Much hubbub about the amazing turbulence in Egypt; especially in the wake of the popular uprising in Tunisia that deposed Ben Ali, I wonder if the “Arab street” in Egypt is finally awakening to the tremors deliberately set off when the United States forcibly deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Remember that the rarely-voiced strategic approach by the Bush Administration and its allies to addressing Islamist terror and its generators was to begin to undermine the autocratic regimes across the region against whose tyranny groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and others were primarily agitating. The invasion of Iraq was not an end, but the necessary intervention to get the whole chain reaction moving. Iraq, located in the center of both the Arab geography and the Sunni-Shi’a split, was always the linchpin—as Saddam and his neighbors knew before Osama bin Laden’s attacks forced the U. S. to change its strategic relationship with the area.
Let’s see if we can’t link the financial turbulence to what’s happening in the Middle East today—see if we can’t find the place of integration of what may not seem linked intuitively.
The primary impetus driving world evolution today is the transcendence of the Orange Industrial Era by the rise of the Green Information Age. (There’s a whole lot to say about how the Information Age itself was created by what the transformations of the Industrial Era gave rise to with the emergence of what we know today as science. The severing of the “objective” and “subjective” worlds, or the granting empirical inquiry the same dignity as religious seeking, inspired an explosion of knowledge about the physical world that emphatically includes the triumphs of Albert Einstein and his quantum physicist colleagues. It was their discoveries that made possible the technology undergirding the Information Age.)
Since we are, relatively speaking (as far as we can hypothesize), at the beginning of this new age, there is a lot about it that we cannot yet say with any certainty. From an Integral Model perspective, we would say that the Kosmic habit being created by true Green is still plastic and variable, so while we can make useful comments about its contours, we must hold these rather lightly.
