The Cheeseburger Parasites and the Pine Tree Investor: Reading the Middle East

When my daughter’s father was sent to Iraq with the National Guard I got books out of the library about the history of Iraq.  It wasn’t hard to see that we were in for difficulties there and so it has been.  Our invasion of Iraq has been a disaster compounded of problems of our own making and conflicts whose origins date back centuries, even millenia, all tangled together.  

Yesterday the New York Times published a long article about the Middle East, “Fractured Lands,” that documents the life stories of six ordinary people through the wars and upheavals of the last two decades. I also picked up My Journey into the Heart of Terror by the iconoclastic German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer that describes the ten days he was permitted to spend in Islamic State-controlled areas of Iraq.

Two details in these narratives stick in my mind today: one of the persons profiled in the NYT article is a young man from Libya, an air force cadet at the time of Libyan uprising, who, by good luck, good instincts and the support of his family manages to survive, despite being used as  pawn by the pro-government forces.  Trying to remake a normal life now, his passion is for planting pine trees.  

The other detail is from My Journey , a moment in which the IS officials and fighters who are “handling” the German journalists stop off for a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi in IS controlled Mosul.  (Funny that, even jihadis love cheeseburgers.)

Two little anchors of mundanity underlying the violent melodramas of the Middle East. Life goes on in even the most ferociously war-torn of places. The IS fighters are just like cheeseburger consumers everywhere - beneficiaries of a long chain of transactions and structures that allow for a cheeseburger to be produced on demand.  Intact in Mosul and its surroundings, it would seem, are beef and dairy cattle, wheat and corn and potato fields, slaughterhouse and cheese-making factory, mill and bakery and Pepsi plant, or at the very least a food distribution network robust enough to bring in from more distant places all of the items necessary to assemble those seemingly simple but actually quite complex edible artifacts.

There is an important difference between the two, however.  The Libyan man planting pine trees is actively trying to bring his world back to life, in however small a way.  That is a courageous act - an act of investment in the very best sense of that word.   And  simple-minded as it might seem, those are the kinds of investments that must be made over and over again, courageously and persistently,  not just in the Middle East but everywhere, if we are to pull that region and civilization out of the vicious cycles that we are all currently enacting.  

PS: check out something cool in (the former) Syria: Rojava