of course. And there are those who consider that Qatar’s nomination to host the 2022 World Cup was just another notch in the wealth belt.
The huge resources and enormous construction projects attract millions of workers. For example, as one newspaper article recently pointed out, Qatar has the highest net immigration in the world. There are many Irish in the region, working in construction, medicine and education in particular. It may all be far away but it’s also very close to home. The butterfly doesn’t have to flutter much nowadays for us to feel the breeze.
Many people (with no relatives working in the region) might say we should all stand back and let them at it. And when you see the results of western interference down the generations it’s a sustainable case.
But until we can harvest enough renewable energy to keep us going, the west needs the oil. Were a war to break out that couldn’t be stopped, it would be a global catastrophe. As it is, the tension has raised oil prices which will be seen at the pumps pretty soon and which will dent the fragile recovery across the world.
Underlying all of this is our shared humanity. One of the routes by which our original ancestors left the continent of Africa – before trudging both north and east – was across the gate of the Red Sea from Ethiopia to, yes, Yemen. Okay, it was a long time ago, perhaps 100,000 years. But their descendants are everywhere. You, dear reader, carry the DNA of those first expanders, just as do those who would go to war in the Yemen. We are they and they are we and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun. I’m crying...
Nobody in Hog Central has any idea about how this probable war can be averted. The thing with fluttering butterfly wings, with the movement towards chaos, is that once it starts, stopping it is damn near impossible to stop. We need to brace ourselves.
Watch out. A storm’s brewing...
The Hog