Islam and Western converts: from the "Trojan Horse" to the Danish Cartoons, what is "wrong" with Islam?

I recently found out that one of my old acquaintances converted to Islam. I listened to his explanation of his decision with polite respect, and was intellectually interested to discover his reasons for becoming Muslim.

This experience got me thinking more about why Westerners in particular become Muslims. As with many people who are religious in general (I am not), the most common explanation for the attraction of Islam to Westerners is the moral and ideological certainty inherent in the faith. In Islam, there is little room for equivocation; for the most part, there is only right or wrong - halal and haram.

In many cases, Westerners who convert to Islam are either people who were non-religious (and usually morally lax, or even entirely absent of morality), or people who were religious (eg. Christian) but had fallen out with their former faith. In these circumstances, the appeal of Islam is obvious: such people are attracted to the certainties of the moral guidance that Islam provides. Submit, and be happy.

Can't you take a joke?

There is a reverse side of the coin to this. After what has happened in the Islamic world in the last fifteen years, it is hard to see how Westerners can convert to Islam, and yet ignore (or rationally explain) the reality that Islam has brought to the world compared to other major world religions. There is little objective doubt that in the contemporary world, Islam is the most uncompromising, polarising and extreme of the major faiths on the planet.

I should emphasize from the last sentence the part "in the contemporary world". Islam was not always so uncompromising or extreme in its methodology, but gradually became so over the last hundred years (more on that here). But the radicalisation of Islam in the last fifteen years or so is impossible to refute or ignore. Compared to other major world religions (Catholicism and its many Christian Protestant off-shoots, Hinduism and Buddhism), Islam is the most-feared religion in the world today. And for good reason.

There is a stereotype that Muslims are cheerless, and take their religion and life too seriously. Unfortunately, this "stereotype" is often proven to be truth in many cases. Recently, some British Muslims made a version of the Pharrell song "Happy". The response to this from some quarters of the Muslim community was less charitable, calling it "haram". This has then led to a debate about whether the idea was "haram" or not. Seriously. This tells you the mentality of some Muslims, living up to the stereotype of being cheerless and taking things too seriously.

Much more controversial was the "Danish Cartoons" issue, that provoked outrage across much of the Muslim world. The worst that can be said of some of the cartoons is that they were in poor taste, but some of the cartoons featuring "Mo" were actually helpful to the agenda of moderate Muslims: one cartoon featured the Prophet at the gates of heaven, saying to two suicide bombers "I'm sorry, we've run out of virgins".
The best way to refute the ideas of extremism is to ridicule and lampoon them.

The controversy about picturing the Prophet Mohammed is that the prophet's face isn't shown because it is considered idolatrous in Islam. And yet "Mohammed" is the most popular name given to men in Islamic countries. There was also a controversy some years ago in Sudan when a female English teacher was arrested for allowing local children to name a school teddy-bear "Mohammed".
Yet why is it not idolatrous for parents to name their children after the prophet? Surely this should be "haram" too, for encouraging the idolatrous idea that the boy is equal to the prophet himself?

A "Trojan Horse"

The most recent scandal relating to Islam in Britain was the unearthing of the so-called "Trojan Horse" project within the school system in urban areas with a high number of Muslims. Again, we see an example of what might be called "Islamic exceptionalism": Muslims being given ground to change the teaching of the national curriculum (as well as breaking schools policy, if not the law) in state schools. The creeping Islamisation of Britain has been going on for decades, but its only in the last ten years that people have paid any attention to it.

Another example is the "halal" controversy just uncovered in some of Britain's biggest food chains. Some food companies had been serving "halal" meat to its unwitting, non-Muslim customers for years. Regardless of the "animal rights" aspect to this issue, which I'll ignore for the sake of the argument, there is the central issue of a) choice, and b) minority rights subverting majority rights. In a supposedly democratic, free-market society, it is extraordinary that private companies are happy to autocratically decide what their customers should eat, out of fear of the wishes of a small minority of their customers.

These two examples demonstrate what is "exceptional" about Islam compared to other contemporary major religions: the disproportionate amount of bullying some of its adherents use to get what they want from society, and the fear that they create in the rest of society. Apart from isolated cases of fundamentalist Christians in the USA, or occasional stories about conservative Hindus in India, the prevalence of this aggressive attitude that emanates from many Muslims is unprecedented in modern society. Of the theocratic states that exist in the world, almost all of them are Islamic; of the most religiously-conservative nation-states that exist in the word, almost all of them are Islamic.

Rebels with a cause

I've digressed from the original theme of this article, which was about why Westerners convert to Islam. Apart from the "moral" reasons, there may well exist a more superficial one. Because it is the ultimate act of rebellion towards "Western values".

Back in the days of the Cold War and the earlier threat of Bolshevism, some Westerners became drawn to some idealistic romanticism of equality and morality that they saw in the principles of Communism. Some journalists had a word for these types: "useful idiots".
While I don't wish to make direct comparisons, it is a self-evident truth that some "real" (i.e. born into the faith) Muslims have a wariness towards Western converts, being initially sceptical of the converts' true belief in Islam. They are wont to "test" them. On the other hand, Western converts often turn out to be much more uncompromising in their Islamic faith than those actually "born into it", often shocking even "real" Muslims about how seriously they take things.

Those imams that are responsible for a Westerner's conversion to the faith often use the strategy of preying on those Westerners that seem pliant and willing to listen to an alternative telling of the "accepted" Western world-view. Tied in with the moral underpinning of Islam is the implicit politics of the faith: that, like Communism, becoming Muslim is the ultimate act of rejecting the "New World Order".
Modern Islam is fused with the politics of conspiracy theories: like Communism (and Fascism), it uses conspiracy theories to argue that Muslims are the world's great "victims", have been oppressed, and that "the Jews" can be squarely blamed for much of it.

It goes without saying that some of these imams are responsible for radicalising converts into suicide bombers or for fighting "Jihad".

The irony these days is that Islam's biggest "war" is not against non-Muslims, but fighting a sectarian war against the Shia Alawite government of Syria. After fighting a "jihad" against the West for ten years, radical Sunnis like Al-Qaeda and others are now fighting a civil war against Shias in Syria instead.

Then again, there is a further ideological divide within the Islamic world, at least in the Middle East. Apart from the sectarian Shia-Sunni civil war in Syria, there is the wider, ideological "cold war" between those supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (such as Qatar and Turkey), and those opposed to it, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

So for those Westerners converting to Islam, please understand what kind of world you're signing up for.

Cameron and the Syria vote: the epitome of Cameron's pitiful personality

So it has come to this: almost inevitably, Cameron's personality flaws have finally led him to bring the country, his government, and his party, to a new low. Cameron has already shown on many occasions his personality flaws while acting as leader of the country. But it has been a foreign policy issue that has put them into the sharpest focus.

The Syrian civil war finally turned on the chemical weapons attack of the 21st August. While on holiday on Cornwall the previous weekend, Cameron received a call from Obama to support him on military action against Assad's regime. Cameron's support was expected, given both Obama's and Cameron's joint stand against Assad. However, from the point of agreeing to join with Obama, Cameron made political blunder after blunder.

 Given the traumatic impact of Iraq on the Blair government, and that Cameron still vainly sees himself as the "heir to Blair", Cameron clearly wanted to be involved in action in Syria, but the legacy of Iraq made feel the need to involve parliament. That being said, Cameron clearly thought that this "parliamentary involvement" was simply a cosmetic exercise, and that the vote was in the bag; in other words, a politically-cynical move to give the fig leaf of democracy to Cameron's plans, and superficially appear inclusive and mindful of the legislature. This decision displays Cameron's tendency to arrogance, superficiality, and poor judgment all at once.

The superficiality of this exercise became clear from the fact that Cameron felt it suitable to announce the recall of parliament from holiday on Twitter, of all things, on Tuesday lunch-time. By Tuesday afternoon, while him, Clegg and Milliband were discussing a statement to vote on in parliament on Thursday, military assets were already being transferred to the conflict area. This action cements the views that Cameron's use of parliament was just a cover, and that Cameron was expecting military action perhaps as soon as that weekend. And by Wednesday morning, Cameron had already decided to press on with a UN motion calling for action on Syria; something that had not been discussed in the meeting with Milliband the previous day.

But the UN inspectors in Syria would be there until Saturday, and were not expected to report their findings until some days later; maybe weeks later. As parliament was due to return from holiday that Monday (2 September) anyway, this again shows Cameron's serious lack of thought; bringing back MPs (and using taxpayers' money) to hold a vote that was not even truly urgent, if purpose of the UN team was considered so important. Why not simply wait till Monday, till the UN team had left Syria? And what was the point of trying to get a vote from the UN before the inspectors had even finished their job? Cameron's efforts with the UN show up his ham-fisted and thoughtless approach to politicking, as much as in Westminster.

Discussions between Cameron and Milliband about the vote now began to diverge, with Milliband insisting on a more cautious, evidence-based statement of his own, that made British military action dependent on the UN. Milliband's actions were seen as akin to being stabbed in the back by Cameron, who quickly made sure his staff leaked invective-filled criticisms of Milliband. This reaction shows the impetuous, even infantile side of Cameron's personality, who is prone to short-tempered bursts. What marks Cameron out as more unstable and careless in his behaviour compared to his predecessors, is that while Gordon Brown often lost his temper, it was always behind closed doors; Cameron does so publicly in parliament, and in doing so highlights how unfit he is to high office.
Some criticise Milliband's change of mind as politically-cynical positioning. Two points spring to mind about this accusation: first, that Cameron's decision to recall parliament was at least as superficial and cynical in its intent; second, Milliband clearly understood that public opinion was against intervention, as were much of the Labour party and a number of Conservative MPs. In this way, he was simply displaying better political acumen; what's a worse criticism of Cameron is that his arrogance led him to take his party (and Labour) for granted, and that Milliband knew the minds of Conservative MPs better than their own leader. This is an appalling indictment of Cameron, fed by his own arrogance.

So by the time the vote came, Milliband's re-positioning led Cameron to a further compromise (and another potential recall of parliament): that the Thursday vote would not be binding if it passed, and that a second vote (presumably on the Saturday) would be held to agree on military action. This decision simply piled absurdity onto absurdity: for the sake of appearing democratic, Cameron was willing to waste MPs' holidays (and taxpayers' money) for a second time. If there was to have been a second vote, why on earth could it not wait till Monday? What was so special about Saturday? This feeds the view that Cameron was simply playing games with parliament for his own vanity, to appear as one with Obama. It feeds the view that Cameron has a deeply insecure personality, amongst other flaws.

So when it came to losing the vote, Cameron was not expecting the result at all; it appears the possibility of losing it had not even occurred to him. His whips had not been told to recall MPs on holiday; they had not been hold to ensure government loyalty; some MPs and ministers didn't even bother to vote, even though they were in parliament. This all stems from Cameron's arrogance, surrounding himself with sycophants, and disregard for others' opinions. So when it came to looking for who to blame, Cameron again set his personal staff to shamelessly attack Milliband in vicious terms; for a second time.

But the blame all lies with one man alone: Cameron himself.

In the past, Prime Ministers have resigned when losing votes on foreign policy. The fact that Cameron had made the vote almost a question of trusting his judgement, tells you how much he put his own credibility at stake. The vote can therefore be seen as a vanity project of Cameron's own making. And he lost it, due to his incredible arrogance and vanity. The vote was never absolutely necessary: it was something that Cameron himself had clearly decided to do for superficial reasons, as highlighted earlier.

The vote can be seen in humiliating historical terms (one fact being that it's the first time a PM has been prevented from declaring war by his own parliament), but also its impact will be felt abroad, and already has been. Its long-term impact may not be huge; more symbolic. But it will have an effect on Cameron's personal standing abroad. For a start, Cameron as Prime Minister is in the politically-absurd position of no longer being able to state his views on Syria with any authority abroad. On Syria, he is now the puppet and mouthpiece of parliament, who he helplessly disagrees with. When a foreign statesman asks for Cameron's views on Syria, he is only able to repeat parliament's view, not his own. Any other statesman would find such a situation extraordinary, but the fact that Cameron would rather stay in power than resign for such a humiliation tells you that he has no sense of shame. 

Then there is the damage done to his authority at home, within his own party and parliament - which is much more serious. Cameron's own vanity and arrogance has displayed how he effectively has no control over his own party. The first (cynical) rule about holding votes in politics is that you don't hold a vote if you can't easily predict the outcome. Cameron held the vote without bothering to check that he had the support, because he assumed he already had it; that much is clear. He assumed that he had the charisma to win over any waverers.

But his behaviour this week, after a "good" summer for his government, has managed to prise defeat from the jaws of victory. Milliband's positioning was politically-astute on the Syria vote, and also demonstrated a "killer instinct" that Milliband has only rarely shown since beating his brother to the leadership; seeing the poor judgement that Cameron was openly displaying, it was not hard to take political advantage, while also siding with public opinion and parliamentary will.

For the Conservatives, Cameron's pitiful, true self has been nakedly on display this week, and on a matter of international importance as well as domestic political opinion; the worst possible combination. Cameron is expected to have a reshuffle in the coming weeks. But many of his backbenchers will know that the real liability is not the ministers but the leader himself.

Cameron doesn't suffer from a lack of self-confidence; he is also charming and knows how to appear statesman-like.
But these are his only positive characteristics: the way he has behaved in the past week has displayed his many negative characteristics to the fore.

The question is how long these many negatives will be tolerated.

Why religion and politics don't mix: From Northern Ireland to Syria, The Arab Spring and Turkey

I wrote an article last year about the relationship between intelligence and free thought. While religion provides the function of giving a moral code to humanity, it also takes away from humanity the ability to arrive at a judgement using their own intellect. When that judgement is a political one, the influence of religion should be looked at even more critically.   

The link between church and state (or religion and politics) has been severed in Europe for as long as anyone can care to remember. In America, that link is more nuanced, but still there on paper, if not always clearly there on the floor of Congress.
Secularism has been established in the West as the method to separate religious teachings from the official business of government.
In the UK, the most recent example of an openly-religious leader was former PM, Tony Blair, who waited until he stood down as premier before converting to Catholicism; then again, there were his infamous shared prayer-meetings with former US President, George W Bush, which were ridiculed in the British press. In a secular state, when a premier's private religious views become openly-displayed habits, ridicule is probably the best reply to remind a politician that religion is a private matter outside of the realm of government. So he then made sure to keep his religious sentiments more to himself.

Staying in the UK, the problem of what happens when when religion and politics fuse together is seen daily across the water from London, in Northern Ireland. The clash of two Christian branches, Catholicism and Protestantism, led to a sectarian conflict. After the thirty years of "The Troubles", the religious divides are as sharp as ever, even if the violence has subsided. The politics of Northern Ireland are divided as always; the Catholics voting one way, the Protestants another.
Not long ago, the province was ruled by Rev. Ian Paisley, a hardline Protestant priest. While his rhetoric had undergone a massive toning-down compared with his earlier days, Paisley had been the recipient of the polarisation of the two sides. Until the late '90s, when the "peace process" had begun in earnest, the main Protestant party was the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP); after this point, Protestant views became more intransigent against surrendering their position in favour of the Catholics, and flocked to the more hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), represented by Paisley. So for a time in the 2000s, Paisley became the provincial head of government, in tandem with his Catholic deputy (and former terrorist) Martin McGuinness.  More recently, trouble has flared up again from the Protestants, who rioted as a result of a compromise with the Catholics over the flying of the British flag from government buildings in the province. But the UUP are finished as a political force, and the hardline DUP still hold sway over the Protestant vote in Northern Ireland, demonstrating that religion is often anathema to moderation.
For Brits who live on "the mainland", the politics of Northern Ireland is an unfathomable mess.

The same can be said of Syria, but in this, Syria's "troubles" are far more extensive, horrifying, and potentially explosive.
Like its neighbour Iraq, Syria is a religious melting-pot of four or five major religious and ethnic denominations: Sunni Muslims, Alawite (Shia) Muslims, Druze (Muslims), and Christians (of a few different Orthodox churches). And there are also the Kurds, too, who are a significant ethnic minority in the east. Given the delicate religious mix, it has seemed sensible that secularism would be the best way to avoid a sectarian war. That had been the case during the French Mandate between the First and Second World War, and also after Syria became independent.
Things became more complicated (and a ticking time-bomb of resentment) when Hafez Al-Assad, an Alawite, took power in the sixties. Although he officially continued the secular (and quasi-socialist) form of government, he began to fill the government with fellow-Alawites, who were far outnumbered by Sunni Muslims in the general population.
This reached a head when there was a Sunni "uprising" in the early eighties, which was brutally suppressed, and also suppressed to the outside world. It was only finally after the "Arab Spring" in 2011, when Hafez's son, Bashar, was in power, that the Sunnis were able to properly make their voices heard against the persecution and maltreatment from the Alawite-led "secular" government.
The problem with the Assad regime in Syria was not that it was secular; it was that it was clearly not secular, but favoured the Alawites (and to an extent, the Christians) at the expense of the Sunni majority. The rebellion against Bashar Al-Assad's government then quickly took on a religious dimension, which has broadened ever since, attracting the attention of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters to the Sunni Muslim side. The original aims - to make Syria a "free" country - has become confused amidst the conflicting aims of two major factions fighting on the ground against the regime, as well as the conflicting aims of the foreign powers (the West and the Gulf States) that supply them.
The rebels' political aim of "freedom" has now become merged with the religious aim of creating a Sunni Muslim-majority state, which has spurred-on horrifying levels of violence and reprisals on both sides.
For the West, the politics of Syria has become and unfathomable mess.

Thus in Northern Ireland, thus in Syria.

The "Arab Spring" that first sprouted in Tunisia, which toppled regimes there and in neighbouring Libya and Egypt (as well as, indirectly, Yemen), was meant to be about freedom and democracy.
These states had been ruled for decades by secular dictatorships. During the Cold War, America tolerated this as it feared what the result would be if the Arabs gained the right to vote with their religious conscience. Iran was a short lesson that matched its greatest fears: what had originally been a "democratic" revolution against Iranian Shah, turned into an Islamic revolution when anti-Shah secularists, lacking a clear leader of their own, sided with the Muslim conservatives to install Ayatollah Khomeini as an "apolitical" leader.

The "Arab Spring" took its inspiration from contemporary Turkey, which had put some of the West's fears of mass Islamic revolution across the Middle East to rest.
While the Arab world had been under the thumb of American-backed secular dictatorships, Turkey had been a secular democracy since the around the Second World War, or thereabouts. To be fair, its form of "democracy" was far from perfect, and in some areas bore little relation to the West, such the strong weight that the military had over how the country was governed (and intervened directly when it felt necessary). Furthermore, grievances by ethnic and religious minorities tended to be swept under the carpet in the name of unity.
But some conservative Muslims felt that for too long Turkey's secular democracy was not properly representative of its religious values, and that the various official parties had brushed their views under the carpet like with other marginalised groups. One person who held this view was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had been istanbul's mayor during the nineties.
Knowing how Turkey's political system effectively banned religious parties from parliament, he created the AK ("Justice and Development") Party, which was not overtly religious; conservatively Muslim in values, but capitalist in economics and tolerant and pro-European in outlook (or so it seemed). Once his party came to power in 2002, he emphasized the need for "democratic" reforms that broadened freedom of (religious) expression; similarly, he sought to "democratise" Turkey by removing the influence of the army. It was this, and the steps to improve Turkey's economy, that earned him the respect of the West. It was for these reasons that the West had felt reassured by the "Arab Spring's" inspiration from Turkey.

We know now that this story does not end well. As in Turkey, as in The Arab Spring.

While Erdogan in Turkey was "democratising" the country, the West was wilfully ignoring the real purpose for the "reforms", while also ignoring the obvious signs over the years of creeping authoritarianism and Islamification, as I've explained before.
The same process can be seen in the Middle East, post-Arab Spring. While Arab states are ruled by AK Party-like groups, they make the claim that because they are the largest party, it means they have a mandate to implement Islamic policy. Thus they subvert the purpose of democracy for religious purposes to mean Islamic majoritarianism. All those who therefore do not subscribe to a religious government are therefore against the popular will.
The hideous irony is that two years on from the Arab Spring, with his reaction to the Gezi Park protests, Erdogan has finally been recognised by the West as the religious authoritarian he was all along, while using the masquerade of democracy to achieve his aims; and now the Arab Spring bears all the hallmarks of following the same pattern as Erdogan's "Turkish Spring" at the ballot box in 2002.

This is another example of why religion and politics don't mix. The result is often ugly.

Pakistan is another example of what happens when you have religious parties in a (supposedly) democratic system. Politicians then start using religion as a weapon against their enemies; the same has been done in the past in neighbouring India during the rule of the Hindu nationalist BJP. Religion was used as a weapon there by Hindu politicians to blame Muslims; the result was massacres and the destruction of religious sites.

Let the religious leaders stick to the religion, in the confines of their religious places. Let politicians stick to the politics, in the dull confines of their drab government buildings.
Let the religious leaders deal with personal morality, and the politicians deal with social policy.
And never the two should meet!

Syria and the Great Game Of The Middle East

It's ironic that the so-called "Domino Theory" that the USA predicted would cause South-East Asia to collapse into Communism in the Cold War was proved so wrong, whereas the same "Domino Theory" has been proved right where it applies to democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

A year on from the Arab Spring, and of all the uprisings and protests that proliferated across the region, the one that was one of the first, and in the country with so much strategic and political baggage, remains the most violent, the most tenacious, and the most intractable; a situation that retains the strongest danger of being a Pandora's box.

The first thing to be understood about Syria is the nature of its society and its government, before we talk about the plethora of wider issues.

Like Iraq and Lebanon, Syria is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic country created in the aftermath of the First World War. The ruling Baath party came to power in the sixties, the same as their former namesake in Iraq. In Iraq the Baath party was a party that had the support of the Sunni minority over a Shia majority (as well as Kurds and a small number of Christians); in Syria, the Baath had the support of the Alawites (a Shia sect), who ruled over the Sunni majority, with Christian acquiescence.

In both Iraq and Syria, in spite of the religious differences, the Baath were a secular party that encouraged the active suppression of religion; during the Cold War, and as allies of the Soviet Union while the USA were allies of Israel, even the Prophet was in danger of being seen almost as a person of ridicule, although the Baath in Syria and Iraq were always keen to indulge Islam where useful.

So, with Iraq liberated, Syria remains the only bastion of the Baath party: a party that, by definition, is the party representing a small religious sect, now atrophied by five decades of rule into an elite clan that remains in power by sheer force of will over an opposing Sunni majority, backed up by the fear of religious and civil war.

Bashar Al-Assad has remained in power through using similar techniques to Saddam Hussein; a personality cult, an efficient police state, and fear of sectarian civil war as the only alternative to the father of the nation. Saddam Hussein used his sons to ensure that his regime stayed in place through brutality and paranoia; Bashar Al-Assad uses his brother, Maher for the same purposes (more about him later).

But Bashar's situation still has some crucial differences. For a start, there is the personality. Saddam Hussein seemed to come across as the "Stalin of Iraq"; a gangster-like figure who ruled Iraq by his singular force of will, backed up by his male offspring and extended family. By comparison, Bashar Al-Assad seems on a personal level as threatening as, say, John Major: as much as Bashar might sound the tough guy, it hardly ever sounds natural or believable. In fact, Bashar does not appear to have the natural leadership skills, because it seems not natural to his personality; in every interview seen of him, he sounds passive, his voice soft, difficult to carry. When you see him at party rallies in front of his closest, most fanatical supporters, his body language even there seems slightly awkward, almost embarrassed of his supposed supreme power and popularity.

This is where Maher, his younger brother, comes in. Bashar was not, in fact, meant to be destined for power; that was meant to go to his elder brother, Basil, who died in the mid-nineties. The status as heir apparent then passed to Bashar, so that when his father, President Hafez, died a decade ago, Bashar was still getting to grips with the role.

Interestingly, soon after Bashar came to power, there was a movement towards modest political reforms backed by the new President, seemingly in order to make some sort of clean break with his father's leadership style. This didn't last long, though: Maher has been leader of the army and security services since Hafez died, and he quickly put wind to any real steps towards reforms. Those calling for freedom and a democratic process were quickly suppressed by the military; since that time, Bashar has not bothered to make any further efforts at reform.

And so we get to the situation of a year ago. With what we know of Bashar's personality, it can be quickly guessed that it is Maher who is the real power behind the throne, along with the elderly patricians of Hafez's generation. It is Maher who has been orchestrating the military campaign against the majority of his own country's people; Bashar has, more than likely, been stuck in a bubble of his Baath hardliners who urge further fighting and brutality because they fear for their own lives if they fall. Meanwhile, the likes of Maher and others like him are in a psychotic death-march to genocide, intent on killing anyone who gets the way of the regime, using any spurious justification possible.

So that's a summary of the internal situation: a virtual genocide by a government, who have declared war on most of their own people; furthermore, it has become a sectarian genocide, because it is effectively the government of the Alawite sect persecuting the majority Sunnis. Gaddafi also committed genocide; due to the swift actions of the international community, the worst of the violence was over within the first few months, leaving the remaining six months a gradual war of attrition across the wide open spaces and desert towns and cities of Libya.

Alas, those being persecuted in Syria have seen no such response from outside after almost a year of unrest and virtual civil war. Apart from the political reasons, which are many (and I'll go into those shortly), there are also tactical differences that explain why the same response as in Libya has not happened.

To begin with, the UN declared a no-fly zone to prevent attacks on civilians. The air attacks happened in Libya partly because the sheer size of the country, the distances between towns, and the terrain, meant that air attacks were the easiest way for the Gaddafi regime to deal with the unrest. The Al-Assad government has had no urgent need for air support, so therefore a no-fly zone, even if it were supported in the UN, would be pretty pointless.

The Western powers then took the UN resolution with such a broad interpretation that they used it to justify air attacks on Gaddafi's military instillations and hardware. Furthermore, some countries also began supplying the opposition with more effective firepower. These things have not happened either because there is no UN agreement on a tactical resolution to the conflict; Syria is seen as "messier" from a tactical point of view because there are more closely-packed urban areas than in the open desert of Libya.

But the main issues are political, and these are many. Apart from the sectarian nature of society that brings about discouraging comparisons with Iraq, the wider outside implications of the fall of the Al-Assad government is what caused the real sleepless nights in the major capitals in the region and the wider world.

Going back to the Cold War, Syria contains Russia's only naval base that exists outside of the immediate Russian sphere of influence; of obvious strategic value to Russia, any change of government would make Russia feel uncertain to the status of this prized piece of real estate. Apart from that, Russia has always been keen to discourage any country's internal affairs being interfered in from the outside. This is a point of principle, but one that houses an obvious self-interest. Looking back to 2008: in February of that year, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, a historic Russian ally; almost immediately, Russia supported the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, resulting six months later in war. So, point taken.

The Al-Assad government are Alawites, a Shia sect; since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the ties between Iran and Syria have got closer and closer; these days the Middle East is diplomatically as divided like during the Cold War (or like the years leading up to the First World War in Europe), with Iran and Syria on one side (implicitly backed up by Russian and Chinese "neutrality"), and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States on the other (implicitly backed up by Western "democratic values" from the US, Turkey and Europe).

For that reason, no-one is really sure how Iran would react if the Al-Assad government fell.

This partly depends on the nature of its removal (a clear outside intervention could easily be seen as a "provocation" leading to God-knows-where, whereas internal removal by the opposition would put Iran in a trickier position).

It also depends on the state of play within Iran itself: whoever is really in charge, the Ayatollah or Ahmadinajad or the more "moderate" in the regime voices at the time.

And it also depends on whatever mood music is coming from the West; if the Iranians feel threatened and encircled due to Western intransigence and rhetoric, they may well lash out in desperation if the Al-Assad regime fell. If the West plays a more considered game, some sort of accommodation might be reached; if not, then things could get very sticky, very quickly.

In that sense, although the Middle East in 2012 may seem like a re-hash of the Cold War alliances, in another sense it feels more like Europe in 1914: Syria is like Bosnia, Damascus like Sarajevo; in itself a fairly small and not massively important country on paper, but a geopolitical powder-keg sitting on a melting-pot, primed to explode.

It's often forgotten that the Balkans, the birthplace of the Great War, had for the first thirteen years of the 20th century, been host to a number of minor conflicts and internal insurrections. So, in the same way, has the Middle East for the first eleven years of the 21st century. The territorial boundaries of the Balkans were drawn and squabbled over by various imperial powers from the 1820s onwards, right up to the 1910s; the same could be said of the Middle East if you shift the timeline forward a century.

In any case, it seems almost unthinkable that the current situation in Syria could last as it is for another twelve months. Somehow, it appears that there will be some sort of Syrian endgame in 2012. But what?

As things stand, with the Arab League shunning Syria, yet still not yet ready to take the plunge militarily, and with the USA and Europe most likely to do what they can to cause problems for the Al-Assad regime short of getting involved militarily, the most openly vocal critics, with the means at their disposal, as well as the moral force and support of regional powers to do something meaningful, are Turkey.

There is a kind of clear logic to the thinking that, since the Turks' excellent relations with the Arabs, some kind of intervention, with the support of willing Arab forces from, say Jordan and/or Saudi Arabia and Qatar, could well happen. This, at least would have clear moral support from the likes of the Arab League, and without the need for direct Western involvement. Besides, much of the Syrian opposition are based in Turkey.

Although what Iran might think of such an intervention is another matter, but as I suggested earlier, what Iran thinks about the likes of Turkey is also important. As far as I know, Turkey retains cordial relations with Tehran, so this might hold back the more hard-line elements of the Islamic regime from winning the argument.

But, then again, it's also hard to deny that if the Al-Assad regime does fall sometime this year, that there could well be a bloodthirsty period of revenge by Sunnis against the Alawites. After what they have been subjected to for the past year, one could hardly blame them for wanting it. That could then, at its worst, provoke a further counter-backlash by Shias in Iraq and Lebanon, instigated by Iran.

But that's just one of many possible outcomes. Like throwing dice in a deadly game of chance. The Middle East in 2012 could turn out into a new version of the Balkans in 1914; albeit, with even higher stakes.