Growing pains only with guns and insanely over complex cultures. The next fifty years are gonna be way more interesting than anyone in the Middle East is gonna like.

America makes it look easy from the outside. We blend cultures, ideas and peoples like a tapestry. What the rest of the world doesn’t see are all the knots in the back. They don’t notice the times we rip out the messed up sections to weave in new ones. On top of that we have the most over the top decision tree ever. We mostly make those decisions while fussing and fuming. Little wonder everyone thinks we’re crazy. Heck, maybe we even are, a little bit.

The point is that sausage making mess actually ends up with sausage. Okay, we wreck half the kitchen doing it, but we still end up with a pretty decent sausage. Then we have to clean up the kitchen and by the end, everyone outside thinks our house is a beautiful tapestry. They have no idea how messed up that kitchen door we’re hiding really is.

Eventually, we straighten that out in time for the next round of sausage making. The American system is nothing if not messy. But it works for us and we like it.

The Middle East has nothing comparable. The tapestry that hides all their many messy divisions has so many holes that it hides their unity more than it hides their disunity. They slap a coat of Islam paint on it and call it a day.

Hey, America has days like that, too. The difference is we eventually get in there and actually clean up. The Middle East slaps on more paint. A hundred years later and you end up with a bit of a problem.

Ever see a window painted shut to the point that it’s gonna be easier to remove the window than the paint? That’s pretty much where the Middle East is except they painted over the broken glass as well as the window frame. They know it’s a mess but even they have no clue just how bad the thing really is.

It’s probably gonna be easier to take down the whole wall. Easier but a LOT more painful.

The Middle East has stabilized over the last twenty years – the US kind of made that non-optional – but there’s a very big question as to how deep that stability really runs. Outside looking in, there are indications that the average Muhamad would just as soon forget the whole ‘unite the Arab world’ thing and the whole jihad thing in favor of just being able to live without the worry of instability or nut jobs with guns destroying even more territory and lives.

You wouldn’t know it from most of the ‘man on the street’ interviews done by al Jazeera. They manage to find every raving lunatic they can get in front of a camera. As a Southerner, I know better than accept that at face value. Jeff Foxworthy was right – the media only ever interviewed upset women in muumuus in the South.

Whenever al Jazeera gets a sane person by mistake, they very quickly cut away. Learned from CNN, huh?

You could not pay me to poll anywhere in the Middle East. Lovely folks but Heaven only knows what you need to ask to get a legitimate response. First off, they are by all accounts very hospitable – there’s nothing worse for polling. Hospitable people are people pleasers under the circumstances you will be working in while polling. That means they will tell you exactly what they think you want to hear.

And if you are polling in a crowded area, they will tell you exactly what they think everyone around them wants to hear. Poll them at home and they will put on an extra helping of what you want to hear with a topping of whatever they think they’re supposed to say. Poll online or on the phone and your sample is crap because it can’t possibly be representative and the nice person will still tell you what they think you want to hear.

Don’t laugh – the US is just about as bad for very different reasons. Polling is pretty useless nowadays.

It’s expensive to fix in the US which is why only around election time is anyone doing the stuff they need to to get a decent poll. It’s frankly impossible to fix in the Middle East at least for the foreseeable future.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have other options. Those man on the street interviews I mentioned earlier? They aren’t representative but they can be indicative. It’s really weird how many cutaways al Jazeera have been making since the Gaza conflict began. One, okay, that’s an outlier, but so many that people have taken notice? That may – I emphasize MAY – be a trend.

It’s definitely not an outlier. Outliers shouldn’t pop up in clusters. They REALLY shouldn’t cluster around a short event. But not an outlier isn’t the same thing as statistically significant. Let me say in no uncertain terms this is not statistically significant – but it just might be an indicator of some underlying trend.

But if you ask a Middle East analyst, they will tell you that the ‘street’ is very strongly X or Y. I think it’s the same phenomena I described earlier – folks on the street will tell the pollster whatever they think the folks around them want to hear. Certainly, we see plenty of reactionary protests on the Arab street so they may be representative of the real attitudes.

Or not. Protests are easy to stage. In countries without a lot of home entertainment options, large crowds are easy to generate – it’s more interesting than reading a book. The nice people who just wanted to be part of the group will obligingly shout the foulest crap that everyone else expects. So, is this the real attitude or is it affected for the group? Both? Neither?

Depends on how bored the folks are and no, I’m not kidding. But that doesn’t mean the Middle East doesn’t have legitimate, organic protests. How do you assess them?

The telltale hallmark is official intervention. Organic protests scare authoritarian governments and the Middle East has no other kind of government. Large protests will almost always be government sanctioned. If the protest is large and the police are trying to break it up, that is likely an organic protest.

So, is the Middle East really divided or is it all just window dressing? They are incredibly divided and it gets worse if you count the Islamic world and not just the Middle East. Religious factions beyond the major Sunni/Shia split exist. Ethnic factions abound. Political factions are even more numerous than the ethnic ones. Then you have the Iran/Saudi polarization – it’s really amazing they haven’t nuked each other long since.

Mind you, this is why nuclear proliferation is bad. Quite a few of those groups would use nukes if they could get them. Fortunately, so far, none of the nation-states proper show signs of being that suicidally stupid. At this point, only nation-states have the resources to develop actual nuclear weapons. The tech is not the problem, the fuel is.

It’s a Western past time to see how many ways we can blame ourselves and our ancestors for whatever insanity grips whatever Third World nation. This one is all theirs. Colonization may have actually kept the lid on the pressure cooker longer than it would have otherwise held out. The Middle East was busily killing each other long before the Europeans showed up. Europe probably didn’t help and likely hurt at times, but it also didn’t change much.

Oh, except for Britain ending slavery as an open institution. That was a big change.

It came with big consequences, too. Doing the right thing is no guarantee that nothing bad or stupid will happen as a result. Middle Eastern dependence on slavery then is part of its messed up status now. When you allow polygamy, you end up with a very big societal problem – you don’t have enough native born girls. Slavery is a quick solution.

Remove slavery but not polygamy and suddenly you have way too many disgruntled young men who can’t compete with older, wealthier men for wives.

The next quickest solution is intertribal warfare. Let the boys go beat each other’s brains out. The survivors can raid the losers for wives.

Those big bad Western sticks in the mud, Great Britain and later America, take all the fun out of this by insisting that grown up nation states settle matters as peaceably as possible. That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they hadn’t both had such big proverbial sticks to make peaceable a lot more possible.

Oh yeah, then they discover oil. Wealth does not improve dysfunctional families. Wealth puts dysfunction on steroids with nation-states.

Mind you, that’s just one of a multitude of problems with forcing basically tribal and old school empires into the 20th Century. Don’t look at us! The Middle Eastern powers have been pushing for modernity, minus the freedom part, since the British sailed up and demonstrated why arguing with cannons is a bad idea.

I’d call the Middle East a train wreck but that needlessly insults train wrecks.

Yes, I’m on record calling the Middle East a lot more stable than it has been historically. I’ll stick with that assessment. Being a ship in five simultaneous hurricanes is better than being that same ship in fifteen simultaneous hurricanes. The Middle East is getting better.

It just has a few million things to work out. While they’re at it, they also have to deal with each other and the US.

I know, I sound like the Middle East is a hopeless basket case. Well, it’s not. The Arab Spring is a huge indicator that down deep, regular folks do want freedom and a better life. They want peace and prosperity. They just have to figure out how to get those things for themselves and that process is tough.

You can’t just copy and paste the US Constitution and call it a day. A government has to fit its culture without being shackled to that culture to the point of self destruction. It sounds a LOT easier in a short commentary than it is in reality, but what doesn’t?

Christian organizations like Voice of the Martyrs have been noting for well over two decades growth in Christian converts. From a purely political assessment, that is an indicator of a cultural shift that, if it goes far enough, could lead to the freedom that the Arab Spring was seeking. No, I don’t mean a religious shift – that’s a discussion for another day – but the cultural one necessary for a sustained democratic based system.

Something is happening where it matters. Something is happening in hearts and minds.

No nation wakes up one day democratic. All the cultural infrastructure necessary for the governmental systems that enshrine Government by the People has to be built first. It’s not a fun process but the indicators point to the nascent movements in that direction. I think there is real hope for a free, prosperous Middle East in the long term.

If they can just keep from nuking each other long enough to get there.