Editor’s Note

Abstract

War has been a political reality and human tragedy in some part of the Middle East since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, for example, Afghanistan was convulsed in civil warfare between a then new Afghan political-religious group, the Taliban, and a rival group known as the Northern Alliance, while in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, an uprising—intifada—against Israeli rule erupted in September, following the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that had been taking place under the auspices of the Oslo Peace Process. In subsequent years, the United States (US) sent military forces to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, which it accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, the mostly (dissident) Saudi group, responsible for carrying out the attacks in 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and then to Iraq, to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the past decade, the US effectively forgot about Oslo and the plight of Palestinians under de facto Israeli rule; instead it has been providing military assistance to its Middle East allies, such as militia groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria and to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to support their joint endeavor to prop up their favored ally in Yemen’s brutal civil war. Meanwhile, in the background throughout the past two decades a de facto cold war has persisted between the US and Iran while simultaneously in neighboring Afghanistan the US military remained to fight the Taliban and to prop up a civilian regime whose authority did not seem to extend beyond the capital, Kabul, and a few other cities. In July 2021, the US announced it would withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan in accordance with an agreement that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020. This prompted Afghanistan’s civilian president and several cabinet officials to flee in secret even before the Americans began their withdrawal. The Taliban quickly returned from their bases in Pakistan, took over towns with barely a fight, and then entered Kabul to observe what only can be described as a two-week chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the airport, along with thousands of Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution. By mid-August, the twenty-year, multi-billion dollar American experiment of nation building in Afghanistan ingloriously ended, although multiple unresolved other conflicts in the Middle East remained. Six months later, on February 24, 2022, Middle East issues were overshadowed by a very real hot war in the heart of Europe as a result of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic (pre-1991). The first six weeks of war were