Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

 

The Middle East is Imploding

Sadly the Middle East is in turmoil again and it's sending shockwave's throughout the world as it escalates causing our democratic governments to try and calm down the situation.

As long as the Middle East carries on the way it does, this is a pattern we are going to see over and over again until the people living there decide they have had enough.  I don't believe it is right for me to take sides because I don't live there and I have no idea of the way of life apart from what I see on the television and the news that I receive on the radio and read in the papers.

I can take pity on both sides.  When I say that, I mean the ordinary people who get caught up in these types of conflicts.  But as long as there are terrorist groups and radicals running some of these countries nothing is going to change for a long time.  They need to be weeded out and removed for there to be any progress and so that the ordinary people can have a say in the way their countries are administered and so that they can live in peace.

The human race has always found something to fight over from the beginning of time, and I just wonder if it part of the human make up?  Is it in the nature of the human race to fight?

I know that if you are attacked most people will fight back.  We have fights between people all the time, normally over what we consider trivial matters.  But according to the people involved it's a serious issue.  But again there are some nasty people who are aggressive and would cause a fight in an empty room, I'm quite sure that these type of people have something lacking somewhere.

Most of the problems caused by the people in this country are caused by drink and we can see them fighting every weekend outside the bars.  But at least we have laws to deal with these types of issues and they can be resolved by someone being lifted and put in the cells for the night so that they can sober up.  And if they end up in court for their behaviour for assault then they deserve what they get.

The Middle East is a different issue and it's one that needs to be resolved so that there can be a lasting peace in the Middle East.  We already have proscribed terrorist groups because of what they want to create throughout the world, and what I have heard from these terrorist groups and radicals makes me shudder.  I do not want to live with their vision of the world which seems to be a jumble of ideas and radicalism which would see us going back and living like they did in the centuries past.  That's not for me as I move forward in the twenty first century which is what life is about.  It's about moving forward and embracing the different cultures that we didn't even know existed centuries ago.

The days of countries fighting over land and trying to exterminate their neighbours over their borders should have ended after the second world war.  But it seems that we never seem to learn from history as Bosnia and Serbia and the Middle East has recently shown us.

We have organisations such as NATO and the United Nations which costs us all a lot of money, these are the organisations that should be trying to resolve these issues, but by the time they do get involved or make up their minds as what should be done things have normally escalated beyond control.  What are they doing, and what are they there for when they don't get involved in bringing peace and stability to warring countries?  Snails move faster than these organisations.

I see this new conflict going a lot further than some of the problems we have seen in the past, and if it does the Middle East will implode on itself because of all the radical and terrorist organisation setting themselves up there.  They don't seem to have any coherent strategy at all.  There are too many people making up the policy as they go along.  The problems come when people listen to them and really believe what they are saying.

It's time to move forward and learn to live with your neighbours, accepting what they do as long as it doesn't effect you, but most of all learning that war is an old fashioned way of solving issues.

We have to learn to live with each other without going to war all the time, if we can't find lasting and peaceful solutions for these issue we are failing as the human race.

We have tried all the old ways, it's now time to try new ways.

Written by Andrew Murphy 29 July 2006

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