Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, Ottoman Grand Vizier and Wali of Yemen |
The United States and the Iranians share a common enemy in ISIS which they are both battling in Tikrit. There have even been reports that
there has been some competiton and resentment on the part of Shiite militias
who have refused to fight while the United States is bombing targets in the
city (“US Airstrikes on ISIS in Tikrit Prompt Boycott by Shiite Fighters,” NYT, 3/26/15). In Yemen the United States backs the Abrabbuh Mansour Hadi the
democratically elected president who had previously been unseated by the
Iranian backed Houthi’s and is now in the process of being restored by a Saudi
lead coalition (“Yemen Crisis: Who is fighting whom?"BBC, 3/26/15). America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, is Iran’s greatest
foe. Have such multivalent alliances ever existed in modern times. In the
Second World War, there was, for instance, the Axis (composed of Japan, German
and the fascist governments of Italy, France and Spain) and the Allies. However
fragile, life was still simpler, as it was in terms of the spectrum of
alliances that characterized the First World War. In l939, Russia did sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with
the Germans, but that alliance soon fell apart. In his speech to congress
Netanyahu said about the prospect of a military alliance with Iran, “the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.” But
these developments might be termed post-modernist realpolitik. If there ever was
a sense of good and evil, of right and wrong, it is has become more cloudy then
ever and the current situation has begotten the kind of strange bedfellows that
one finds here in America where the Christian right and the feminist left have united against protecting the First Amendment rights of pornographers
who produce images that are offensive to women. There's strength in
numbers and its always easier when a coalition can close ranks against a common
enemy the way the allies did against the axis powers during the Second World
War. But there's also something undeniably intriguing about the prospect of
sharing objectives with unlikely partners. As the palette of human sexuality
has changed with same sex marriage and sex reassignment, so the concept of
national objectives and identities which have created entities like NATO an SEATO may
also evolve in ways that offer more pluralistic solutions to conflict
resolution.